Paul Kiel wrote:
>One must also think in terms of the physical memory.  I found an old "mag
>card" in a collection of materials back in my archivist days.  It was
>basically a punch card sized strip of magnetic material.  No one could read
>it.

Jeremy H. Griffith wrote:
>> That would be an MCST, Mag Card Selectric Typewriter, the predecessor
>> of the MTST, Mag Tape ST, which was arguably the first word processor.

The Friden Flexowriter, which used paper tape, preceded the IBM MCST and MTST. 
The US Senate used the Flexowriter so there might be an archive somewhere of 
paper tapes containing Senate documents. Here's a photo:
http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/flex_recomp.jpg

Both present the same problem of retrieval from obsolete media that's 40 years 
old.

A recent survey by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) found that 
80% of respondents needed to retain electronic records for 50 years or more. 
SNIA created a 100 year archive task force and it has a working group developing 
a spec for a standard for an archival storage container. It's called the 
Self-Describing, Self-Contained Data Format (SD-SCDF). There's a presentation by 
Simona Cohen at:

http://www.snia-dmf.org/library/SNIA-DMF_Towards_%20SD-SCDF_20070412.pdf



======== Ken North ===========
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