Hi,

One of the groups trying to do something about this is the Television
Archive, which is part of the Internet Archvie.

http://tvnews3.televisionarchive.org/tvarchive/html/about.html

They might be interested.  

cheers

bruce


Kevin Fisher writes:
 > On Sun, Jan 27, 2002 at 04:56:08PM +0000, John Hinsley wrote:
 > [snip]
 > > 
 > > 
 > > I wonder how "pointless" this really is? My guess is that you have the
 > > sole remaining viable recording (whoever made the show has almost
 > > certainly overwritten the tape and binned it long since). 
 > 
 > :)  Well, I did copy it digitally to a Hi-8 tape using my digital
 > camcorder (it has video input).  That's where I made these screen grabs
 > from.  The actual recording is safe, as I dubbed it back to a new
 > video tape.  
 > 
 > For some reason I just love this old nostalgic stuff...I've managed to
 > rescue some other old technology shows that used to air back in 1980.
 > One of them, called "Fast Forward", has interviews with just about every
 > luminary imaginable, from Ted Nelson to Isaac Asimov to Freeman Dyson, on
 > the future of technology.  It's frightening to see how much of what they
 > predicted actually came true!  (I believe this show was recorded 
 > before the space shuttle Columbia made it's maiden voyage).
 > 
 > My copy of this particular tape is horrid, but is probably indeed
 > the last of it's kind...I even contacted TVO about buying a copy
 > but they won't sell...something about the original copyrights being
 > expired.  I imagine they'd say the same thing about "Bits and Bytes" since
 > it was from that era as well.
 > 
 > > 
 > > It's terrifying to think how much more transient history on digital
 > > media is than history recorded on papyrus!
 > 
 > I often wonder what must be lurking in the old piles of U-matic tapes
 > hiding in the basements of certain schools.. there's probably a historic
 > goldmine there!
 > 
 > > 
 > > Maybe you could encode it to mpeg, stick it on something else and
 > > preserve it for another 10 - 20 years?
 > 
 > Indeed, I'd like to do this.  I lack the hardware to do the conversion, but
 > I know someone who can--I'll try to MPEG the whole thing, if possible.
 > Of course, my camcorder does support firewire, but I don't know if that's
 > for the memory stick, or if I can get a pure MPEG feed off of it...
 > 
 > > 
 > > Cheers
 > > 
 > > John
 > > 
 > > 
 > > -- 
 > > They're afraid, very afraid......
 > > According to CRN magazine, Microsoft staff discovering Linux in use
 > > will have now access to a special 'escalation' team.
 > > http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/16/0310222&mode=nocomment
 > > 
 > 

-- 
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."  

Bruce O'Neel                       phone:  +41 22 950 91 46 (fow now)
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