Or did they have no idea? It falls on what you mean by "posterity"
but I'm betting ignorance, drink and hubris.
Tape-life is usually 10-60 years, encoding obsolescence is a greater
threat according to
http://www.amianet.org/publication/resources/guidelines/videofacts/tapelife.html
Some of the earlier German Magnetophone tapes from the war are still
playable. Some enterprise systems still use tape as back-up. Modern
day media such as CDs, can last up to 50 years. Unless you want to
engrave on stone, paper looks to be the longer-term preservation agent
of choice. Just pick a good-quality washi - known to last for a 1000
years - and you'll still be read into the far future. If you want to
be heard into the future, I'd emboss a series of encoded dots onto the
washi, along with their encoding algorithm, so that it could be
translated into sound. The alternate stratagey is to store your
content in as many forms as you can and hope some of it survives.
As for vehicular activity, apparently Sparty Lea had Land Rovers
driven by Tom Pickard. Hey ho.
Roger
On 10/30/06, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > It's all a bit of a storm in a tea-cup. What's interesting to me is
> > the overall preciousness of Prynne that comes out.
> ....
> > Roger
>
> Mind you, when Tom Leonard first read the Six Glasgow Poems in Philip
> Hobsbaum's flat at Wilton Street in Glasgow in I think 1966, Philip's
> immediate reaction was to leap across the room and drag out a reel-to-reel
> tape recorder and insist Tom immediately reread them into a microphone. In
> case Tom fell under a bus on the way home and they were lost forever.
>
> So is it preciousness (lovely word, and I'm quite prepared to believe it of
> Prynne) or a desire to preserve something for posterity that might otherwise
> be lost?
>
> (Or that the danger of falling under a bus in Glasgow was higher than the
> same thing happening at Sparty Lea. Did Sparty Lea have buses, even?)
>
> Robin
>
--
http://www.badstep.net/
Suspicion breeds confidence
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