📑 Decades of history could be ‘erased from Australia’s memory’ as tape machines disappear, archivists warn
In the age of the 4K smart TV, audio-visual companies are looking forward to ever-greater digital innovations. Few are looking back at the cavalcade of tape formats that came before, which never had the same desirable aesthetic that made film so enduringly popular.
Mr Ficker says it is “very unlikely” that archives around the world could raise the capital to have tape machines manufactured again, even if they worked together.
But he said he “hadn’t written it off”, because “if that’s what it takes, will then we will be pursuing those strategies”.
He also suggests future digital innovations might make it possible to read the data off magnetic tapes in a different way, using software to reconstruct the images.
James Elton discusses the demise of tape machines and the memories kept on them. Lauren Young also provides an interesting take on magnetic tape. This reminds me of Celia Coffa’s keynote at Digicon15 Digital Stories and Future Memories.
I’m pretty confident it won’t be “erased” completely. Just like record players, VCRs and box brownie cameras, there will always be someone who collects and repairs the equipment, as long as we keep the recordings.
I guess time will tell Sue.
There’s an infamous example I touched on a long time ago in which the BBC basically invented their own variant of Laserdisc for a history project—a format that was basically used for nothing else, making the discs obsolete almost immediately. tedium.co/2015/09/04/for…
Thanks for sharing that Ernie. It is always intriguing what technology succeeds. Kind of disconcerting that was only the 80’s. I liked your closing remarks, “These days, we do all this stuff in the cloud.”