"AnonyMouse" wrote:

Gold disk is fine and dandy, but ...
Do you have a drive that can get data off of my 8" floppy disks from
very
early CCD image capture devices? How about something for my Syquest disks
from 10 years ago??
The medium (in this case, gold disk) is not an ends, but only a small
part
of an entire line of equipment that would be necesary for data retrieval.
Within our lifetimes, there will be thousands of great images that will
be
lost due to the obsolescence of electronic storage media (not to mention
the
millions of poor images).

Heh, heh...

From a Voyager spacecraft Web site:

----------

"The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record - a 12-inch
gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the
diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were
selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell
University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety
of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds,
whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from
different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in 55
languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary
General Waldheim.

Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a
cartridge and needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin
of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played; The 115
images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio,
designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per second. It contains the
spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about
six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect.
Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 95 minute
selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a
variety of ethnic music."

----------

It's only been - what? - 27 years (1977) since the twin Voyager
interplanetary probes were launched and the technology to read that golden
phonograph record is already extinct to all but a small group of
afficianados. (At least here on Earth.) I wonder... what will be the
situation in another 475 years?

Nice of them to include the replacement cartridge and needle, though. A
Radio Shack might be hard to come by...

Ken