CPM... the real story.....
CPM... the real story.....
CPM was a leading OS software. It was the leader in the race to be the OS system for IBM. When the IBM people showed up for a meeting, Gary Kildall (CPM) was not there. The rumor that he went flying instead and missed the meeting became popular and is better explained on this Web Site:
http://www.freeenterpriseland.com/BOOK/KILDALL.html
IBM ended up dealing with Bill Gates instead, which has it's own set of mythical tales, the best of which is that when Gates took the deposit (front money) for DOS, he did not own DOS. Shortly after putting the money in the bank, he did own DOS, buying it from the actual author, which he did do some development work with. Again most of these stories and truths can be documented in diligent searches on the internet.
Gary Kildall did go on to make major dollars with his company, Digital Research. In fact, he wrote and marketed a shell program which made PC-DOS (IBM), run much better. It was called DR-DOS and many old timers in computers know it well.
I make these points for a reason related to this post and thread. It is these types of common classic F-ups throughout the computer software world that reinforce conclusions that archiving of file formats and software compatibility will ever give us a reliable system of image migration to future systems.
Discussions of RAW are compounded by the proprietary nature of individuals to protect their intellectuall property by making it different from the competition AND hard to engineer to a compatible state.
Digital images will NEVER achieve the reliabilty or archival length of film.
But as has been aptly pointed out in posts on this thread. It is only ego and arrogance that make this an issue, and it is not important.
Other posters can argue religiously about the ease with which one can find solutions to file conversions. Really NOW, file conversions alone are a minimal part of the discussion. Media changes, file corruption growing out of migrations, hardware changes, etc are all part of the issue.
Simple file conversion, which some conclude is easy, is of little or no interest to 90% of the people using these digital capture devices, if even close at that figure. The presumption that any significant number of digital camera users want to learn and use all these solutions is preposterous.