Slide Three: Digits

Once upon a time, you could "get at" most media through sheer cleverness. With analog media, such as a record or a film slide, there is an "analogy" between process and form. In practical terms, even without playback equipment, you could simulate the media experience. For example, I recall building a phonograph player, using rolled-up cardboard to amplify the sound and a sewing needle for a stylus. I can tell you, it was not very popular with my parents, whose records I sometimes borrowed for my prototype. Digital can refer literally to both fingers on a hand and to numbers. "A digital computer performs calculations and logical operations with quantities represented as digits, usually in the binary number system." To get at digital media, you need some form of decoder, too often the exact decoder. There are presently over a dozen proprietary digital storage formats. We propose to add one more: the UPF. The format would be "platform-independent," meaning that it would load into applications that adopted this standard, regardless of the computer's operating system. The Universal Preservation Format standard would serve as a universal decoder, co-existing and interchanging with proprietary formats in the same way that, say, an ascii or plain text and RTF or "rich text format" co-exist with Word or WordPerfect formats in your word processors. Table of Contents   Next