Accessing obsolete media -- a permanent solution

Marian Prokop raised a good point about archiving on disks.   That reminds me of another archiving issue -- lost hardware and drivers.

It generally is hard to find equipment to read 10-year-old media, and very hard to read anything that's 20+ years old.  Recreating the needed hardware might be the least of the problems, actually; what's really needed are drivers.

Certainly there are large driver databases on the Web -- DriverGuide looks like a good one, and Webgrid offers links to a bunch of others.   But if I were the US Federal Government, I'd like to maintain a database that included sufficient specifications to build hardware and drivers -- the latter on a new operating system -- at any point in the future, should the original technology be lost.   It might even be worth keeping a room full of obsolete machines to read old media directly.

This could also be done in the private sector.  An organization -- profit or non-profit -- could be set up to store this information, and issue certifications to disk and tape drive manufacturers once they turn over sufficient information to the archive-keepers.  Why would a drive manufacturer turn this information over?  Because they'd get certified if the did so, and certain large enteprises wouldn't buy from them (and wouldn't buy hardware that included their drives) if they didn't.

It wouldn't take many large enterprises insisting on archive certification to induce the whole drive industry to play ball.  Indeed, the US government alone might well suffice.