Archival vs. Ephemeral.

As anyone who has tried to hunt down old software on cassette tapes or 5.25" floppies knows, magnetic storage media is far from archival. As it happens, if you got into the CD-ROM game early enough, you may be finding out that some CDs are even less archival than others.

Isn't it ironic that in the digital age is still looking for new media storage as archival as good ink on acid-free paper? (Of course, writing out Microsoft Office in binary would take a sheet of paper or two. It'd be a bear to type back in manually when you wanted to restore from archives, too.)