4 ms·
Strange, I would call these preoccupations BS if not for the source. This was a common concern some 20 to 30 years ago, when the internet was practically non ex
by Udik 12y ago
Strange, I would call these preoccupations BS if not for the source. This was a common concern some 20 to 30 years ago, when the internet was practically non existent and people still used old floppy disks and cds. Today, a good part of our personal files are stored in the cloud and storage devices have become more standard through the usage of universal interfaces. Some of our personal data will be lost (whatever is left in the hard drives of old computers and not backed up) but the trail of information the world is leaving behind is so huge that what worries me is rather that time seems to have frozen. Everything we leave behind us, documents, pictures, looks as fresh today as it was the day it was produced. And as easily retrievable.
- agumonkey 12y agoOn another thread people were saddened by rapidshare-like website being put down because a lot of content was hosted there. Let's be sure the cloud will stay long. So far most 80s data I see on the web comes from .. magazines. Ha paper.
- evgen 12y agoThe trick with digital data (including that stored in cloud services) is to keep it in motion. Movement from one service to another, leaving behind a copy that may eventually get deleted but just might stick around a while, is the best way to keep data available. Whatever disappeared with rapidshare would have been just fine if people have moved it to the various "latest and greatest" systems when they popped up, the only way it gets lost is if it stops moving.
- pmontra 12y agoWhat happens when one dies, who keeps moving that data? Companies eventually close. Millennia old documents made their way to us without anybody carying about them. Digital data seem to be intrinsically different from analog ones in that continuous care is needed. What you propose is a solution but I can't see who's going to do it for free as walls and caves did for paintings and inscriptions.
- agumonkey 12y agoNot necessarily. Analog data decays too. The issue is to be blind to the fact that neither `technology` is timeless and perfect. People are giving in too easy and too deep in digital data nowadays.
- jarek 12y ago> Analog data decays too. Sure but at what rate? Most 20 year old CDs are still fine, to say nothing of paper stored with a sliver of care, what percentage of web companies from 1995 are still around?
- evgen 12y agoConsider this fact, for perhaps a hundred years prior to digital technology consuming just about everything we collectively produced gigatons of paper output. How much of that is available today? A thousandth of a percent perhaps? Almost all of it has been lost and most of what does remain is available because it was related to someone famous or some famous event, or because it was widely replicated. Digital data is easy to replicate and spread widely. Given how cheap it is to store and how it gets cheaper every day it is not inconceivable that every bit that is generated and "donated to the public" will survive forever.
- agumonkey 12y agoNot so fast. If you abandon your house anything in it will be trashed in 20 years. Humidity, fungus, animals, whatever. Data you mention has been wiped or the medium has been destroyed. I have some old Seagate 6GB IDE hard drives that are still working properly. So maybe web companies data could have been around if their hdd had been stored in a nice location.
- benihana 12y agoIt's not BS and you've laid out why. There are games and software on 5.25 and 3.5 disks that we can't access now. Even if we could, the software was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore and we've have to write other software to adapt them to our machines now. This isn't a problem that is just going to go away, formats and OSes and hardware will come and go as our technology needs and abilities change.
- Udik 12y agoFirst, you're talking about a very short timespan right at the beginning of the digital age. Even if we were to lose everything, a missing 20 years timespan (1975-1995) of videogames wouldn't amount to a digital middle age. Second, https://archive.org/details/messmame https://archive.org/details/messmame
- romaniv 12y agoI don't know about digital dark ages, but before GOG this was a serious problem. It's not that games were not accessible at all, it's that it was so hard to access them that most people would not bother. Are you really "preserving" history if it's just some CD in a box no one ever opens?
- Udik 12y agoYou are. Most of our history has been preserved in books that were inaccessible to almost everybody and that nobody opened for hundreds of years. The important thing is that things are preserved somewhere, even if to read them you need a fully equipped laboratory and boffins in white gowns. That's how we read our most ancient documents anyway. Once the information has been retrieved and copied, it's safe.
- romaniv 12y agoI think you are confusing history with archeology. They are obviously related, but they are not the same thing. Preserving history requires keeping it alive. Those books you speak about were endlessly copied and read. I am willing to bet that most of you know about history you have learned from articles or books of people who read other books, and so on. Archeology steps in when history ends up as a CD-in-a-box or tablet-in-a-tomb. And even then we often loose context and meaning.