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I think there's a middle ground though. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphics were around but not understood until the rosetta stone was found. Without a "digit
by cafebeen 12y ago
I think there's a middle ground though. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphics were around but not understood until the rosetta stone was found. Without a "digital rosetta stone" those terabytes would be similarly useless.
There's also some historical value in journals of every day folks, e.g. soldier's notes from major battles or those present at historical events.
- WalterBright 12y agoGiven how good people are at cracking things, I seriously doubt it would be that hard to crack a file format.
- cafebeen 12y agoWell, cracking 100 years from now will probably be much harder. For example, could CSS be as easily cracked if you didn't know it was for DVD video and didn't have access to a working reference implementation? Either way, we're surely capable of leaving a better legacy than what we currently have.
- xamuel 12y agoEven if DVD codecs are 100% opaque to future historians, recall that no video of any format existed until the 20th century, and widespread ubiquitous video recording didn't exist until the 21st. If we're entering a dark age now, what does that make former ages?
- WalterBright 12y agoExactly. Note the dearth of photographs of the Titanic. Just a handful, and that was a major project.
- cafebeen 12y agoI agree that the "dark age" designation is not the best (and perhaps sensational), but the basic issue of how to maintain digital data isn't worth writing off...
- unicornporn 12y agoProblem: floppy disks and DVDs has a shelf life that's less than 100 years.
- WalterBright 12y agoHow many letters do you have from your great grandparents? For me, it's zero. For records to be preserved, someone has to care about preserving them. For digital data, that means copying it forward to newer media now and then.
- unicornporn 12y agoI'm sorry, but there's a huge difference in preserving a letter and a file. I say this as someone who has worked in the field of preservation (mostly digital) for close to a decade. Really simplified... For a letter to be preserved: put it in a box and take it with you when you move and hope that the house doesn't burn down. For a file to be preserved: keep backups to avoid data corruption and media deterioration. Also: control physical media obsolescence and format obsolescence. Most people don't have clue about these things. If our cultural heritage institutions don't get their hands on some of these files, most of them will likely be lost. And no, it's not only about our great grandparents. It's also about the Turings and Einstens. Their day to day mail correspondence has taught us quite a lot. Turing might not have been a good example though... :)
- WalterBright 12y agoThe problems are simply different, not one is better than with the other. With paper and film, making backups is tedious and expensive and rarely happens. They get lost, mildewed, thrown away, looted, burned, flooded, blown up, eaten by insects, etc. Much of my family history got lost that way. Any piece of paper surviving 200 years is a miracle. Paper archives have the unfortunate characteristic of concentrating treasures together. 9/11 apparently destroyed quite an archive of photos - we don't even know what all was there. The Vatican Library concentrates a huge collection of paper, and one little event could take it all away. With digital, copies are cheap. I've been copying forward my old stuff for 40 years now (though I did lose my old IBM punchcard decks and paper tapes!), and it does get easier. With cheap terabyte drives, one drive will hold it all, and I can make copies to make it resistant to catastrophe. The Vatican Library really needs to make it a priority to scan all those papers.