Digital Dark Age
Found an interesting article via Slashdot today that touches on a subject that has concerned me for some time: how long will our information last? The digital revolution, while making the handling of information easier and faster, is not ready for archiving.
Already we can see the effects: Vinyl records, if stored properly, last for decades. Old 78’s made in the 1920’s are still playable today if you have a working record player that plays that fast. Yet CD rot is already an issue, and CD’s are less then 30 years old. Some CD’s made in the 1980’s are already subject to this, and CD-R’s made only a few years ago can suffer the same fate. Then compare a book with, say, a Microsoft Word document. Again, books printed decades ago are still useable, but how long will MS Word be useable? Will computers still recognize Windows software in 2050? (Probably not; Windows 3.1 applications are almost unuseable now)
So, be careful when scanning in and shredding old paper documents. PC’s won’t be around forever, and paper still requires no software to use.
September 28th, 2005 at 16.46 / 032
Do you think that they will go back to making vinyl albums? I hope so. It was simple: records and tapes. At home listening? Records. In your car? A tape made of your favorite record. So what if it’s analog. Everything was simple. How many cd-r’s have you thrown away because they didn’t burn right? For me that number is in the 30’s. How many tapes did you throw away? For me that number is less than 5. And that’s 5 for my whole life, while the cd’s is just the last couple of years. Will the disc makers ever get this right? People want vinyl!
P.S. Television is just a fad, too.