The Long Now Foundation at http://www.longnow.org/index.html addresses the
problems of too short time frames for planning, and the obsolescence of
digital information.
“Computer scientist Danny Hillis notes that we have good raw
data from previous ages written on clay, on stone, on parchment and paper,
but
from the 1950s to the present, recorded information increasingly
disappears
into a digital gap. Historians will consider this a dark age. Science
historians
can read Galileo’s technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin
Minsky’s from the 1960s.”
I find this true in my own work. I have lost several generations of
information to non-viable formats. Some data I will likely have to scan from
printed listings to recover. This is increasingly true of the world’s
information. Conversion of media and formats is a major task for some groups
working on the problem. Often the effort to restore a computer, operating
system, and tape drive to the point of being able to access information can
become a major task. If there are new programs to be written to get at the
information on new ways, it can become essentially impossible.
While we contemplate ways to organize information that may exist over long
periods of time, some of the issues brought up on this site should be
considered.
Thanks,
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
DYNAMIC Alternatives <http://www.dynalt.com/>
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