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Digital Dark Ages?

Posted by michael on from the scp-is-your-friend dept.

angkor writes "The digital dark age--Will all the information from this computer age slowly vanish as our delicate hardrives expire? That's what it looks like. Better start printing everything out."

10 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. The solution by bentriloquist · · Score: 5, Funny

    Install a web server, publish everything you have, then let Google cache it...

  2. Problems are legal, not technical by tshoppa · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Where legal permission to preserve old data has been obtained, lots of interesting stuff has been saved. Examples that I'm personally involved with:
    • The PDP-10 Software Archive. Hundreds of tapes from the 60's, 70's, and 80's have been rescued with sources and documentation for the systems on which the ARPAnet was built.
    • The Unix Heritage Society collection. Again, source code, data, and documentation that are all vitally important.

    But the only reason these archives can be built and maintained is that it is legal to do so, thanks to the hard work of preservationists like Bob Supnik (see his SIMH "old iron" simulation packages) and Warren Toomey who have secured such licenses. Without such permission, many other archives of historical software that I've assembled myself cannot be distributed to the rest of the world.

    1. Re:Problems are legal, not technical by HiThere · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not entirely. 20 years ago, perhaps 30 by now, we wrote a bunch of specialized census information onto 556 BPI 7-track odd parity tapes, and some onto 556 BPI 7-track even parity tapes. And some tapes that were mixed mode, with specialized software to read them. The IBM 7094 goes away, and we switch to an emulator running on a 360. Slowly, and without much plan, we start switching over to programs that run native on the 360. Finally there's OS change, and the emulator goes away (i.e., we aren't willing to pay the service bureau enough to keep it's license current). Some of the tapes haven't been converted yet, but that's no problem. 7-Track tapes are a long established standard, and everyone has a bunch of drives, even though the new 9-Track drives can't read them. Put the tapes into storage. Fast forward a decade. Lots of the documentation has been lost, but surely we could read them if we needed to. Another decade .. it turns out that tapes become unreadable if left to themselves even in a temperature controlled vault, we'd better pull them out an check, probably copy them all over. But where do we find a 7-track tape drive? There are a few places, but nobody even half-way close. And they're expensive. And we don't really know for sure that we can read the tapes. And ... we dither. But we aren't really paying much attention to the problem either, we just aren't deciding what to do, so we keep the tapes in storage while the number of 7-track tape drives dwindles, and the magnetic domains become weaker, and the documentation becomes sparser....

      So when it comes time to do a time series study, 1960 doesn't get included. Nobody knows how to get at the information. Or whether or not it even still exists.

      There may be legal problems, but there are also both organizational and technical problems. And they are all significant. In this case all of the factors would have needed to cooperate to get the problem solved. And to maintain their cooperation over time.

      And we still don't know how important the loss of that data was. We may never know. It could have been worth multiple millions, or nothing. We can't even tell. So everyone is just ignoring the event, because it's too uncomfortable to think about. And while we ignore it, there are the tape cartridges from an IBM 3330 that are sitting around in storage, because somebody wanted them cleared off his desk. And that kind of tape cartridge was only in use for a few years, and was never widely popular. Nobody knows what's on those cartridges, but it probably isn't as important as the census data might have been. And it's probably unreadable too. And I have a box of 5 1/4 single density floppies that have the original source code for one of our major projects. If there is a version that got converted, I don't know where it is. And I don't have a 5 1/4 inch drive. When I got them, I has a Mac (made great sense to give them to me, huh?), and by the time I was coerced into a PC, the PCs only had 3 1/2 inch drives. So it never made sense for me to have them, and I don't even use the project. But I have the only copy that I know about. Maybe it won't be important.

      Data is already evaporating right and left. I see it happening every day. Most times it doesn't matter much, but you can't always tell at the time. And often the reasons that it evaporates are technical. And organizational. Legal problems are rarely the issue, though they can be in unusual circumstances, like proprietary software that the company stops maintaining for some reason (like going out of business).

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  3. The Long Now Foundation by Siener · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is exactly the kind of problem that Danny Hillis and the The Long Now Foundation have been pointing out for years. Digital data doesn't last.

    "Science historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s."

    That's why they started the 10k year library project. A part of this project that interests me especially is the Rosetta Project. It's a "near permanent archive of 1,000 languages". It's still a work in progress, so I hope they succeed. In my eyes it's definitely a worthwhile endeavour.

    --
    siener's youtube channel
  4. HD-Rosetta Dssks by Bookwyrm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Try one of these for your data archiving. No software dependencies, long media life, etc.

  5. This Is An Ancient Problem by sqlzealot · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The problem of saving old data has existed as long as there has been writing. More than 90% of the works of ancient the more famous Roman or Greek authors have vanished, to say nothing of the more lesser known writers. We know this because they are mentioned in other texts but the actual text is lost.

    The solution to both saving ancient works on paper can work just as well for digital media. Keep copying the work to the latest storage media! None of the original texts that we do have have survied. They are all copies made from generation to generation. Thus with digital media. The best of the web (lets say, research articles) will be preserved and transferred to new storage media as it develops. Your blog about your day at the beach prolly won't.

    --
    "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
  6. Re:No because... by analog_line · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You obviously haven't been on an archaelogical expidition ever. Most of what archaeologists and the anthropologists who tag along with them are concerned with, is the trash of past societies and cultures. Most often, the shards of pottery that they laboriously extract from the ground are in so many shards because they were discarded by their original owners/makers.

    Your trash says an awful lot about you, as does the random splay of stuff strewn around your room. Future archaeologists may not be interested in the porn on your hard drive (unless they have to dig it out), but future anthropologists would find it very interesting (and not in the normal manner people find porn interesting, though that may be there too, never know). It says alot about you, an inhabitant of wherever you are, living in the year 2002, as does all the collected sundry data on your drive. It may certainly seem boring as hell to anyone else, but historians and anthropologists can get a whole lot of useful information out of it. It's no less boring than reading through book after book, or letter after letter in the dead tree sense, and in some ways it's alot easier, as you can't write a regular expression to pull whatever interesting tidbits you are looking for out of a book.

  7. Eon-long sotrage options... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    first, we need to think logically.. Every bit of information we have discovered that is aincent was discovered by sheer luck and accident. NOONE back in 985 BC set aside the stone tablets thinking that "someone will want to read this in 3000 years. EVERYTHING we find out about the past has been accidental. Nothing has ever been intentional archives preserved for the distant future.... If there were we might have a whole bunch more knowledge than we do today. (we re-invent things every 50 years.. because we lose how it was done 100 years ago.. My great grandfather's workshop was filled with things that were over 100 years old yet I have seen marketed today as "A TOOL BREAKTHROUGH! The Self Ajdusting wrench!")

    I take EVERY digital photograph I shoot and burn it to CDROM. nothing ever get's deleted in my photography.... Even the blurry shots of the floor (Hey it might make a good background) Granted, CDROM's will be non-existant in 20 years.. but it's replacement will be here BEFORE it goes away.... so I transfer it... or my kids will or my grandchildren... Just like how I transferred my parent's and grandparents legacy media to current (Film, photos, Encode a Edison phonograph tube to mp3.... etc...)

    It takes PEOPLE to make information survive... no magical device or media will.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  8. It's OK to be wrong. by eclectric · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, historically, a "Dark" age (there have been several... the so-called "Dark Ages" is merely the longest series of them in Medieval times) is a period of time *during* recorded history when the historical record is in pieces or non-existant. While other problems can be applied to a Dark Age, these are usually causes, but what defines a Dark age is the result: reduced historical record.

    There were 2 or 3 in the Roman empire, one that I believe lasted about 30 years. Several more cropped up before and after Charlemagne. A much smaller one is happening with books produced in a specific timeframe in the early 20th century (I disremember which). Because of the acid in the paper, they'll deteriorate and fall apart rapidly. Luckily, project gutenberg is making an effort in getting the info out of books this old.

    So, it's OK to be wrong.

  9. Digital Data - The end of Dark Ages? by eclectric · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Quite contrary to this story, the advent of digital data storage and the Internet have led to something never before possible in the history of mankind: near instantaneous massive duplication. It is now possible for digital data to be copied effortlessly and transferred all over the globe. The trick, is doing it.

    Our data storage needs have kept pace with data storage ability for some time now. I don't see this ending anytime soon. But it might, eventually. It stands to reason that there will come a time when we will have a want of things to store for all the space we have. I don't count on it in my lifetime, but it could happen.

    The trick, then, is getting the data from here to there. How do we do it?

    1. The written word is still the most important medium of human communication. Project Gutenberg is doing a bang-up job of digitizing AND distributing written works, and this is a project we should all support. I would also like to see a similar project with scientific journals being digitized (if not already) and widely distributed to universities, who can host them publicly or privately.

    2. Someone suggested CDs, but these are impractical. CD-r's have a shelf life of 100 years, and CD-RW has even less. These could work as storage medium, but you would have to be diligent in keeping them up-to-date. What we really need is a physical storage method (like CDs) that have the capacity of magnetic storage media, like HDs.

    3. Open file formats. It stands to reason that computers will always understand ASCII (or possibly UNICODE) text. It would not be difficult to append text-only information to the end of even very complex documents, that could be retreived even if the file format itself was no longer known. xml-based file formats do this to a degree, but it depends on the universitality of the .zip format.

    4. All of this is useless if we ourselves are not diligent in keeping up with our digital information. In the Middle Ages, copying an old, worn-out parchment or scroll could take weeks, even months. Now it's possible to do it in a fraction of a second, so there's no reason we shouldn't.

    I currently keep my important data (emails, writings, website) in the following locations: My hard drive, a backup file on another hardrive, a CD-RW, a CD-R (which I change/update every six months or so) The server at my school, and the my webserver which is offsite. I personally would like to see off-planet massive storage, but until storage space exceeds storage demand, we will always be faced with the question of "What is important enough to backup?"