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Vint Cerf Warns Against 'Digital Dark Age'
An anonymous reader writes: Vint Cerf, speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said we need better methods for preserving everything we do on computers. It's not just about finding better storage media — it's about recording all the aspects of modern software and operating systems so future generations can figure out how it all worked. Cerf says, "The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future." Cerf is also pushing for better data preservation standards: "The key here is when you move those bits from one place to another, that you still know how to unpack them to correctly interpret the different parts. That is all achievable if we standardize the descriptions."
I think this is Mr. Cerf speaking as the man who was instrumental in the Internet's creation, not as a Google employee.
Last week I made a fresh copy of my 'archive' of everything computer related from my 20's. I copied everything off the 5 DVD-R disks that I burned in the early 00's onto a USB hard drive.
What was on the 5 DVD-Rs was what I copied then off about 30 CDR disks.
What was on the earliest few of the CDR disks was what I had copied there off DC2120 tape cartridges.
There is even one of the DVDs arranged with folders called 'CD4, CD4, CD6' and some of the CD folders have subfolders with names like 'Tape7, Tape8, Tape8.;
I might still have the original CDs in a cakebox somewhere, the DS2120 tapes are long gone.
I still have all the Windows 1.0 apps that I downloaded off BBSes back in the day. I still have every version of PC-DOS. I still have Microsoft Word 5.0 and all the Borland programming languages and all that stuff stored away. Linux install sets with 0.99.x kernel versions. And all my personal files, email, etc.