How long will your computer media last?
My dad sent me an encyclopedia from 1900. It’s in great shape. I was just reading it, and really dig it. The book even has color illustrations, and a lot of science - atomic weight tables, physics of light, and astronomy (though it defines “Black hole” as “a prison cell or dungeon”.)
It made me wonder if any computer media I own now will be readable in 108 years. I kind of doubt it.
(Photo of my friend Sheri’s iPhone, loaded with many many many of my podcasts and songs.)
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:48 am
That is so cool! We had National geographics back to the 1920’s. I think you’re right. I don’t think there will be alot of readable stuff that fan in the future
March 4th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Regardless of whether the digital stuff will be compatible with the future, or if it will still actually work decades hence, another question is whether anyone will actually want to save anything long-term.
One of my gripes with digital storage becoming “THE” storage format, especially for audio and photography, is that while it takes much less in terms of resources to create, it’s also criminally easy to delete.
I used to save all my answering machine tapes. A couple of years ago, I found a box full of them and listened to them. I heard much younger versions of my own voice, voices of family members and friends long dead, and voices of people I’d forgotten about entirely, discussing events that I’d forgotten about entirely.
At the time they were made, those recordings didn’t matter very much at all; they were just daily trivialities. Had digital answering machines or voicemail existed at the time, those messages would probably have been erased as soon as they were listened to the first time. The same goes for photographs and snapshots. It’s too easy to just delete the “unworthy” images 10 seconds after you take them with no remorse whatsoever, no real sense of waste to act as a psychological barrier to wanton abandonment.
Sometimes, things don’t reveal their true value until much later, and in some ways digital storage technology seems to encourage short-term thinking.