The Digital Dark ages.

Crossroads Inc. · Post by **Crossroads Inc.** » 2005-07-03 04:00pm

Recently, I was cleaning house and came across a box of a hundred or so old disks marked 'Backup91'. I talked to my dad about them, curious what we'd find, and found we'd have to buy a new disk drive for them, and new software to read these 'ancient' disks. While taking about this, my dad mentioned how he has several boxes of magnetic tape that are incredibly valuable to his business, but he isn't sure if anyone has a computer for them at his business to read them if needed.

This got me thinking

Considering that Computers really started taking off in our life around 1970, we have had barley 35 years worth of advances in this technology.

In that time the storage of data has gone from Punch Cards to Magnetic Tape, to Magnetic Spools, to floppy disks, to ZIP Disks, to hand held Hard Drives. Contrast that with the 'technology' of print. Words on paper have been good for several thousand years. If tomorrow, we find a long lost manuscript of Copernicus, or Newton, or even Archimedes, we'd be able to translate it and read it.

But, in the coming decades, Libraries worth of material, papers, data, records, peoples thoughts and lives, could all be lost simply because technology is moving so fast, we are losing the ability to read these records.

In the Library of Congress alone I think there is something like over 10,000 Magnetic large spool records that officials are franticly looking for a computer from the 70's to read them before the tape deteriorates.

Anyone else think about this? Or what will happen to old tech that we may someday need? Makes you pause before throwing out that old box of 'useless' disks...

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2005-07-03 04:40pm

Chances are, if nobody thought to copy the data to newer media or to keep around a machine capable of reading the old media, the data was never that "valuable" in the first place; a lot of shit like that is stuff that organizations have to keep around for legal reasons.

Dahak · Post by **Dahak** » 2005-07-03 04:40pm

That's quite an "it" topic.
There already tons of data that are "lost", because the technology doesn't exist anymore, or because the data carrier is degraded.
Even under optimal conditions, the life expectancy of modern data storage devices falls short on "old" stuff, like stone, or papyrus...

When some catastrophe may wipe us out, or just our techology, then future generations may have less material to work with than we have over say Egypt.

FSTargetDrone · Post by **FSTargetDrone** » 2005-07-03 05:18pm

Anyone know how long a typical CD is supposed to last, assuming it's kept out of the sun, etc.?

I once dug up an old CD I'd burned, and the ink from the pen I'd used to write on the lable-side had eaten through the aluminum layer.

sketerpot · Post by **sketerpot** » 2005-07-03 08:07pm

FSTargetDrone wrote:I once dug up an old CD I'd burned, and the ink from the pen I'd used to write on the lable-side had eaten through the aluminum layer.

My respect for aluminum just went down another notch. Is there any safe way to label CDs? Will a plain magic marker do the trick?

Jaepheth · Post by **Jaepheth** » 2005-07-03 08:16pm

sketerpot wrote: My respect for aluminum just went down another notch. Is there any safe way to label CDs? Will a plain magic marker do the trick?

I'm pretty sure that most of the time, the "magic" is an acid of some sort.

And I think that acid free inks are only good for paper.

Stickers would probably be the best way to go for long term stuff.

FSTargetDrone · Post by **FSTargetDrone** » 2005-07-03 10:34pm

sketerpot wrote:
FSTargetDrone wrote:I once dug up an old CD I'd burned, and the ink from the pen I'd used to write on the lable-side had eaten through the aluminum layer.
My respect for aluminum just went down another notch. Is there any safe way to label CDs? Will a plain magic marker do the trick?

No idea. What I do now is use the label marker to write on the inside clear part near the hole. I'm also reluctant to use the specialized circular CD labels you can get that fit over the entire side of the disc. I'm not confident that whatever adhesive they use wouldn't attack the aluminum in some way. I just try to keep my CDs in the thin jewel cases and slip a paper label in the front cover.

The aluminum layer is very thin and easy to scratch. Incidentally (if you've never tried), CDs can be surprisingly hard to break, but when you do they shatter all over the place and you can see just how thin the aluminum is.

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2005-07-04 08:28am

This is not only the case with our digital technology, but even the paper we use today is useless for storing anything but short-term information. A twenty year paper of todays quality does not a pretty sight make, image what it'd be in five hundred years; there'd be nothing left at all.

It's a big problem, because historians in the future will know practically next to nothing about us. Even if we might be able to save some business data and stuff, the most important, or at least most interesting, stuff; the personal stuff like letter, diaries and journals will be lost because, simply, no-one gives a fuck about it. That's not to say people gave a fuck about in earlier times, but it's a lot harder to destroy a letter or rune-stone (which wasn't really used as letters though), than it is to delete an e-mail. In fact, don't log in to that free mail service almost everyone are using for 30 days and they will kindly do it for you.

However, if one could print some hundred Instant Messaging chats, like Messenger or something, on a piece of high-quality, acid-treated paper, using high-quality ink and put it somewhere safe, I bet future historians would love it when they find it. They would either wonder what odd pricks the teens of old were, or conclude that teens will be teens, or that humanity is doomed because it actually was better in the good old days, that is today...