Man-Machine The Digital Dark Ages

beancounter

beancounter

The Fire That Burns Within
Joined
Jun 3, 2012
Reaction score
2,843
Location
In the Church of the Poisoned Mind
"The digital dark age is a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been in an obsolete and obscure file format."

Digital dark age - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Does this concern you at all? I remember transfering a bunch of documents from numerous 3.5" floppy disks to my computer hard drive when computers no longer came standard with a 3.5" floppy disk reader. Most of my docs can be read (backward compatible) with modern Office software, but there may come a time when the formats are no longer supported.

And then there are digital photos. Will .jpg be supported indefintely? (Anyone here remember the .bmp format?...) Your grand children my never get to see pictures of you.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ledboots
beancounter said:
Does this concern you at all?
Click to expand...

Somewhat. More in the case of a mission to Mars than in the case of 5 1/4 inch disks.

beancounter said:
I remember transfering a bunch of documents from numerous 3.5" floppy disks to my computer hard drive when computers no longer came standard with a 3.5" floppy disk reader.
Click to expand...

You can buy an external floppy drive that plugs in through a USB port. Sony makes one, among others.

beancounter said:
Most of my docs can be read (backward compatible) with modern Office software, but there may come a time when the formats are no longer supported.

And then there are digital photos. Will .jpg be supported indefintely? (Anyone here remember the .bmp format?...) Your grand children my never get to see pictures of you.
Click to expand...

BMPs are still viewable with Windows Paint and other current programs.

What is the suggested solution? Make print-outs of everything? Make prints of pictures as though it was still 1970?
 
Joe said:
Somewhat. More in the case of a mission to Mars than in the case of 5 1/4 inch disks.



You can buy an external floppy drive that plugs in through a USB port. Sony makes one, among others.



BMPs are still viewable with Windows Paint and other current programs.

What is the suggested solution? Make print-outs of everything? Make prints of pictures as though it was still 1970?
Click to expand...

Obviously the examples I gave are not unrecoverable or unreadable currently, but the point is that they are likely to be in the future.

And if the majority of people share your short term view, then our descendent are in for a rude suprise
 
beancounter said:
And if the majority of people share your short term view, then our descendent are in for a rude suprise
Click to expand...

And when I was in high school in the 1970s, my teachers were fanatically convinced that the US would soon be on the metric system.
Put another way, I do not believe we can see the future with any accuracy.

You did not answer my question: What solutions to this problem are you proposing?
 
  • Like
Reactions: RascalsMom
Joe said:
And when I was in high school in the 1970s, my teachers were fanatically convinced that the US would soon be on the metric system.
Put another way, I do not believe we can see the future with any accuracy.

You did not answer my question: What solutions to this problem are you proposing?
Click to expand...

The whole metric system thing was ultimately a political issue, this is technological.

If you don't think it's a problem, there is no sense in discussing solutions.
 
beancounter said:
If you don't think it's a problem, there is no sense in discussing solutions.
Click to expand...

I did not say it is not a problem. But we have many problems in the world, and it is not clear to me that this one is all that important.

I am suspicious of a discussion of a problem with no suggested solutions. Should we cut, say, funding for education to fund some preservation scheme?
 
I'm sure a lot of data will ultimately get lost over time, same can be said of the past, but the fact that people are aware of this issue means that people will work to preserve data. What worries me more is the possibility of information being intentionally corrupted (1984 style) over time due to file sharing, saving in the cloud, etc.
 
flyingsnail said:
1984 style
Click to expand...

I think people are in for a surprise when computer graphics and animation really get lifelike, and the sort of thing that people can afford to do at home.
If that happens then you couldn't really trust any video you see, to be of a real event.
 
I'm not too concerned about actual file formats going out of date. There is a wealth of converter software around, especially these days.

I'm more worried about storage media such as DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, LP records, diskettes and hard drives becoming corrupted due to the effects of aging, and also problems accessing the data because I no longer have the right equipment, or due to equipment malfunction.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Tom L.
I think BC makes a definitely interesting point, very likely valid.

I have dat tapes, some of those hi-capacity discs (omni-drive?) and a pile of old video camera tapes in my cupboards. I am not sure I could access the data on them anymore, if I wanted to.

The only solution I can think of would be to transfer everything from old to new(er) media and convert from old to new(er) formats at frequent intervals.
 
Joe said:
I did not say it is not a problem. But we have many problems in the world, and it is not clear to me that this one is all that important.

I am suspicious of a discussion of a problem with no suggested solutions. Should we cut, say, funding for education to fund some preservation scheme?
Click to expand...

The solution is an industry initiated standardization scheme and/or archiving method. The government shouldn't get involved.
 
There's an excellent article on this subject here:

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age » American Scientist

I found this story fascinating:

In the 1960s, NASA launched Lunar Orbiter 1, which took breathtaking, famous photographs of the Earth juxtaposed with the Moon. In their rush to get astronauts to the Moon, NASA engineers created a mountain of magnetic tapes containing these important digital images and other space-mission-related data. However, only a specific, rare model of tape drive made for the U.S. military could read these tapes, and at the time (the 1970s to 1980s), NASA had no interest in keeping even one compatible drive in good repair. A heroic NASA archivist kept several donated broken tape drives in her garage for two decades until she was able to gain enough public interest to find experts to repair the drives and help her recover these images.
Click to expand...

This suggests to me that much of the data loss from NASA missions can be attributed to indifference or negligence by NASA itself
 
  • Like
Reactions: Second Summer
flyingsnail said:
What worries me more is the possibility of information being intentionally corrupted (1984 style) over time due to file sharing, saving in the cloud, etc.
Click to expand...

What motivation would the cloud storage companies have to intentionally corrupt the data stored there?
 
Joe said:
What motivation would the cloud storage companies have to intentionally corrupt the data stored there?
Click to expand...
That would depend on the ownership of the company but clouds can be hacked so the corruption doesn't necessarily have to come form the company itself.
 
BBC News - Google's Vint Cerf warns of 'digital Dark Age'

I'm guessing he has some personal financial interest in this X-ray idea, but it's interesting nonetheless.

"Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete - just like what happens in a museum - but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.

"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."
 
Last edited:
Haha, I remember backing up my digital photographs from 2003 to 2009 on a huge lot of archive-quality CD-Roms.
If I wanted to do this with my new digital pictures, the average shooting day (300 pictures) would take 15 CD Roms.
Don't know if there is a thing like archive-quality bluray disks.

So nowadays I use 1-2 TB USB HD drives that I more or less regularly back up on new ones I buy (and keep in different storage places).

Best regards,
Andy
 
Top Bottom
Back