[extropy-chat] The Digital Dark Age

[Emlyn]

Here's an article about the problem of disappearing information -
heritage - as the computer age continues, due to records becoming
digital and then being lost as the machines and software and media
used go from current to obsolete to completely unusable or gone.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/the-digital-dark-age/2005/09/22/1126982184206.html

This is an interesting one for extropians, maybe. How do we preserve
the digital past in a wildly dynamic present and future?

Personally, I think this problem will lessen in the future. These days
our information is much more likely to be online, interesting stuff is
more likely to be in duplicate places, a lot of stuff can just stay
online because storage capacities are so high, so no disappearing into
dusty old tape archives.

Also, we now have standard formats that could easily survive the
passage of time, particularly XML. XML is a real retro standard,
something no one would have tried in the dim distant past of 20 years
ago, because it's wasteful and dumb. However, it's designed to be
interoperable by using the most basic lingua franca that we can find
in the computer world, the string. That *should* make it robust and
long lived. (question: does anyone know if there is a simple
compression standard to go with XML? Something that people might still
be able to work with in 50 years, say?)

When you look at efforts like those of google, or the internet archive
(http://www.archive.org/), or project gutenberg maybe, things look a
lot less gloomy.

The biggest problem I see is software. Software tends to be platform
specific, and those platforms die. Lots of information is locked up to
be usable only by a specific application. The only real answer that I
can see here for the long term is open source. If the old open source
operating system versions all hang around online, and all the layers
of tools and utilities and extensions and so on stay around, and the
applications stay around (and because it's free-libre software it can
stay around), then there is no reason that the apps should become
inaccessible. If people who care (and it's clear there are such
people) make sure there are hardware emulators created where
necessary, things look good.

OTOH, proprietary software is going to always be ephemeral, no way
around it. Companies die, and their software usually dies with them.
Closed source is hopeless. Rebel!

--
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *