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Posted on 02/18/2015 3:31:11 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost. Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete. He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a "digital Dark Age".
(Excerpt) Read more at m.bbc.com ...
I have had to find less than legal ways to retain old data files from the 80s and 90s.
They won't be missing much.
Heck, they can’t read the cursive on the Declaration of Independence already.
How about all those documents in old software like SAMNA, or on Wang word processors.
How about videotape of Eisenhower - unwatchable because the hardware to watch them is obsolete?
Try looking up old copies of many magazines. Lot of scanned pics and ephemera, but searchable articles?
This might be a concern if Obama fails in his takeover of the internet and digital medium so that the only history is the state approved message.
The first problem is solved by copying everything of interest to fresh media from time to time.
The second problem is simpler. You just need to preserve copies of software able to read each format (.jpg, .gif, .mp4, .pdf, .xlsx, etc.). And you need to update said software to work in whatever computing environment currently prevails.
I'm not worried.
Obama’s birth certificate is probably the first casualty of it.
Who decides what is copied?
Who’s going to check if it’s been copied faithfully?
What BC? How does a Kenyan villager in the 1960s exactly document a birth? Go outside and sling something on the village firepit?
You do.
Who’s going to check if it’s been copied faithfully?
If it's important enough to matter, chances are, there are multiple copies. Let the jury decide.
>> Can you imagine medical and financial records “disappearing”?
Who cares about that crap. Instead imagine the pain and suffering if all those cute pictures of kittehs and LOL fake demotivational posters were irretrievably lost!!?! OMG!!!!!
There are many cheap and reliable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs on the market. Here's one. Here's more.
You simply open a document in the program, make a few choices and let it run.
I use one all the time that's built into Adobe Acrobat Pro; I scan stacks of paper to pdf using the office copier, then convert the huge pdf files into searchable text. Works perfectly.
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“Lot of scanned pics and ephemera, but searchable articles?”
Believe it or not, I found my birth announcement on the front page of the Deming Headlight in NM. I’m almost 70. The newspaper gave all their archives to Ancestry.Com and somehow they made them searchable. But only to the page of the newspaper. Still it is amazing to see what ribbons my grandmother won at the fair for her needlework and baking.
I wonder about this for personal family photographs. Time was, your family had their portrait taken on tintype or glass, then paper prints, and they are available 100+ years later.
Now, family photos have been relegated to files on the family computer or on their phones with backup “in the cloud.” Once the device dies, or the owner does, the images are either lost or locked up in a “wrong password” limbo.
And prints made from digital photos often are not very robust.
The first “program” (”Free OCR”) is actually a web site you upload to, and it could steal all your text, or someone hacking it could steal text. It is only safe to use for some items.
Always use protection on the internet.
My point is that the text is not trapped in non-searchable formats.
The records of what you owe will somehow find a way to live forever.
This is one of the reasons that I’m still stuck on paper.
Yeah it doesn’t hurt I’m a bibliophile to begin with, but I’ve had too many hard drives crash - once dual backups nearly simultaneously - to trust myself to electronic only.
At one point in my career I was working with MRIs - can’t tell you how many people I watched destroyed their data/computers by forgetting a magnet was still ramped and walking into the bay.
My local library does a friends of the library sale of donated books about once a quarter - the last day of the sale it’s $3/paper grocery bag. I usually walk out with 10 bags or so - mainly reference, how-to, science, history.
True.
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