Quote:
Google Boss warns of a
‘Forgotten Century’ with Emails and Photos at Risk…!
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[/FONT][FONT="]What is 'bit rot' and should we to be worried?[/FONT]
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[/FONT][FONT="]Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Cerf. [/FONT]“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them but unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse...“ Cerf told the Guardian......and the problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was routine to save documents on floppy disks, upload Jet Set Willy from cassette to the ZX spectrum, slaughter aliens with a Quickfire II joystick, and have Atari games cartridges in the attic. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, the equipment needed to run them is mostly found only in museums.
Cerf concedes that historians will take steps to preserve material considered important by today’s standards, but argues that the significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have a short term solution to bit rot......they take digital snapshots of computer hard drives while they run different software programs. These can then be uploaded to a computer that mimics the one the software ran on. The result is a computer that can read otherwise defunct files.
Called Project ‚
Olive’ has archived the original 1982 graphic adventure game for the Apple II, an early version of WordPerfect, and Doom, the original 1993 first person shooter game.
Link:
http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...arns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf