As schoolchildren we had to scribble our notes on paper with graphite lead pencils. They told us we could keep the notes forever. Did you ask your Mommy, “How long is “Forever?”
Then somebody invented a typewriter to make uniform uncoded marks on paper. By the time I ran my dissertation data on a computer, we had graduated to using Hollerith punched cards for coded data storage. We had advanced from making marks on paper to punching holes in paper cards. Magnetic data storage on tape and disk was still on the drawing boards.
Hardcover books were the source for obtaining academic material and entertaining stories. We have witnessed enormous, technical advances since those early days. Now we have electronic readers that even can convert the stored, printed words into speech for relaxed listening. Books are becoming obsolete because a pocket-sized electronic tablet can store a thousand books to form the reader’s personal library. Electronic memory-storage-devices are so small that a hand-held device can retain a person’s lifetime of business records and books. Records no longer require storage space. Bookstores are going out of business and libraries are closing. We no longer need to crowd our homes and offices with bookshelves to hold 20+ volume home encyclopedias for references. Businesses no longer require multi-floor storage rooms. Just find room for a laptop, or even a tablet, and your environment no longer needs to be dusty and oppressive. All the things worth knowing or recalling are stored for us in neat little electronic files. No more rummaging through papers in boxes up in the attic. The new digital world of marvels is taking over our lives!
All the information I needed to assemble my web pages was retrieved faster than the speed of sound. This digital boost has placed in our hands the power of an oriental genie. It all seems too good to be true. The real world, the analogue one that we touch, and that touches us, is still there. Will people 50 years hence still use books at all? They told us children that we could keep our paper notes forever. Did you ask your Mommy, “How long is “Forever?”
Will all writing and printing be available only as teeny-weeny bytes of binary coding? Will all records be accessible only from the banks of cloud storage? The experts want us to believe that the stored information will be accessible forever. It doesn’t occur to us to ask, “How long is forever?”
I tried to focus on the downside of computer-stored information as I retrieved information for this website. Just because we never think in general about retrieval problems doesn’t mean there are none. Forgotten user IDs and passwords are always with us to keep this from being a perfect world. Security will become tighter over the coming half-century and what you stored on a disk will be impossible to access. The security-coded keys to access old storage will have become part of the forgotten past. Will my great-great grandchildren even be able to find my webpages?
I know how it will be because important information I stored 50 years ago in a computer is no longer accessible. Will people even know in which data banks their grandparents stored their family history and pictures? Then, if you find the files, you will learn that the all the hardware for reading those particular kind of file(s) was junked years ago. Good luck if you find a reading device that could recall your data, because you still have to face the changes in software drivers and operating systems. Even if you found a compatible storage device, you would be stopped abruptly because the old file extension isn’t recognizable. Decades ago, the data will have been stored in some obsolete format.
While I was prepared my uploads, I had the illusion that I was storing our family information safely and forever. Then it occurred to me that there is no forever! The answer, ironical as it is-- “Just download. The web pages from digital storage back to be printed in the form of a book.” All I have to do is give each living family member a copy so he can keep it on a shelf or in some musty box of old things that belonged to the grandparents-- regress 50 years to analogue storage! Availability of books will protect you from losing the website because a careless executor fails to pay the annual bills for domain rental and web hosting. Books should assure that some copies of the information will be preserved long after these webpages have been archived in some obscure data storage bank, somewhere in this world or in the next!