COMMENTARY--There seems to be growing concern that the various media types for recordable and rewriteable CDs will deteriorate. The likelihood exists that data will forever have to be moved from one media type to another, making the data nomadic. Whew!
As I considered this, I realized that almost all data is better off being nomadic. Very few media types can withstand the ravages of time. Books fall apart, go up in flames, get eaten by worms, or just deteriorate. It's a miracle when we find old scrolls from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. And surely we are freaked out about longevity, because we really think that our thoughts should be considered by others not one or two hundred years from now, but 3,000 years from now. Good luck.
I think it would be a kick, at some point in the distant future, for someone to be poring over old copies of PC Magazine, rereading my Inside Track columns, and pondering the ancient fate of the battles between AMD and Intel. The AMD and Intel battle would be considered a saga that occurred during some ancient corporate era when men wore odd garb and identified each other by a twist of cloth around the neck. I'd be remembered as the great chronicler of a lost time.
Well, that's not going to happen if nobody can find a way to preserve PC Magazine or keep CD-ROMs alive for 3,000 years. In fact, I see no way any column of mine will survive 3,000 years unless I personally bury all the back issues in the desert someplace. The deserts in and around Israel seem like the best place, since they are time-tested locations for this kind of thing. However, I suppose Death Valley might offer other benefits, such as perpetually low humidity.
The fact is, only nomadic data will make it into the future, and the future is shaky. Look how often we already move our data from one system to another when we upgrade. If this keeps up, nomadic data might have to be moved 200 times to last 1,000 years. After about 50 times, I think people will just say "nuts to moving this crap."
In the world of desktop computers, popular media types have gone from cassette tape to 5.25-inch floppy disks, to 3.5-inch floppy disks, to hard drives, to CD-R. We aren't stopping there, though. We've got DVD-RW coming up, and who knows what after that?
What happens to your personal files or digital photos after you die? Unless you are a famous photographer, nobody is going to keep copying your digital pictures from old media to new. A favorite relative might do it for a while, but the preservation won't go on for more than a generation or two. The stuff is going to be gone! Think about that as you assiduously organize your files and pictures.
I have two boxes of old CD-ROMs that I've been keeping because I figured I might find them useful someday as source material for a future column. Many of the disks can't even be deciphered by newer versions of Windows. Some require old passwords for access to data. I have no idea what the passwords are, and I'm not sure I can find out.
So all these old disks have to go into a box headed for the dump, to be unearthed someday by an archaeologist. Some may simply be ground up and recycled. There is probably more information being lost every day than ever before in history.
So whether data is nomadic or not, the likelihood of most data making it into a distant future seems to be low. If you want to send a message to the future, I suggest you etch it into a sheet of platinum, although a looter might sell the platinum for scrap. Perhaps laser-etching a message on the moon itself would do the trick, except for meteors.
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