Future historians, scientists may curse PC

History is more or less bunk - Henry Ford
AN INTERESTING ARTICLE in the latest edition of the very useful Risks digest says that research info on the planet Mars has been lost because the data was held in a format that is lost to science, and that's caused us to wonder how future historians and scientists are going to cope with our current digital revolution. (See Risks Digest).

Towards the end of the 19th century, archaeologists found a treasure trove of Babylonian clay tablets containing ephemerides and the like that bettered anything the astronomers of the time could come up with themselves.

While those clay tablets are a-mouldering in the basement of the British Museum somewhere, they at least had the advantage that they weren't on eight inch floppy disks or CD-ROMs, which would almost certainly have perished over the course of 2,000 years.

The problem is real enough - even in our own experience. We've no eight inch floppy disks here at the INQUIRER but have a mass of five inch disks and nothing to read them with anymore. The contents are just journalism so hardly worthy of preserving, but it occurs to us that 100 years from now, all the research currently being churned out on the IBM PC or compatible may be more impenetrable than clay tablets from the banks of the river Euphrates.

There's an interesting article here about preserving information "forever", and going back to the home page it seems that the Archive Builders believe that Adobe PDFs may be the best way to create "permanent electronic records".

But wouldn't we better preserve our historical, archaeological and scientific archive by printing it all out on durable paper, digging a big hole in the ground, and putting all of it in there, as our own security services are rumoured to have done around eight years ago when they transferred their archives to optical storage?

Otherwise, the boffins and historians 100 years from now may thoroughly be cursing us for our wasteful reliance on our PCs... µ Henry Ford page