Wednesday, July 30, 2003
A Digital Dark Age - Are We in Danger of Losing History?
Posted by Crystal Eitle in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 06:50 AM
Even though I'm not a programmer, I found this article fascinating. We're still living in the early days of computing (or at least, we're not very far from those origins), and we risk losing a lot of computing history.
"With new programs replacing old and no major company or institution playing the central role of source-code archivist, the amount of software history currently circling the memory hole is scarily large. And even if there were a central institution, recent changes to the copyright code have made the transfer of source code from old media to new forms of storage a dicey prospect, legally. Add it all up, and you have the ideal makings for what some are already calling the 'digital dark age.' For every modern offshoot of DOS/Windows, Unix and Macintosh OS evolving with the marketplace, a dozen ghost programs lurk inside yellowed engineering pads, punch-card stacks and slowly degaussing magnetic memories."
This reminds me of the early days of film. Thousands of historically valuable films from the 1890s to the 1920s have been lost forever, simply because film pioneers didn't realize their value. The celluloid the films were stored on was melted down and recycled to make nail polish, among other things. Now we're looking at preserving the origins of another new technology, and finding there isn't yet any organized way of storing, organizing, and analyzing this important piece of history.
(Warning - you'll have to click through an ad to read the article.)
"With new programs replacing old and no major company or institution playing the central role of source-code archivist, the amount of software history currently circling the memory hole is scarily large. And even if there were a central institution, recent changes to the copyright code have made the transfer of source code from old media to new forms of storage a dicey prospect, legally. Add it all up, and you have the ideal makings for what some are already calling the 'digital dark age.' For every modern offshoot of DOS/Windows, Unix and Macintosh OS evolving with the marketplace, a dozen ghost programs lurk inside yellowed engineering pads, punch-card stacks and slowly degaussing magnetic memories."
This reminds me of the early days of film. Thousands of historically valuable films from the 1890s to the 1920s have been lost forever, simply because film pioneers didn't realize their value. The celluloid the films were stored on was melted down and recycled to make nail polish, among other things. Now we're looking at preserving the origins of another new technology, and finding there isn't yet any organized way of storing, organizing, and analyzing this important piece of history.
(Warning - you'll have to click through an ad to read the article.)
