Hi,
I think this discussion can branch off into several directions.
- Digital (or even analog) forms of data storage that are no longer in
use, or replaced by supposed "improved mediums", that were meant to last a
long time, but failed to gain traction in the real world. Remember punch
cards? What about early computers that used (audio) cassette tapes to
store program code, or data? (I remember having an old RCA computer that
plugged into a cheap cassette recorder/player, and I had to crank up the
volume to reload programs from tape, back in the 70's). In the early 80s,
there was a booming business opportunity to transfer company files from old
8" floppy disks, mainframes, or tapes, to the new PC 5.25" disk format,
which was then followed by 3.5" floppies, etc. In some situations,
transferring data from one computer platform to another was a challenge
because of differences in how character sets were "standardized" by
vendors, or if data was processed with LIFO or FIFO methods. In the early
days of personal computing, data standards were defined by 7-bit (ASCII) or
8-bit (EBCDIC) character sets, depending on whether extended
(non-alphanumeric and non-number characters) were required. Support for
foreign character sets introduced UTF-8 to industries, and software vendors
added double-byte character (DBCS) support for international languages such
as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
- Data media has its own challenges, as the devices that read media is
prone to obsolescence (over time). I have boxes of old punch cards from
school that are of little use without a card reader (IBM?), but I can still
manually read the old FORTAN instructions that were encoded on each card
(if I had to...). Same thing goes for old floppy disks, ZIP drives (or the
original larger IOMega Bernoulli drives), Exabyte tapes, old tape reels,
and other mediums that you might only recognize from watching old tv shows,
movies, or visiting the local computer museum (or possibly perusing certain
OVSage member's basement inventories)? ;-)
- Many of us are experienced enough to remember the creative ways of
transferring "old data" into a form that can be used by today's systems. I
remember using serial cables to transfer files from one computer to another
(and, in some situations, having to re-wire cables to get the communication
"handshake" to work properly between systems...). Sometimes a
communications application would be required (remember CrossTalk?), or
creating a custom script to manipulate or filter "useable" data from one
system to another.
- From a low-level perspective, the data itself may need some "extra
loving care" to interpret properly. Most people think that data is
ubiquitous, but how data interpretation can be somewhat "finicky", as a
data object might need to be read as a string, number, boolean, binary, or
date value. Take date for example - who gets to decide if a date is
"month-day-year", "day-month-year" or "year-month-day", etc.? Is the date
based on GMT, a relative value, or a calculated value based on the
application used (ie., MS Excel?).
- Sometimes the best solution is to locate a printout of the old data in
mind, so that one can use the latest OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
software to scan and interpret the information into something that can be
reused (without having to manually retype everything). Personally, I am
not a big fan of OCR software, but I have to admit that the technology, as
well as the scanning accuracy, as improved a lot over the past couple of
decades, so this is a good solution for large volumes of paper reports.
(It is very fortunate that the "paperless society" vision never really
came to pass...)
Anyway, I just thought I would share some of my thoughts on the subject...
As you can tell, there will be many opinions and perspectives on this
subject so feel free to focus on the pieces that interest you the most.
Thanks for starting up this email thread - it was fun to think about what
we have encountered with technology over the years!
Have a enjoyable Friday, and a great weekend!
Cheers,
Ed
On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 8:44 AM Nicholas Savage <nick [ at ] nicksavage [ dot ] ca> wrote:
> I can't seem to find it now, but there is a historian or an archivist
> whose specialty is studying this phenomena. I've read some journal articles
> and other pieces they've written about this.
>
> From what I remember, it was more about what *will* happen than what has
> already. For example, if twitter is used now to communicate, what will
> historians have in 300 years to study? Now, we have letters people would
> write to each other. The prediction was that the digital age would be a
> dark spot. We'd know that something happened then, and probably have a
> general idea (barring some sort of catastrophe), but we wouldn't have any
> specifics. The idea being, sure the archives of Twitter exist now, but who
> will pay to keep them running for 300 years (given physical media rot,
> etc)? I think the answer is "no one".
>
> I'll keep looking for the name or article I read.
>
> On Sat, Jul 20, 2019, at 05:44, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >
> > good friend of mine is starting a research project, looking into
> > what i will call "digital transience" ... she is using a slightly
> > different term and would prefer i not use it for the time being.
> >
> > the idea is fairly obvious ... the danger of digital content
> > vanishing for any of a number of reasons: dropping support for
> > proprietary data formats, physical media (5 1/4" floppy drives, Zip
> > drives(?)) vanishing, link rot, entire site rot, and so on. so she's
> > interested in a couple things.
> >
> > first, just *general* contributors to the unexpected loss of what
> > might be important corporate digital data. but also, real-life
> > examples of things like this -- the one that leaps to mind is the
> > recent microsoft debacle involving ebooks protected by DRM:
> >
> > https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-ebook-apocalypse-drm/
> >
> > i think that, of the two topics above, she's more interested in
> > actual examples of significant loss of digital data, not through any
> > sort of malice, but by accident or unforeseen developments in hardware
> > or data formats that suddenly cause a catastrophic loss of
> > information.
> >
> > i've already started a list, but i'm open to as many examples as i
> > can collect. thoughts?
> >
> > rday
> >
> > --
> >
> > ========================================================================
> > Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
> > http://crashcourse.ca
> >
> > Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday
> > LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
> > ========================================================================
> >
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