November 20, 1998

from the Friends-of-the-Revolution dept

Digital Decay

groveling
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First of all I would like to apologize to everyone for my extended leave of absence from writing.  I of course have been busy doing who knows what... .  I think it was best put like this... "If you have a newsletter and you never send it out, does it make a sound?"

the story
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I was visiting my parents over Christmas last year, and they wanted us "kids" to remove all the junk from the basement (letter jackets, string art, model rockets, etc).  As I went through the piles of stuff and decided weather to keep each item, I was re-living my childhood.  The items were not of particular value at the time, and I would have thrown them away years ago, but I was glad I didn't because now they did have value to me.  Items like the picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware that I made with crayons in second grade, a piece of string art from 4rd grade, programs from high school sporting events and that old Apple II plus.

While all the items were faded or torn, they were still intact.  In contrast; the adventure game that I had written in Apple Basic was no where to be found.  I could boot the machine, but the disks that I found were badly damaged or had been demagnetized.

the point
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Why are we rushing to de-materialize everything into bits when it appears that bits actually have a shorter life span than atoms?

The problem with bits.

• storage media is destroyed (used as a coaster)
• storage media is obsolete (5 1/4?)
• file system is obsolete (pro-dos)
• processor is no longer in production
• no conversion tools
• don't have time or the desire to convert the files (imagine transfering the Adventure Program from an Apple II to a Apple IIc to a Macintosh to a Palm Pilot?)

Are we setting ourselves up for another crash of some kind?  Or worse yet erasing our existance?  If aliens landed on the earth millions of years from now would they find a cave drawing or a deteriorated floppy disk crystalized in amber (ala Jurasic Park) more valuable?

the solution?
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I suspect that there is some money to be made here.  Here are some early examples.

Emulators - There are emulators for nearly every kind of computer ever made.  You can run a Commodore64 on your pentium or an Apple II on the web!  Tons of people are re-discovering all the cool games that they used to play as a kid.  There are emulators for nearly every game system ever built (including Nintendo64) and the ROM images are available on-line (illegally).  While it does not appear that anyone is making money at this yet it is only a matter of time before they find the right business model.  I would buy an Apple II emulator for my Pilot, or perhaps Microsoft buys an X86 SuperNintendo emulator company and Web-TV cuts a deal with Nintendo to to include the ROMS either on-line or pre-installed.

Global Backup - Last I checked Alexa (the company that provides the technology behind Netscape's smart browsing) was backing up the Web on a periodic basis.  They are storing Terabytes of information.  Their plan... serve up web-pages that have been deleted from the web and eliminate 404 errors.  Not very exciting stuff and I imagine that it is more likely to be valuable from a historical perspective.  Lawyers could puchase snapshots of the web to prove/or disprove a fact. Historians could purchase chunks of the web to explain cultural phenonenoms.

conclusion
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The Y2K problem is just a first example of digital decay.  I suspect that we will see other forms of this problem in the near future.  Basically... computers are moving too fast to continually migrate all of our information to the newest standard and therefore we are losing information.

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Friends of the Revolution
by Brian Day

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