Losing touch with the past
Technology
consultant Bill Thompson is worried about losing our digital history
This
week space scientists and astronomers have been celebrating the
25th anniversary of the launch of two spacecraft - Voyager 2 on
20 August, and its twin, Voyager 1, 16 days later.
They
were sent to Jupiter, Saturn and the other outer planets, and
the coverage of the anniversary took me back to the sheer excitement
of seeing what these far-distant planets really looked like.
In
1979 I was 18, and I remember seeing the first clear pictures
of the great red spot in Jupiter's atmosphere, taken by Voyager
1.
Now
it has travelled further from the Earth than anything else we've
thrown into the sky. It's about 85 times as far from the Sun as
we are and is still sending back information about conditions
at the edge of the Solar System.
It
may even leave the sun's influence before its power supply fails
in about 2020.
Alien
record
Even
without power, both craft will continue to travel into interstellar
space. However if they are ever found by another intelligent form
of life then they carry with them information about our planet
and its inhabitants.
Each
craft has a plaque, engraved with a picture of a woman and a man
and some clues as to where to find our planet.
There
is also a copper audio recording - a metal LP - with greetings
in 60 languages and recordings of many natural sounds.
The
idea is that an alien civilisation would be able to figure out
how to read the record - there is even a spare needle on board
- and be able to play it.
This
is an interesting idea and it even seems possible. After all,
making sound waves by vibrating a membrane is easy to do, as a
child I remember playing records using a thorn instead of a needle.
But
suppose that Voyager was being launched today. Nobody would think
of putting a long-playing analogue record on board because we
are now a digital civilisation.
Perhaps
a CD or DVD would do instead. Except, of course, that it would
not.
Even if an alien figured out that there was a sequence of ones
and zeros hidden in the DVD and set up a laser to read them, they
would have no idea of how the sounds had been encoded, how the
constantly varying pattern of frequencies at different volumes
had been turned into binary.
They would never hear human speech or whale song.
Domesday
disks
It
is not just the space aliens who are having problems with digital
data. We have now been using computers and digital storage for
long enough to have to deal with the issue ourselves, and there
is a large and growing collection of unrecoverable data on our
computers.
In 1986, while the Voyagers were still hopping between the planets,
the BBC and Acorn Computers created the Domesday Project - two
interactive video disks which were read in a specially adapted
Philips VP 415 player.
It is worth being precise, because there are now very few working
VP 415s around, and as a result most of the Domesday disks are
effectively unreadable.
The 11th century Domesday Book may be in Latin but it can at least
be seen and the words can be made out. There is no such ability
with a videodisk without its hardware.
Fortunately we do know how the data was encoded on the disks and
so could, if we wanted, transfer the data to another medium and
make it accessible to today's computers.
But there are millions of tapes in company and university archives
which contain all sorts of undocumented file formats and this
is digital data that is almost certainly unrecoverable.
Child's play
Does
this matter? If I cannot read the personnel files from a now-defunct
company, then it does not really seem to be terribly significant.
Yet more and more of our personal communications, more and more
of the information we deal with every day, more and more of the
stuff we create ourselves, from e-mails to photos and videos and
drawings, is stored digitally, often so it can be sent over the
internet.
When she was three, my daughter Lili did a drawing on the computer,
and I still have it and can look at it. In 50 years' time I may
no longer be able to do this, even if I remember to copy the file
to every new computer I own.
What is the solution? Do we really want to print out every document
on acid-free paper and archive it? I don't think so. The point
of the network is to get rid of paper, not to encourage the creation
of massive new libraries.
Perhaps we just have to trust to the skills of historians and
archaeologists to come. After all, many ancient languages have
been deciphered from very few clues, like hieroglyphics or Linear-B.
But the stuff that matters to me personally, like my daughter's
first piece of computer art, will make it onto paper, however
silly it may seem.
What you said about Bill's column:
There should be no need to rely only on the future skills of historians
and archaeologists. Librarians will be already archiving different
media types with a positive view towards future retrieval.
Chris Foster, Scotland
There needs to be an obligation on designers and manufacturers
of new systems to design new systems with the idea of some degree
of future proofing and future systems need to be backward compatible.
Adam, UK
The problem here is not the technology, but procedures and documentation.
In my previous company, very ancient files were stored with a
working hardware unit, or copied onto newer systems. Data management
is easy if proper procedures are in place. If you have ignorant
or negligent data management staff, then even keeping things on
paper won't help you.
Jezar, England
I think this is a serious concern. The Y2K problem was left until
the last minute. This issue however will, I'm sure increase in
its importance over time as more and more data and becomes unrecoverable.
If computers had become commercially available several centuries
ago and artists and inventors of long ago stored their works in
a digital format on their computers, many of today's inventions
would not exist and the art world would also have missed out on
some of the world's greatest artwork that fortunately can be enjoyed
today in galleries.
Rich, UK
I am a writer and a historian and this is a problem I have worried
about. My personal solution is to keep copies of all the old programmes
I no longer use, and to update my backups regularly. When 5-1/2
inch disks finished, I copied all the data I had stored on them
onto 3-1/2 in floppies, then to Zip disks, and now onto recordable
CDs. But I still keep hard copies of key stuff. I wonder too about
BBC News Online. I love the fact that I can go to libraries and
see old copies of newspapers, many of them with complete runs
of a century or more. Is there an equivalent for the BBC news
website, I wonder?
Iqbal Siddiqui, UK
Looking back, if a widely available standard becomes outdated,
it will be possible for some time to restore the information on
it - vinyl and audio cassettes are examples. At present we rely
on standard computer equipment to store information. I expect
that files I leave on my website on the internet will be available
in 10, 20 even 50 years to what ever device I attach to the internet
with.
Ben Roberts, UK
Formats
are an issue
with computers. For example, I have games which I enjoyed playing
on early computers such as the ZX81 and the BBC Micro. I still
have the games, but the computers are long gone, replaced by my
trusty PC which does not recognise the formats. Fortunately, emulators
which run on PC's enable me to continue to play these classics
on current systems. I don't know if emulators are available for
VP 415's, but if we are to retain this information, I feel that
emulation on current hardware is the best solution - rather than
trying to keep the original machines working as I'm sure that
working parts will get progressively harder to find.
Steve Burns, UK
Surely if we have been capable of deciphering Egyptian papyrus
scrolls and clay tablets, advanced civilisations could fairly
easily work out how a CD was written? Chris
Chris Bird, UK
My daughter spent three months doodling on an old Mac, then started
messing with the folders and NOW the thing doesn't start up now
but I can't throw it out because it has all those doodles.
lon Barfield, UK
The Bill Thompson column is courtesy of BBC WebWise, part of BBC Education's ongoing campaign to teach people about the internet and how to use it. Bill is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital
http://news.bbc.co.uk/