February 13th, 2015, 1:58 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaQuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnVint Cerf and the Era of Digital Darkness After the fall of the Roman Empire, a dark age came in which a large part of the ancient knowledge was lost in Europe. Manuscripts were destroyed in wars and fires, or became illegible before getting transcribed. Much of their content had to be re-discovered, but it took centuries to recover it.This problem seems overblown to me unless one is a historian or a packrat. Any knowledge that's in digital objects that is actually important for today and tomorrow tends to get distributed to many locations and does get translated to new formats. Plus, there's always keeping some old hardware around or using an emulator.Most ancient knowledge really isn't worth much except as trivia or anecdote. Just follow the old rule about the boxes of stuff one moves to a new house, if there's some stuff that's still sitting packed in boxes after a year, throw it out!P.S. I say this as a packrat who still has every computer and every hard disk I've ever owned. If I needed one of my spreadsheets from 1987, I'm sure that I could get at least one computer and one hard disk running and resurrect it. But the number of times I've had to do this in the last nearly 30 years is zero.I have someTK50 (DEC)paper tape (TTP)800 bpi tapeword perfect files===QuoteThis problem seems overblown to me unless one is a historian [..]I think you are missing the point. 'Posterity' is the key word here.
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Cuchulainn on February 14th, 2015, 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.