The lesson began when I bought my first car, a used 1969 VW Beetle. The guy I bought it from added what was then the hottest, coolest, most necessary thing a young man could want: an 8 track player. No longer was I a slave to Allison Steele, the nightbird. I could play whatever I liked, whenever I wanted.
But 8 tracks sucked. Their fidelity was poor, and they broke up songs wherever they had to in order to make them fit the medium. It was some pretty weird stuff, but it was all there was. Within hours, cassettes were putting 8 tracks to death, but there I was, a Beetle with an 8 track player and a box of 8 tracks to play. Sure, I wanted to switch over to cassettes. Who wouldn’t? But that meant trashing what I had and buying new, starting over. That took money, which was a scarce resource then allocated for eating dinner.
In the forty years since, I’ve seen a lot of newest, coolest things ever come and go. On the shelf in my den, there are tapes of movies collected during my children’s youth. They are on VHS, as I was way too smart to go with Sony’s Betamax. Try as I might, they won’t fit into the DVD slot on my player.
As an early adopter to computers, I was a huge fan of WordPerfect, which was an excellent word processing program. When Microsoft started handing Word out like candy, mostly because no one would buy that crappy program because WP was far superior, it created a problem as file sharing required people to use the same software.
I used WP 5.0 for years, though I now use a later version of WordPerfect. Sure, I had to have Word as well, to work with cheapskates, later adopters and young lawyers who never learned of the beauty of WordPerfect. But Corel figured out that if they didn’t change stuff, make it unusable and incompatible, then nobody would buy new software. That makes it hard for a company to stay in business. It’s still far superior to Word, though I miss the bright blue screen of old WP.
Sometimes change happened so damn fast that by the time I learned of a new thing, it was already an old thing. Think Iomega Zip drives, which became obsolete when jump drives blew them out of the water. Jump drives were expensive at first, but now they’re given away at trade shows in 8 gig increments.
Bear in mind, my old 186 computer whizzed along at 6 MHz searching massive 10MB hard drive (“So huge, you’ll never fill that up,” the computer guy explained). Of course, there was no internet then, so the demands on its 256k RAM were no big deal. Modems were still a twinkle in a geek’s eye.
Google’s Vint Cerf has grey hair and beard. Maybe he remembers 8 tracks too. I doubt he still has one, but if he did, it would do him no good. It’s just landfill fodder unless you still have an 8 track player, and as soon as we switched to cassettes, the 8 track player went straight into the garbage. And that concerns Cerf.
Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.
Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
Some people like to say that we should look to the future, not the past. Others remember George Santayana’s admonition, that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Or if that’s too grey beard for you, how about “you don’t know where you’re going unless you remember where you’ve been.”
Two things about technology are indisputable: it can be very cool, and it’s all disposable.
“Does this computer come with a 20 year guarantee?” asked no one ever.
We enable automatic updates, but try to buy a computer today running Windows XP, the last version of the program that any grown-up would want to use. And don’t even talk about DOS, except over brandy served in snifters in the old folks’ cigar room.
“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,” Cerf told the Guardian. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”
Print them out? How archaic, and yet, if we don’t, they will be lost even though we assume everything digitized must, by definition, live forever.
When I recently cleaned out my parents’ house, there were tons of old photos. I found pictures of my grandfather when he was a GI in World War I. Will your grandchildren be able to see pictures of their grandfather? Do you care? Or are you too busy downloading the latest app that will enable you to crush digital candy?
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
SHG,
Your great post illustrates a real problem faced by historians and archivists. I think our government is thinking about this, but probably not enough time, effort and money is devoted to being able to read WP files 125 years from now. That is good for me ’cause my goofy ideas will escape attention, but for other judges our history is in danger. Thanks for reminding us.
All the best.
RGK
PS, I can personally attest that a 1972 VW with the back seat down will put a screaming little girl to sleep in the middle of the night when no other method worked. The hum of the little 40 something horsepower motor induced sleep in the child and maintained sanity in two young and clueless parents.
The Library of Congress had a project going that captures blogs, including this one, but I think it’s now pretty much defunct for lack of funding. Then again, in the scheme of good uses of money, cataloguing SJ for posterity falls far behind bunker buster bombs.
And I too am familiar with the backseat of a VW, though falling asleep back there was not part of highest and best use.
No worries. Your blog exists in The Wayback Machine.
But they’re archiving Twitter, baby!
The heaters in the old VW Bugs were crap. The 8-tracks froze to death.
The heaters only sucked until they rusted out.
So long as it was the heater box, and not the J-pipe, that’s fine, LOL. The flaps also tended to get stuck, too. How many people do you think actually understand what we are talking about (besides you, me, and the judge)?
So true.
Did you old people forget your Geritol today or something?
Get off my lawn.
Nah, we’re trying to find one to make a kit car. We can do either the ’56 Porsche Speedster or the ’27 Bugatti if we can find an old VW bug with its motor….
An enjoyable reminder of things gone, thanks. I still have a zip disk, no drive of course so not even sure what is on it. You might be interested a group of guys who recognised the problem and went about recovering some of the old moon photo’s http://www.moonviews.com/2014/12/high-resolution-lunar-orbiter-imagery-online-at-nasa-sservi.html. There is a real need to recover some of this stuff while the chance still exists.
What WordPerfect was to writing, dBase IV was to databases. Elegance, simplicity and power.
Things printed out are subject to loss as well. They are thrown away, burned, eaten by mildew, etc. These digital losses are the equivalent of forgetting the language that something is written in – which happened a lot! Same problem, different domain.
You’re making my head hurt, already. Yes, this is true, but it’s not exactly a revelation. Most people already know this, making it unnecessary to say. There is no requirement that you comment if you have nothing illuminating to add.
lol. I was following Rebecca’s last few comments, and wondered how long you were going to take before you had enough. You lasted longer than I thought you would.
Worst part is that she’s a hit and run commenter, so she leaves these almost, kinda correct/worthwhile comments, but doesn’t come back for replies. I’ve struggled with whether to let them post, but this one pushed me too far.
You do realize that pointing out that computers quickly become obsolete is nothing new either, right? You spent a blog post complaining about kids these days with their iPhones who don’t even know about 8-track tapes, and now it seems that you want the darn kids to get out of your comment section. We migrated away from magnetic media because they suck, and they will degrade in 10-30 years anyway. Digital media can be copied indefinitely without signal loss or degradation of the original, unlike magnetic media. All your printed out photos will fade with UV light, but darn it, the old ways were better! I was going to make a joke about how in your day you only had typewriters and none of this “Internet” stuff and you were grateful, damn it, but the article you linked to did me one better by talking about baked clay tablets and rolled papyrus scrolls. Now, those are reliable storage medium. Anyway, I have to go memorize our oral history as told by the tribal elders, so I’ll let you get back to your 8-track tapes in peace.
Well, at least you came back to see a reply, even if you didn’t get the point of the post.
He was building to a point, which you might have realized had you read the link in the post. You were just being dull and obvious.
But even if he wasn’t building to apoint, he gets to be obvious, because it’s his blog. You don’t. This isn’t your blog. We come here to read what Scott says. You? Not so much.
Happy to clear up the confusion for you.
Sure the digital age is fast, but so was the industrial and the bronze as compared to the stone age.
We may indeed repeat the past , but I think that repeating things only helps us improve on them ( I call it practicing).
I also like being able to carry around 10 Edgar Rice Burroughs books and 100 of my favorite song in my pocket on my IPOD. Carrying 100 vinyl records or even Cd’s and 10 paper books would kinda suck.
I think that things like the Internet Archive and Librivox are going along way to toward saving this information age.
Repeating things means making the same mistakes over and over. You can call it practice. Others call it failure. Your point about content on an iPod is the upside to technology. Do you understand that downside, or is the shiny in your eyes?
And as for Internet Archive and Librivox saving “this information age,” you do realize that not everything worth saving is on the internet right? It’s not just about keyboard cat on Youtube. You understand this right? Right?
No Billy Madison Award? He could bring it home and show his mommy.
It was close with the repeating history part, but he’s going to have to try harder if he wants to win.