All had darkened to a point where the photographic images were almost as irretrievable as the digital data stored on the computer disk. Ironically, the only immediately intelligible clues to the disk's probable contents came from the magazines and instruction manuals. These printed publications provided high-quality color images of several dozen videotex frames along with basic descriptions of the Viewtron service and its contents. Given that the disk was packaged with these printed documents, I surmised, as future historians might, that the disk held a sampling of these videotex frames in their original digital form, although there is no way anyone would ever know for certain. Digital Alzheimer's Disease Today, we often hear the litany that digital is better and digital is forever, but, as the floppy disk in my time capsule revealed, digital is neither inherently better nor forever when it comes to the preservation of documents.
Digital documents are, in fact, far more fragile than paper.
Nearly everyone who relies on computers has experienced the occasional loss of digitally stored documents. While these losses are always annoying, special utility programs and human memory are usually able to recover or recreate most lost content. Digital Alzheimer's disease is far more insidious. It is silently and steadily erasing valuable electronic memories stored since the birth of digital computing and computer-mediated communication. If a solution is not found soon, future historians will have sparse first-hand knowledge of what may well be the beginning of the greatest transformation in human communication and culture since the introduction of printing, if not of written language itself.