The ledger on the left is open to some day long ago where you might read that in 1854 a ferry went aground off Penang Island and a coal ship was lost in the Falklands. Remarkably, the ledger from the archives, despite its age, is as legible as the current day s ledger. Meanwhile, I have some computer files barely over ten years old stored on 5 inch diskettes that are lost to me forever. Files can be lost even when they can be read. A friend just called a couple of weeks ago saying that she had found a copy of a book her later father had written, and did I know of a way to convert WordStar files to Word so she could read it.
Modern data is extremely fragile.
The drawings in the tomb of Nefertari are more vivid than the Walt Disney s drawings for Snow White. Hollywood lost many of its early movies because the silver nitrate film deteriorated. And so does digital data. And even if the medium doesn t deteriorate, the bits stored on it will someday lose their magnetism. A more immediate problem is the constant hardware obsolescence.