:dons librarian hat:
Digital preservation is more expensive than preserving paper; it takes more staff, active attention, and consistent computing resources. Libraries have discussed “digital dark age” since the 1990s.
Corp archives often 1st to go b/c suits haven’t figured out how to profit.
One of the interesting things about the Internet is that we’re actually living through a dark age. Future historians are unlikely to have records of this period.
Paper and ink last. Digital storage, less so.
variety.com/2024/tv/news...
Indeed. I feel this goes for a lot of digital content, games as well. There are a lot of older arcade games which have not been preserved yet, as in dumped to roms & if it does not happen they might be lost forever, w/ sourcecodes already gone. Capitalism does not care about preservation. No profit.
I mean, yeah, that happens with backwards compatibility not always being an easy thing to do when hardware moves foreward. This is why Emulation/Virtualisation of old hardware is so important, imo.
Even with emulation, you still need a physical device that can read the physical object on which the data is recorded. Which is where it gets unwieldy and complicated.
I still have Syquest discs, Zip discs, and floppies of various sizes and formatting from way back, and nothing that can read them.
Have you ever tried to get in touch with some demosceners? They usually are the kinda guys who are good with old formats and have the old hardware to read it out.
I actually have a friend who collects retro-tech and has a whole museum of stuff going back to the 70’s
But am I really gonna schlep stuff to Jersey just to open a disc from college out of curiosity, probably not anytime soon.
Meanwhile I can open a paper folder and see art I did when I was two.
Yeah, totally know where you are coming from. I got old drawings from my childhood, but stuff I made when I was like 12-15 on my Amiga 500, while probably still somewhere on a disk in the cellar, I have not checked on at all.
A friend of mine has a 25 year old Mac with Pagemaker and Quark Express still running. He takes on projects where people have working files from the ‘90s that they want converted to usable PDFs. Most of the times it’s church archivists wanting access to old bulletins 😉
