Digital memory loss

If you own a closet full of vinyl records or VHS tapes but long ago got rid of your record player or VCR, you have some idea of the magnitude of the problem Google executive Vint Cerf is wrestling with: Future historians may have no way to read, hear, or visualize today’s digital file formats for text, audio, and video—ushering in what he calls a “digital dark age.”

Cerf, Google’s dapper, white-bearded chief internet evangelist and co-designer of the basic internet protocols, is considered by many to be a “father” of the internet.

“When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, Calif., in January. “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,” he added.

Cerf coined the term “bit rot” to describe a process in which the digital mechanisms for reading a file are lost—much as a VHS tape is useless in a world of Blu-ray players.

Many popular digital file formats such as the Microsoft Office .doc format are easily readable by a number of programs, not all of them made by Microsoft. However, the .doc format is proprietary and licensed by Microsoft, and Microsoft could choose to stop supporting it or allowing other software to use the format. If it did so, any document created using the .doc format would eventually become unreadable once the last version of the software that could read it no longer runs on newer computers and operating systems.

Vint Cerf believes a possible solution to the problem of bit rot lies in something he refers to as “digital vellum.”

“The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time,” Cerf told BBC News. “And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future.”

The Guardian reports that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have made some progress using this technique. Under a project called Olive, the researchers have archived Mystery House, the original 1982 graphic adventure game for the Apple II, an early version of WordPerfect, and Doom, the original 1993 first-person shooter game.

Cerf points to the irony of “digitizing” documents, photos, and other historical artifacts while the very software and computers used to read those digitized artifacts are becoming obsolete.

“We digitize 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 artifacts that we digitized,” Cerf told The Guardian. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

Listen to Michael Cochran discuss this topic on The World and Everything in It.