A few weeks ago, I experienced a classic annoyance of modern life: one of my computer games stopped working. The cause? An “update” to the emulator that translates old games into programs that today’s machines can execute. In my case, this update broke the translation process, and the tenuous thread of hardware and software connecting my laptop to the game’s 30-year-old code was severed.
For individuals, failures like this are irritating. But for the wider digital ecosystem, they’re a real problem – so much so, in fact, that Vint Cerf, who’s known as one of the “fathers of the Internet”, made them the subject of his talk at last week’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) in Heidelberg, Germany.
“My big worry is that all this digital stuff won’t be there when we would like it to be there, or when our descendants would like to have it,” Cerf said.
How it used to work
Historically, the best ways of preserving information involved writing it on durable materials such as clay tablets, high-quality paper, or a form of animal skin known as vellum. These media, Cerf observed, “have one thing in common: they don’t require electricity to be stored and preserved.”
Digital media, in contrast, are much less robust. “Many of them are magnetic, and the magnetic material wears away after a while,” Cerf explained. Consequently, some old tapes are now so fragile that attempting to read them can actually lift the magnetic material off the surface: “You read it once and that’s it. It’s now transparent tape,” he said.
Being able to read data is just the beginning, though. As my broken computer game shows, you also need programs and equipment that can persuade those data to do things. “That’s often the thing that goes first,” Cerf told me in a press conference after his talk. For example, when Cerf recently tried to retrieve data from an old three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, he discovered that doing so would require three additional components: a drive that could read the disk, a program that could open the files stored on the disk and an old computer that could run the program. “I needed a whole lot of software help and several stages in order to make that digital content useful,” Cerf said.
Creating ‘digital vellum’
As for how to fix this problem and create a digital version of vellum, Cerf, who has been the “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google since 2005, listed three ideas that he finds interesting. The first involves a New Jersey, US-based company called SPhotonix that does research and development work in the UK and Switzerland. It’s using lasers to write bits of data into chunks of quartz crystal, which is a very long-lasting medium. However, each crystal is roughly the size of a hockey puck, and Cerf thinks that “real work” still needs to be done to organize the information the material holds.
The second idea is partly inspired by the clay tablets that proved so successful at preserving cuneiform writing from ancient Mesopotamia. Cerabyte, a start-up with facilities in Austria, Germany and the US, has developed a ceramic material that its founders claim could “store all data virtually forever”.
The third idea, and the one that seems to appeal most to Cerf, is to write digital information into DNA. That might sound like an inherently fragile medium, but as Cerf pointed out, “It’s actually a very robust molecule – otherwise, life wouldn’t have persisted for several billion years.” Provided you dehydrate the DNA first, he added, it lasts for “quite a long time”.
The question of how to read such information is not an easy one, and Cerf doesn’t have an answer to it. He is, however, hopeful that someone will find one. At the HLF, where he is such a revered figure that even the journalists want to take photos with him, he issued a call to arms for the young researchers in the audience. “I want you to appreciate the scope of the work that is required to preserve digital things,” Cerf told them. Without that work, he added, “recreating a digital environment in 100 years is not going to be a trivial matter.”
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