Hey! Welcome to the new decade. Where have you been? And what took you so long to get here?
It is truly a wondrous time to be alive, isn’t it? The gadgets we have, the amount of information at our disposal through our computers and the internet… it just staggers the imagination.
Go back fifty years or so, before the Beatles, before manned space flight, around the time when Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched into space, and the term “global village” was still obscure. Better yet, try going back a century, before most people could imagine movies, cars, or even global wars. Describe your laptop computer to them, your cell phone, your iPod that plays feature films, or the concepts of Facebook and Wikipedia…. that would be a fun homework assignment for any kid wouldn’t it?
Now, just for kicks, step forward a century. And be prepared to explain it all over again.
Why is that? There are a lot of reasons, actually. We could talk about the effects of a single solar flare on our fragile telecommunication systems including just about every satellite we have; or the giant reset button a clever Chinese hacker may or may not have developed that will one day, if provoked, turn off the entire internet. But let’s save all doomier and gloomier scenarios for others to discuss. Let’s assume everything goes according to schedule, barring major earth-changing calamities.
The technology we have today, in our homes and offices is, on average, being replaced every two and a half years. Very few of us are using the computers, televisions, or data recording devices we were using five years ago. A mere ten years ago, important data was being backed up on floppy drives, Travan drives, Zip Drives and SuperDisks. How many of us even have a floppy drive today, let alone the ability to get the DOS or Microsoft 3.1 software and drivers to work properly on our today’s computers?
How many of us can access the wedding videos we took on a video camera ten years ago? Do you know where you can get a VCR today? What was the life expectancy of those tapes anyway?
Fortunately today, we have CD’s, DVD’s and Blu-ray discs, with lab-tested life expectancies of 100 to 300 years… Right? Well it turns out that lab-testing doesn’t mean very much compared to real life, and many CD’s and DVD’s are failing after only two years.* No one really knows how long the best of these will last.
In many cases, the business or organization you work for is no better off than your own home, should a major computer breakdown occur, or a fire.
The Dark Ages were generally described as that period of history between stone tablets and books, when people did record what they did, but not in ways that survived through time. We still have books today, but very few of them are being printed on acid-free paper.
It may be a very ironic footnote in the history discs of the future that very little information in the Information Age was ever designed for longevity.
So imagine trying to explain to someone a century from now all the great songs they could be listening to, if only that had a recharger for that last remaining iPod their archeologists unearthed.
*Source: The Lifespan of DVD’s by Larry Jordan, 2006
{ 1 comment }
Love this post. Love it. So true. So scary. Why don’t I spend more time backing up my valuables? I keep ignoring the prompts. Bad idea. Will do that within the next week.
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