The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures - millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.Most of us who have been using personal computers for a while have already had to deal with the problem of conversion... from one platform to another, from one application to another, and so on. I've got a less-than-a-year-old Windows XP box on my desk at home, but the hard drive's document archive contains stuff that I wrote in the late 80s on a Macintosh SE... from that point forward, I have backed up and transferred my hard drive contents every time I buy a new machine.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
Nonetheless, the Times article sounds a cautionary note.
For extreme cases of media obsolescence, see the Dead Media Project.
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