“Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole,” says Gordon Frazer, Microsoft’s UK Managing Director.
The problem we are facing, and if you think about it have been facing, is that files are being sorted and saved from programs that are either no longer readable by today’s current programs, the programs no longer exist and sometime the equipment to read them is nonexistent. When is the last time you saw a 3.5″ floppy drive. They’re not a standard device on today’s computers.
The BBC reported yesterday that the UK National Archives has “580 terabytes of data – the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopedias – in older file formats that are no longer commercially available. ”
Reading the article reminds me of a show I watched last night about an ancient civilization in South America that disappeared with very little to show for their existence. Could this happen to us? Could we perhaps fall into that “digital black hole” that the article is reporting?
This issue will need to be seriously considered and addressed globally to persevere virtually everything we keep track of as a society.