solar powered for a post-digital age
“Books are dead. You should just put the encyclopedia out on CDs.” “It would be cheaper and faster to put the encyclopedia out on CD-rom instead of printing books.” “I’m going to wait for it to come out on CD-rom because I want something that will last forever.”
We hear some variation of these comments at every event we do. Computers were supposed to send the book off into the vast wasteland of ephemera to die quietly. But that isn’t what’s happening. Today we have “the cloud,” but that isn’t a sure thing either. Martin Payne explains the perils of impermanence in a piece he wrote in 2003.
Storage Media Surprises
by Martin B. Payne
A thousand years ago, things were vastly different from what they are today. It is likely that things will be vastly different 1,000 years from now. Several years ago, Wired magazine published a brief article regarding audio storage media. The article centered around the question, “In 1000 years, which of today’s audio storage media will likely be able to be read by our descendents?” The author’s postulated answer surprised me, but made sense.
I have always felt that CD’s were the ultimate in terms of long-term storage and durability. I probably should have known better since I am in the information business, but the Chief Technical Officer at my company had to enlighten me. Basically, CDs are polycarbonate (plastic) sheets with different-sized pits burned into them. Aluminum foil covers these pits. A laser reflects light off of the pits, thereby creating the “ones and zeros” that make up digital information. Lacquer covers the foil to protect the aluminum from the elements (clean aluminum oxidizes rapidly when exposed to air).
So, as our CTO explained, if the lacquer or case is compromised, air gradually leaks in and the data is jeopardized. He felt like 3 years was the maximum that you could really depend on a CD, but he has recently been convinced that maybe ten years is a reasonable maximum, for critical data. I was in awe. I thought (or didn’t think, in this case) they’d last forever! Some websites say 50 to 100 years is reasonable to expect for family pictures, non-“mission critical” data, etc.
So a CD in 1000 years? No way.
However, the Wired article was concerned not just with the “mechanical integrity” of the CD, but also the existence of a device that would read it. In other words, due to the evolution of hardware and software, Windows, CD readers, and even PCs are likely to be long gone in 1,000 years. And, no one is likely to take the time to recreate complex, yet archaic, operating systems, hardware, etc. just to read archaic storage media. As an analogy, think about how difficult it is to find a machine to read those 5 ¼” floppy disks, and those were commonplace just 15 years ago!
So, much to my surprise, the Wired article author picked the vinyl album as the music storage media that would most likely survive and be readable circa A.D. 3000! (A vinyl-record player could likely be improvised in a short period of time out of basic materials, such as a sharp point, some wire, a magnet and a motor.)
Similarly, the good old solar-powered book is also likely to be around in 1,000 years, since there are many books around the world today that are over 500 years old, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are well over 2,000 years old. CDs are great, but ask me how many I have on my credenza that have things of interest on them, but that I haven’t ever loaded. A bunch. It is just a hassle to load each of the different index systems, download more little “helper” software programs onto my computer, and then figure out how to find what I want in the index. If that data had been in a book I would have flipped through it long ago.
I look forward to the utility of Useful Wild Plants… on CD, as well as the searchability of the information via a relational database (maybe even map-based). But I’m glad that UWP, Inc. is focusing on getting the volumes published first. This project is not just for us, or even our children — it is for posterity. And that’s a long time.