The Medium Is Not The Message

Talking yesterday in the pub with Joe about that development in data storage media currently being mooted, which utilises a 3D borosilicate glass [Pyrex to you and me] structure and lasers to store data at a pretty prodigious density for a claimed 10,000 years. The development by Microsoft is pretty impressive in and of itself, technically, and the predicted lifespan of the storage medium is a thousand times that of today's solid state hard drives, but herein lies the rub. As I've written here before, we struggle now to retrieve data from digital media created less than fifty years ago; not because the media themselves have necessarily physically deteriorated beyond reading, but simply because the file storage formats, not only physically themselves but their data structures also are now obsolete; the disk drives largely all gone to landfill, and the file and disk formats they employed arcane to all but a few archivists, museums and data specialists.

For most us at least, the data we carefully stored and accumulated back in the day are effectively unrecoverable. The thing is that digital data is always at two removes from its original human-readable form. The raw data are abstracted twice and once those layers of abstraction are consigned to the bin of obsolescent technology, they are effectively lost, except to expensive bespoke data-retrieval systems and companies who charge handsomely for their services. This means that most stuff is effectively just binned after a few years as trends in technology and fashions change. Even some analogue systems have fallen foul of the same trap; take the much-vaunted LaserDisk of the 1980s: granted the data on them was essentially analogue, but much like video or audio tape, if you lose the playback technology to time and history, you lose the data.

Wherefore now the great Domesday Project of that decade, which relied not only on the LaserDisk players themselves, but on a now obsolete computer and software, and much other ancillary media playback equipment and cables to access it in any meaningful way. Compare and contrast that with the original Domesday Book of 1086, and all written or printed volumes written since, even in microfilm and microfiche form. Despite the slightly alien form of the language in Domesday, it is still readable to this day, nearly a thousand years later. So that claim of ten-thousand year longevity for storage really needs putting into perspective, as the means of data retrieval at that kind of time distance will certainly not have survived, unless it has been enshrined and carefully maintained as a result of some arcane religious practice to ensure its upkeep - unlikely on many, many counts - and the data themselves, even if successfully accessed, will probably be indecipherable, anyway. Nice try, boys...