Forever

 

What would we do without the computer? When I was young no such thing existed and all its benefits were not only unknown, but difficult to imagine.ⁱ Apart from all the information it could produce and all the skills that it would impart to us, who could have predicted that it would allow us to go paperless?

Everything we produce can now be maintained without our printing it out, saving forestsⁱⁱ outside, and storage space within. What could be better? It's a win-win for the environment and for us. Paper, which used to be expensive, may no be longer so, but since it's unnecessary that is not a relevant point. And since printing documents can take place whenever they are needed, the value of this medium is unarguable. Saving the same information digitally, and making “hard” copies only when they are absolutely necessary, lessens the need both for paper and storage space, but doesn't eliminate the possibility of doing so if printed versions are required.

At least that's what I used to think.

Then we changed word processors, storage media, and computers. The rapidity of change was really impressive.ⁱⁱⁱ And now I have stacks of diskettes I can't read with documents I can only vaguely remember. Even having spent large sums on external drives to help me access the disks, I find out that the word processor I'm using now can't translate most of them. I'm reluctant to throw the diskettes out but I know rationally that they're useless and I'll never see their contents again. They remind me of the audio cassettes that are sitting around my house even though I know I'll never listen to them again. And I have to admit that I have some reel-to-reel tapes which predate the cassettes.

Even the hard disks on outdated computers are, at best, difficult to use. I've removed them from their old housings and purchased drives which allow me to read them, but here, too, I'm faced with the problem of word processing programs which are unrecognizable and other programs which my newer computers can't operate. DOS no longer rules the roost and all the work I did using DOS programs is, for all practical purposes, lost. And the same will be true of whatever operating systems, programs, and media I'm using now.^iv Unless, of course, I print out everything of importance to me and file it away. Then I can retype it or copy it if absolutely necessary. It's possible that it will yellow over the years,^v but with reasonable care I should be left with some kind of paper trail. Not so with one of my computer hard disks which failed, and which my local repair shop was unable to recover. They suggested I get a new machine, which I did. But the documents on the previous one – at least those documents I had not backed up – are lost forever.

It's not a new problem. In my attic are 16 millimeter movies that my father made when I was young.^vi And vinyl recordings etched by a machine we no longer have – recordings made using sharp steel needles. On them are the sounds I made and the words I spoke in the 1940s. But I'd need a 78 RPM record player to listen to them, and who has one of them now.^vii Nor do I have a 16 mm projector to show the movies. Even 8 mm movies are no longer used.

More recently there have been, among other rivalries, the competition between Beta and VHS and between eight track and cassette tapes, the end of film cameras and slide projectors, the gradual disappearance of land telephone lines including dial-up connections for computers, generation after generation of mobile telephones, and a wide variety of hand held devices, from calculators and little computers to book readers. And whatever you have – even if you got it today – is outdated.

I don't mean to suggest that progress is bad. I'm not a Luddite. But if I've learned one thing over the years it's that such progress will continue,^viii often beyond my ability to use it, and certainly beyond the ability to use whatever it replaced. And the same is probably true for you. So make hard copies of whatever is important. And back up whatever you have as soon as the technology changes in the newer format, before the ability to do so is eliminated as an option. And it will be. Manufacturers have to stay ahead of the competition. And it's too expensive for them to try to preserve everything.

Next episode: “God, save our flight!” – The Religion Of Atheism

i     A secret code ring was all you needed to stay ahead of your friends.

ii    And their eco-systems.

iii    Although computers have been around a long time, the introduction of IBM's PC in 1981 was the real start of the movement from the perspective of the consumer. Now there are computer applications in almost every field, and a variety of hand-held devices of all sorts that are carried around by most of the American population and numerous people elsewhere. All this in thirty years.

iv    CDs are unlikely to be around much longer.

v     And the problem of storage space will return.

vi    There were also commercially-made cartoons. I don't know where they are.

vii    In fact all record players are on the way out. There are units that will digitize your recordings and put them on your computer. There are also gizmos that you can use to digitize your negatives and slides so you can upload them. But that will probably take more time than it's worth.

viii    The more things change, the more money you can make by ensuring that they're not backward compatible.