For all the computing power available today, it’s ironic that the ability to archive information for the long term was accomplished better at the advent of the printing age hundreds of years ago than it is today. I’m discovering, and perhaps you are too, that there are some real downsides to our fast-moving technology.

Recently, I was digging through my old article archives and I had an interesting revelation. The real Circuit Cellar at my house is the ultimate archive (some affectionately call it the museum). It’s truly not as messy as I humorously alluded, but it is definitely full of history since the hardware on the shelves spans 40 years of technology. The last time I was digging through some of the piles I even found a couple 8008 processors along with some Raytheon CK722 transistors from the late ’60s. More importantly, I actually discovered an original printed 8008 processor manual in the pile.

As for the old articles, they were all in file folders that contained the printed manuscripts, 35-mm picture slides, BYTE author proofs, and the original Word Star files on 5² or 8² floppy disks. Interestingly, I also found the folder for the first issue of Circuit Cellar back in 1987, and it was a similar story. The folder contained a few floppy disks (I haven’t a clue which word processor it was), some slides, and a pile of printed article proofs. The irony of all of this is that while the history of my endeavors are always tuned to presenting the latest technology, today I have to actually use the oldest and least sophisticated technology if I want to see what I said back then. I have no computer or software system in the Circuit Cellar that can read these old disks.

In fact, if I hadn’t already transferred things to newer-generation storage, apparently I wouldn’t be able to electronically view any original medium much more than about 10 years old. If it weren’t for the printed magazines and developed photographs in these folders, it would all be useless landfill.

Digital archiving is a complex process and a significant problem. It’s one thing to save the physical disks, tapes, and drives that hold your data, but you also need to make sure those media are compatible with the hardware and the software of the future in order to recover them. Unlike raw language on a simple piece of paper that requires only raw intelligence to decipher, digital stuff is always encoded and formatted such that both media-specific hardware and unique decoding software are necessary to render it in a form that we can see. If the hardware to read it or the software to decrypt it becomes obsolete, we’re in a whole lot of trouble.

Media obsolescence isn’t a new phenomenon. It just seems that the changes from an analog to a digital world have made extending the life of an archive into an exceedingly more complex problem. Throughout the past, preserving information for posterity was simply a matter of physical storage—stashing photographs and printed documents in a secure place. As we have evolved to a digital life, where incompatible coding from generation to generation seems to be the norm rather than the exception, long-term non-obsolescent data retention requires us to keep massaging the old data into each new technology. Unless someone invents the ultimate hardware/software emulator, people better be shrink-wrapping laser disk players, old PCs, CD players, and whatever for future use if they aren’t converting files and restoring them periodically. That, or throw it all away when the old hardware deep-sixes itself.

The problem is even greater in business and government. Historically, these entities have created vast paper trails memorializing everything from orders for paper clips to specification documents on every item in the inventory and even the menus served at board meetings. In the 1980s, computers replaced typing pools and file clerks. Carbon copies were gradually replaced by perishable e-mails, cryptic PowerPoint slides, and transient web sites that could be deleted instantly. Worse yet, think about schematic programs and CAD systems. Are you still using the same programs you used 10 years ago, or are the files from those older programs compatible with the ones you use today? It’s one thing to update files from old piles of PC floppies to a DVD. It’s quite another to make sure that you can even print the schematic of a design you did 10 years ago with today’s software.

I don’t have a good answer for this dilemma other than to say that we may be a generation with no history to share with future generations if we don’t solve it. Our history will simply evaporate. Apparently, we don’t care about the hundred laser disks we discard when purchasing a new networked HDTV system because we either purchase the same movies again on DVD or “subscribe” to a commercial audio/video provider who maintains the real audio/movie/TV archive and simply transmits these materials in a format compatible with our latest hardware iteration. And, I suppose we don’t care about finding a 10-year-old schematic because the hardware is already obsolete.

If I sold CD-ROMs for a living, I’d be pointing out the availability of gold-plated CD-ROMs that guarantee a 25-year retention rather than describing all this doom and gloom. Of course, no one can guarantee that we’ll even have a CD-ROM reader on any computer 25 years from now any more than he could have predicted 8-GB USB flash drives half the size of a car key 10 years ago. It’s pretty much safe to say that storage technology, and the necessity to keep moving archives to updated media, will remain dynamic. The bad news is that unless we eventually have some nonproprietary formats that everyone uses or can emulate all past data coding formats, we’re still destined to lose most of it to obsolete software.

In the meantime, here at Circuit Cellar, we’ll just keep plugging along with one foot in each world. For the people who think that reading Circuit Cellar on their cell phone display is fun, we’ll continue to have an electronic version. For the rest of us who like the idea that someone might look at a printed copy of Circuit Cellar 200 years from now and know exactly who we are, we’ll stick with some paper and ink, too.