TITLE: Looking Backward and Forward
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 11, 2015  2:59 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:

Jon Udell looks forward to a time when looking backward
digitally requires
<A HREF="http://blog.jonudell.net/2015/12/09/faithful-reanimation-of-born-digital-artifacts/">
   faithful reanimation of born-digital artifacts</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Much of our culture heritage -- our words, our still and
 moving pictures, our sounds, our data -- is born digital.
 Soon almost everything will be.  It won't be enough to
 archive our digital artifacts.  We'll also need to
 archive the software that accesses and renders them.  And
 we'll need systems that retrieve and animate that software
 so it, in turn, can retrieve and animate the data.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

We already face this challenge.  My hard drive is littered by
files I have a hard time opening, if I am able to at all.

Tim Bray reminds us that many of those "born-digital" artifacts
will probably live on someone else's computer, including ones
owned by his employer, as computing
<A HREF="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/12/01/One-Amazon-Year">
   moves to a utility model</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Yeah, computing is moving to a utility model.  Yeah, you
 can do all sorts of things in a public cloud that are too
 hard or too expensive in your own computer room.  Yeah,
 the public-cloud operators are going to provide way better
 up-time, security, and distribution than you can build
 yourself.  And yeah, there was a Tuesday in last week.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I still prefer to have original versions of my documents live
on my hardware, even when using a cloud service.  Maybe one
day I'll be less skeptical, when it really is as unremarkable
as Tuesday next week.  But then, plain text still seems to me
to be the safest way to store most data, so what do I know?
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