Tech Jawa > The Digital Dark Age: No Escape

Warning: This is something I’ve personally wanted to write about for a while now, just for my own thoughts on the matter to be documented, it’s not meant to be an interesting or informative read, however it may be to some…

The Digital Dark Age according wo Wikipedia is a point in time when it will become impossible to read historical old data, because they have been stored in an obsolete digital format.

Now to me, this includes both file formats, and physical media.
Some things on my mind about this topic are:

Hard Disk Drives are one their way out, Solid State Drives are making their amazing entrance into the world of computing, and will soon drive conventional HDDs out of existence and manufacturing. Sure, alot of SSDs are new, small capacity, and expensive, but give it some time and they will undoubtedly be the norm.

Think as far back as you can, about what portable data was stored on. Most of you are thinking of a Floppy Disk I’m sure, in one size or another. Even further back than that, was analog tapes, similar to those we all used to listen to music on before compact discs. Clearly nobody uses tapes anymore, and it’s quite the treasure to find a PC with a floppy drive in it. Hell, with the advent of the X58 motherboards (for Intel’s Core i7 processor) I don’t think any of them even have the cable channels for floppy disk drives anymore. One example of this I can give is at my place of work, we have a ton of tapes just laying around, nobody willing to throw them away because they contained our backups at some point. However, they simply can’t be used anymore, no modern day PC, with any modern operating system can even support a real tape drive, let alone finding the drivers for it would be a puzzling effort. Even if drives and tapes were found, and were hooked to a compatible PC, the chances of the data being 100% intact are wretched, so say the least. The old analog medium just won’t hold up well over time.

Now, taking it into a new court here. 16-bit file’s just aren’t compatible anymore. Everybody today is surely away of the x86 (32-bit) and the x64 (64-bit) standoff, where everybody’s trying to move towards 64-bit, but older systems just aren’t compatible, and the final switch can’t really truly be made just yet. Well the switch away from 16-bit has already happened. There are some Windows programs out there that simply won’t run anymore because they are 16-bit, and were never designed for modern-day hardware. I’ve actually run into this problem a few times myself.

Now lets take that thought a step further, into the file format realm of things. Imagine in today’s world, where we already cannot run 16-bit programs. What if Adobe Reader was a 16-bit program, and PDF’s weren’t actively being developed anymore, but a company had TONS of them as old records. There would literally be no way to open them on a modern system. This scenario is inevitable in the future, with 64, and 128 bit systems to undoubtedly become the norm in computing, old 32-bit applications that used to open, read, edit, and save our records simply will cease to function…