MIND THE GAP

The digital gap, that is.
Think I'm right in saying that I glimpsed a computer for the very first time in the mid-1970s. It was called a PAL (or was it PET?), had a tiny screen to run an accounting package, and was being demonstrated in a shop in Prince of Wales Road, Norwich. A decade later I assembled my first computer, a Commodore 64 keyboard with separate hard drive, floppy thingy, and a printer, and all the rest of the gubbins, which ran via a tangled mass of cables through a TV screen. You had to enter a code to do anything. But no matter, I wrote two books on it. Then came Amstrad (marvellous - writing software at last!) followed by Windows. And the rest was history, as they say.
In the early days there was much boastful talk of the Eldorado of a 'paper-free office,' something mentioned a lot less nowadays because (a) the amount of paper in general seems to have quadrupled, and (b) most people want anything important printed and stored on paper, anyway. Which brings me to the nub of the problem: the long-term storage of information and images.
Some years ago I was a member of a small group which set up an archive society to collect and keep safe as much as it could about the history of our village. It progressed significantly but slowly, many village people being understandably reluctant to relinquish their hold on old and treasured family photographs and ephemera.
So we started a secondary scheme: lend us your stuff and we will make copies of it and then return the originals, with grateful thanks. This was slightly more successful, but it promptly threw up a problem of its own. How do you store this sort of material?
No problem, said the technos (of which I was not one). We'll scan it and digitalise it and store it on floppies, or CD disks, or in the clouds, or whatever. Another group, including myself, went in the opposite direction by suggesting paper copies and filing cabinets. It became a difficult problem to resolve, and it led to prolonged debates. In the end the technos did their thing and the rest of us filed our piles of paper.
My reservations about digital storage centered then, and still do, around the speed at which technology changes and how quickly bits of kit go out of fashion or are replaced by something new. For example, anyone with important material still stored on floppy disks now faces a real problem in retrieving it. Yet this is after the passage of only a few decades. The same goes for laser disks and CDRs and hard drives and recording and video tapes. No doubt it will soon be a similar case with DVDs and suchlike. One day, perhaps, the shadow of progress may even disperse the clouds.
My point is that information technology, and thus the recording of information, changes so quickly that no one piece of kit can be taken for granted or trusted for any length of time. Not for more than a year or two, anyway. Thus in future years (or future centuries) historians and researchers may struggle to source the nitty-gritty of today's bits and pieces. After all, who writes letters any more, or keeps them? Will today's email exchanges be available to researchers in a hundred years' time? In 50 years' time, will anyone actually be able to see granny's photos, once so lovingly and carefully copied and thoughtfully stored on CDs? Will there be any CDs?
If we are not careful a yawning digital/techno archival gap may well open up, putting the history of our time at risk. So for the moment, I'm still advocating printed copies and filing cabinets. Unless someone comes up with a better idea, of course.