Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

I expect this to also mark the beginning of what will in the future be seen as a hole in history: a time when software was downloaded on demand, and consequently lost to time, because companies were too ephemeral, and the software bits too centralized, to survive through redundant copies.

View on HN

I don't think the lack of optical or hard disk storage started the hole in history. Rather, perhaps IBM did when it invented the hard drive in the 1950s. Or maybe it was as early as Edison's phonograph in the 1870s. Whenever artifacts started requiring technology to interpret them (external dependencies, if you will) is when this hole in human history really began.

Perhaps future generations will see the digital revolution as a time of strictly furthering the bottom-line; a time when it became prohibitively expensive to print most data. Yet currently, we call this "being green."

How will future generations perceive this period in history?

Unlikely - I had 4 year old cds that I couldn't read because they had degraded too much.

So this is already an issue.

But not everyone keeps all their old software on the original CDs. This is the point: the decentralization of the distribution mechanism meant that everybody was free to use different methods of storing them. Even if everybody was restricted to keeping stuff on the original CDs, the chances of all CDs failing is a lot lower than any single one failing.

FWIW, I don't have any CDs (including cheap CD-Rs burnt over 12 years ago) that I can no longer read in any CD drive; some aren't readable by some drives, but they are readable by other drives. But I've since moved the small amount of data on them (and it is small, by today's measurements) to my file server, which is both RAIDZ and backed up remotely.

An interesting point. Although CDs are not archival media.

The old ones were. It seems the industry migrated to cheaper materials with time, or something with similar effect happened... I have problems reading some 2 year-old CD now, but a stack of disks from random newspapers from 1996 is working perfectly fine (found a big pile just a week ago).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com