Future Historians

[Demolition Squid]

So this story is pretty interesting.

Basically the vice president of google has said that, as programs to read files become obsolete, future historians will no longer be able to access documents we are storing electronically.

I lived with a historian at university and this seems fantastically naive to me. If the records still exist digitally somewhere, I imagine that future historians would learn to code new programs to access the old information rather than just let it sit there. People have rediscovered dead languages to interpret old records and such, so why wouldn't they go to similar lengths to access this information?

Especially since people are already thinking about this, I'm not sure the concern is worthwhile... but it is funny to think that in two or three hundred year's time we could have absolutely no idea how we got to where we are because the world seems to go 'stone tablets > paper records > ??? ??? ??? > Apple iBrain'. 

[Cain]

Ha!  Yeah.  Historians are all like "what's microfilm" and "this album is stored on a grammophone record, damn, that's just too bad" right now, so just imagine what will happen when they're confronted with a .doc document..

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Unless there is a fantastical upheaval resulting in a loss of electronic technology (not impossible), it's a fairly good bet that what will happen as time goes on will be exactly what happens now; legions of graduate students will transfer the archives to a newer format, and contained within the archives will be examples of the old technology.

[Faust]

This seems very odd to me, do they mean they wont be able to interface with older hardware, or that we wont understand file formats in the distant future.

The latter is ludicrous, as long as someone somewhere has kept a copy of the ascii table, all text docs would be simple to figure out. The only format I can see being a problem is video because I have video formats from within the time I started college that no longer have support in players I have.

If the former, then he is being very optimistic on the lifespan of magnetic disk platters, and flash memory, I intend to outlive 90% of the worlds hard drives and most of the flash memory. Let alone centuries down the line.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

I heard that flash memory could last a really long time