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From The Times

March 23, 2007

History 1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry

Ben Macintyre

We know what was written in the first telegram, sent by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844: “What hath God wrought?” We know the words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell when he made the first telephone call in 1876, to his assistant, Thomas Watson: “Mr Watson — come here — I want to see you.” (The “polite telephone manner” had not yet been invented.) But we have absolutely no idea what was said in the first e-mail, just 35 years ago.

The digital age brought with it the false promise that everything written, filmed, photographed or recorded might now be preserved, for ever. The “save” key would eliminate the need for filing and storage. Since 1945 we have gathered 100 times more information than in the whole of human history up until that point. Entire libraries could be preserved on disks that fitted into a pocket. Paper was dead.

It has not quite worked out that way. Digital information may be impossibly voluminous and convenient, but it is also vulnerable and dangerously disposable. Already a vast amount of information has been lost. CDs disintegrate in just 20 years, whereas the Domesday Book, written on sheepskin in 1086, will still be with us in another millennium. Few people still write regular letters, but their replacement, the ubiquitous e-mail, is so easily deleted and forgotten, to say nothing of the fleeting text message.

Technology has already left behind the forms of electronic storage once expected to be eternal: the laser disk, the 5¼in, the 3.5in floppy, the Amstrad all-in-one word processor have all been flung into obsolescence, often taking their information with them. Only a small fraction of government bodies and companies even bother to archive their digital material. Who, save the most fastidious self-chronicler, takes the trouble to embalm their own e-mails electronically? Historians of the future may look back on the 1980s and 1990s as a black hole in the collective memory, a time when the historical record thinned alarmingly owing to the pace of technological change. Future biographers may be reduced to trying to extract personality from whatever electronic fragments survive, cheque stubs and those few ritual moments (birth, death and overdraft) when a subject still puts pen to paper.

I have recently spent many hours in the National Archives, ferreting through the wartime records of MI5.

The sheer richness of written material is overwhelming: letters, memos, telephone transcripts, diaries, scribbled notes in the margins. You can smell the pipe smoke and personalities wafting off the pages.

When MI5’s current files are released decades hence, historians will have a far drier time of it. Electronic messages not deemed to be of “archival” value are routinely deleted by civil servants, simply as an insurance policy — significant or potentially damaging information is strictly verbal, particularly since Jo Moore’s attempt to “bury bad news” by e-mail.

Arguably, the most important and reliable real-time histories of places such as Iraq and Iran are currently being written on weblogs, the online journals and discussion forums that are, by definition, mutable and impermanent. A historian 50 years hence would probably get the most accurate picture of life in Baghdad today by collecting and studying the blogs of the moment, but it may already be too late. The average life expectancy of a website is about 44 days, roughly the same as the common house fly.

Just as importantly, by committing to erasable electronic memory the things we once committed to paper, we may be denying future generations the chance to witness the warp and weft of our lives. Our ancestors were writers and hoarders. I have a collection of my grandfather’s letters in the attic, describing the life of a sheep farmer in New South Wales in the 1930s. They are of interest, I suspect, to no one but me, but to me they are invaluable, a chronicle of where I come from. What will we bequeath to our grandchildren? At best a bunch of antiquated disks that they may well be unable to open and read.

Anyone (with a magnifying glass and patience) can read letters, but there is a real danger that technology will leave much of the electronically written record marooned and illegible. The BBC’s Doomsday Project of 1986, intended to record the economic, social and cultural state of Britain for all time, was recorded on two 12in videodisks. By 2000 it was obsolete, and rescued only thanks to a specialist team working with a single surviving laser disk player.

When Nasa sent two Viking Lander spacecraft to Mars in 1975, the data was carefully recorded on magnetic tape. Two decades later, no one could decode it. The original printouts had be tracked down, and typed out again on paper.

And that, ironic as it seems, may be the answer. The Digital Preservation Coalition, a group encouraging governments, businesses and individuals to curate and preserve electronic information, recently published a report stating that “storage of printed copies of important documents is generally accepted as a reasonably failsafe method of preservation”.

This, then, is a plea for paper. So long as it is stored properly and acid-free, paper endures. Leave the ephemera to the electronic ether, but if you value certain words and images, preserve them on paper. The “print” button is a more faithful saviour than the “save” button.

Before the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson sent his message to the fleet by raising flags using Sir Home Popham’s telegraphic code (a rather newfangled form of communication, which not everyone approved of) — whereupon the words were written down for posterity, on paper.

Today the same message would probably be sent by text — instant, easy, and instantly perishable: “UK xpx dat evry man wll do his duT.”

Mechanical and electronic methods of saving information all have their hazards. Paper etc. has to be both preservable and saved to avoid the Alexander Library fate, and constantly migrating data is a resource and logistical minefield. On balance, the plethora of electronic formats and the ever-changing software and hardware needed to keep retrieving electronic records is problematic, not necessarily invalid, compared to, say, copying to paper. The really difficult challenge, for all kinds of record, is to develop workable archival strategies for deciding what needs to be saved, providing the technical means and ensuring people know how to use them. That said, archival paper duplicates of electronic text are probably vital, regardless of what the IT industry might tell us. But what about data that is just that – data, not text or image, like moving images, or sound recordings? I wonder if anyone is making lots of black vinyl platter backups of all those interviews and phone taps?

Francis Good, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia

Even before electronic "records", libraries disposed of the actual copies of newspapers that were actually read, and kept microfiche copies of "cleaned up" versions after "mistakes" were printed.

If someone tried to alter written records, evidence was far more likely to remain. Falsehood is the stuff of politics and business.

Michael Moore
58 The Ridge, Marple, Stockport

Michael, Stockport, England

I prefer cd's to sheepskin as it is so hard to get the sheep to stand still and if its raining the ink runs. But seriously an orbital library of some sort of optical disk are really the only way to assure the preservation of knowledge in the face of terrestrial disasters; manmade or otherwise. A foundation to establish several high orbit satellites or even moonbased servers that can stream data back to earth would serve mankind well. Lots cheaper than a single nuclear bomb, but I haven't seen a single govenment step forward. No profit in it I guess.

Julie Townser, New Amsterdam, New York

I've been caught by this one myself. Years ago I began a novel on an Amstrad word processor and managed to get 200 pages done.

Unfortunately a number of house moves later and my paper copy was lost.

I recently had to throw away the tantalising discs with the novel on them as there was no way I could retrieve the information on them.

Michele, UK,

I bet this is the only e article printed off this year :)

Paul, Stafford, UK

Sorry Chris, you're not thinking at a low enough level. Whilst use of an international standard for structuring of documents will help to reconstruct a historical document from a bitstream, you still need to generate that bitstream from the storage medium. You suggest a gold surfaced DVD, but you still need an appropriate electro-mechanical device to retrieve the encoded bits from the DVD surface ie. a DVD player. There may be several hundred million of these in the world today, but in a thousand years time? And will the technology of that day be able to interface with a player, even if one can be found?

The author has a valid point about use of machine readable data formats being dangerous as they make the data only recoverable by machine, which is especially dangerous if this substitutes for a human readable historical record rather than complementing it.

Stephen, Brentwood, Essex

To Chris:

I guess you don't get it. The author is saying in a few years - probably less than 20, nothing will be able to read DVDs except the oldest equipment.

I'd have to agree with the author. I've got hundreds of files on storage of work, personal documents, from about 15 years ago .. all on 3 1/2 floppy disks. And I have no easy way of retrieving them, nor of even knowing if they still work - so essentially they are lost or at risk of being lost forever.

The same applies to current electronic media on hard disks. It's so easy to lose something, delete key or by mistake, that it's happened to me more than once. And I'm an IT professional.

Ash, London, Canada

Author should consider poor trees cut and made into paper just to satisfy his fancy of cigars and nostalgia. Importance of information is the criteria for its survival and not medium. Holocaust is not documented in Ghettos or camps but by memoirs and expereince. Similarly, Iraq/Iran or anything will be maintained. Also, maintaining heaps of information is helpful if we use it. Vietnam was documented in paper, did anyone bothered to read it and learnt something?

There is no point of maintaining histor if we dont want to learn anything. Humans are just destroying the planet earth.

Hemal Mehta, London,

Are you mad? Most companies spend a fortune converting digital information from one form of media to another - and generally the progresson has been to increasingly long lived media (a cd survives about a hundred times longer than a floppy for example - and modern cd's have a useable lifetime of well over 100 years - not sure where this 20 year figure comes from - perhaps someone got cd's confused with the mylar tape used in VHS ?).

Besides which, digital information can be quickly backed up and duplicated and transmitted to another storage device geographically far away, thus protecting digital information from fire and flood - the traditional bane of paper-based storage systems.

Still, I appreciate that researching articles is a tedious job and journalists would rather be down the pub. Never mind, eh?

Dougie, London,

My own family has lost key historical paper and photographic documents because they were thrown away by elderly relatives. If those had been in electronic form, then multiple copies of everything could have been distributed around the family. Libraries, offices and houses burn down and often take with them the only existing paper copy of something.

However there is a lot of truth in this article. Many people don't understand the need to back up or to migrate/convert information and they they don't think about it until too late.

I have lost personal letters that were on 3 inch Amstrad PCW disks, but only because when I converted everything else, I didn't think those letters were important enough to bother with. I still have all the important stuff from the last 20 years.

The key is to avoid complicated, proprietary formats from the likes of Microsoft. Store text in basic text format and images as TIFF or JPG. CDs and DVDs seem unreliable to me. So, make lots of copies.

Robert, Manchester,

This article only gives the worst-case scenario, ignoring the fact that some media continue to be saved and many paper records disintegrate. And do CDs really only last 20 years? When i bought my first music CDs in the mid 1980s, there were scare stories saying they would only last for 5-10 years. I think the reasoning was that the printing on the surface would corrode the media, but over 20 years later these CDs are still fine.

Austin, London,

Archives made onto digital media of any sort are only archives as long as you have the technology to read them. Think about the SCSI Syquest Drive and the Bernoulli disk, both stalwarts of the publishing and backup industries in the mid Nineties. Both are now extinct, and the disks and data on them all but buried. MIgrating old offline data to new media is every ten years is expensive and prone to data-loss.
The Zip drive and the floppy disk are two recent endangered species. You'll have problems finding the equipment to read them in 2017.

Paper has the sole advantage of being human-readable.

Sue Schofield, Winchester, UK

And just how many telephone calls have been 'preserved for posterity' since 1876? How many telegrams were preserved during the existence of that medium of communication? How many letters? Just how great a proportion of all the paperwork generated by MI5 during the war years actually made it into the national archives...? And so on... All of these forms of communication are ephemeral by their very nature. The Domesday Book is still with us not because it was 'written on sheepskin', but because it it an important historical document. It is the importance - or otherwise - of the message which determines its preservation, not the medium through which it is delivered.

DavidM, London, England

I agree with the article. The idea that records can be placed on some "golden" digital media is totally flawed. a) the technology that reads that media will not be around in 10 years never mind 1000 and worst of all the alternative b) needs constant management to keep it archived. The beauty of paper was it could be scooped into a box for 200 years and still be understood by any individual who found it, not an expert in OpenOffice version 4.7891/b released in 2067.

Tony, Newcastle,

I thoroughly agree with all that has been said here, and in my eleven years of family tree research have always kept paper copy as well as electronic. Three times i have had to revert to the paper in those eleven years because of computer crashes. So more filing cabinets and easy store boxes please -not jewel cases!

Wendy Skliros, Needham Market, Suffolk

Actually, companies do routinely archive all emails - they are a potentially valuable source of evidence in any future lawsuits there might be. Where money and lawyers are involved, you can be sure that they make sure that the archives are updated every time the storage technology changes. It's only the individual employees who carelessly discard email!

Those skilful conservators at the Fitzwilliam Museum, after gluing their Ming vases back together, last year held an exhibition of their art. It posed the tricky question of whether it is better to watch a painting slowly fade and fall to pieces, or to capture an eternally fixed copy that may right from the start throw away detail because of limited colour and spatial resolution.

Ian Kemmish, Biggleswade, UK

"the Domesday Book, written on sheepskin in 1086, will still be with us in another millennium"

Why use paper then?

Pete, Cov,

Undoubtedly this is a vital point. It was difficult to lose a library in the past but you could easily do so today. It is a further complication in a more complicated life. Your image of MI5 is quaint but I am not sure that it is accurate, since you might well suspect that those casual scribbles are substantially contrived. The concomitant point is that what now appears as the record is increasingly unreliable. ‘Sorry - but we have this alternative history that you might find useful’. Even the contemporary record is now immediately adaptable; not just the text, but both still and moving pictures. As someone said recently, I think, the truth no longer exists. But it must surely be that the most reliable record will be on paper - that can be dated.

Henry Percy, London, UK

Paper is not a failsafe and not necessary. Using open standards, such as ISO 26300 aka Open Document Format for office documents (native format of Sun's StarOffice among others), and regularly backing up and migrating your data, there is no reason why electronic files should not last through the millenia.

For those who want their records to survive ad infinitum, regularly make archival copies of the files onto high quality media e.g. gold based DVDs and deposit them with an archive.

Chris Puttick, Oxford,

"significant or potentially damaging information is strictly verbal"!

Something else important that seems to have slipped out of our knowledge is the meaning of the word "verbal" (viz. pertaining to words), being constantly confused with "oral" (pertaining to the mouth). The only two instances that seem to be remebered correctly by everyone being "verbal diarrhoea" and "oral sex".

Tim, Dinan,

Perhaps our digital information paradigm now mirrors more faithfully the temporal nature of human life. Increasingly, as pace of change accelerates, the past is seen as an irrelevance if not encumbrance.

Whilst this is bad for nostalgia and those who try to learn from history, it is more in keeping with the idea that nothing is for ever, baggage can be left behind, it’s possible to start over, and re-invention is a metaphor for renewal and re-birth.

Certainly records should be archived, if only to fill the boredom of a post-industrial, post modern world with opportunity to research the good old days and find out what made things tick. But there is a space and clutter problem, andt he loss of real clutter is seldom mourned, once it’s been replaced.

dr venables preller, Warminster, UK

Do you know what "verbal" means?
An email is verbal, if it uses words. So is a letter.

dave, reading,

Actually, I think Mr Holden has slightly misunderstood this part of the excellent article. The Data referred to was stored on magnetic tape on earth, but it has become extremely difficult to find a suitable mag tape unit and computer system able to read the tapes, and to prevent their decay.
Probably what Mr Holden was thinking of is the data sent in the form of a disk with the Voyager craft on its voyage to deep space. I seem to recall this was in the form of an old fashioned LP, with a symbolic set of instructions on how to build a mechanical player able to read it.

Michael, Wirral, UK

Agreed.
At the same time, an awful lot of rubbish is published on the web, which should rather better be forgotten and erased after 44 days. It is lucky that this rubbish is not put on paper, because it would deplete the planet's woods.

bill, Bristol, UK

I think it says alot about human arrogance that our brightest minds would send a format into space, expecting that the 'aliens' could decipher the information, when twenty years later we cannot?!!

Life happens so quickly now it has become a blur, and our thoughts and words have gone down the same route.

Whats to be done......

Will Holden, Dublin , Ireland

George Orwell warned us about this in his book "1984".

Why is everyone so surprised?

If you want to preserve history, carve it in rock or build it into a pyramid!

Joel, Sioux Falls, South Dakota

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Ben Macintyre

Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times and contributes a regular Friday column. His earlier roles at The Times include being editor of the Weekend Review, parliamentary sketchwriter and bureau chief in Washington and Paris. He has also published a number of historical non-fiction books