USELESS in a few years

By Even Gran
Illustration: NTNU INFO/Even Gran

Cuneiform writing on 3 800 year-old stone tablets from Mesopotamia can still be read; so can sections of the Hebrew Bible on the approximately 2 000 year-old Dead Sea Scrolls. But as we get closer to our own era, it seems that methods of storing information are becoming more and more short-lived. In 100 years' time you will still be able to play a long-playing record, whereas the contents of contemporary CDs will have been lost long ago.

CD-information is burnt into metal. Even though the metal is encased in plastic, small amounts of air and moisture will seep in over time, so that the metal will begin to corrode. After 25 to 30 years, depending on storage temperature and air humidity, CDs will no longer be playable.

Hard disks are no better. After 10 to 20 years they can no longer be read; by that time their magnetic fields will have become corrupted or demagnetized.

Unintelligible formats

In addition to this, digital storage has another major problem: the extremely rapid development in file formats and hardware. In the 60s and 70s many computer programs were stored on punch cards. The punch cards are still available, but the computers which could read them have long since been discarded. The file formats that were used by these machines are unintelligible to modern computers. It is therefore very unsure whether today's file formats will be readable on computers in 30 years from now, especially if developments continue at the same pace that they have since the 60s and 70s.

What can be done?

Problems relating to the storage of CDs, and to unintelligible file formats, have long been a pressing concern for Professor Kjell Bratbergsengen at the Department of Computer and Information Science at NTNU. He thinks that we are facing a formidable future problem, one which will need enormous amounts of time and resources to solve. He suggests two possible ways of solving the problem of constantly changing file formats:

­ Either all new software must be designed in such a way as to be able to read all old file formats (backwards compatibility), or we have to convert old files into new ones the minute a new version is on the market. Bratbergsengen has more confidence in upgrading old file formats systematically, than in storing all new software on backwards compatible systems.

­ Backwards compatibility will give us endless chains of old formats which it will be hard to keep track of, he says.

But even if systematic conversion programs become available, he believes that large amounts of information will be lost. This applies in particular to information which is closely linked to special types of software and which must be run on special platforms such as Windows 95.

He is less certain about the direction new developments in music CDs will take.

­ Many things suggest that creative works which are preserved in a digital format, such as CD-music, will be stored on central servers for downloading via the Internet to those who pay for it. This means that it will not be necessary for each individual to have his/her own physical copy.

However, he points to what might become a delicate legal problem within a few years:

­ As people's private CD-collections begin to degrade over the next 5 to 10 years, claims for new copies of the music will probably arise. This, he reasons, might precipitate an interesting legal battle about who owns the copyright to digitally stored creative works.

Contact at NTNU: Kjell Bratbergsengen
Tel.: + 47 73 59 34 39
E-mail: Kjell.Bratbergsengen@idi.ntnu.no