Illusion of permanence

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When people donate their life’s work to Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center to be preserved alongside Martin Luther King Jr’s letters or Bette Davis’s scrapbooks, director Vita Paladino has one request: Print out the e-mails. It’s the ultimate irony of a digital world.

Cuneiform tablets, the Dead Sea scrolls, and books can still be deciphered after centuries, but the cassette tapes, Atari game cartridges, laser discs, 78s, and floppy disks of the modern age, hold information that has already become virtually irretrievable.

Digital files decay over time. A typical low-cost hard drive lasts five years. While CD’s and DVD’s haven’t been around long enough to know whether they will in fact last a century, some studies indicate they may last only 20 years. “Who knows how long they’re going to last how much time before the information on a zip disk just goes into heaven, cyberspace heaven,” said Paladino, who recently was shipping out a box of Betamax tapes of the television show Adam Smith’s Money World, to be converted into a more usable format.

And bits written on a disk that do survive completely intact face a far bigger obstacle. The fast pace of technology innovation suggests it’s unlikely that people will have the equipment to read media or the software to understand the file format in a decade, much less in a century. “In 20 years, today’s CD players won’t exist — the same thing we’ve seen with floppy drives,” said Michael Kilian, distinguished engineer at the Hopkinton storage company EMC Corp. “In some drawer I have an eight-inch floppy; they still flop. Those are useless...”