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rfmcdonaldAt least partly for personal reasons, I've always been interested in libraries and archives: their archiving of the past is something I adore. I blogged about this allegiance of mine fairly extensively at History and Futility, talking about the romance of the old media formats, the usefulness of libraries as prosthetic memories, and the emotional incentives that I feel, at least, encourage the preservation. This cluster of posts connects to the theme of an old 2009 post on the potential joys of steampunk: the sorts of analog information storage technologies that a steampunk-type society back in the 19th century would have possessed could have saved so much of that past for us.
Me, I have almost everything saved. My school notes are neatly boxed up on Prince Edward Island, thanks to my mother; all of my university notes are saved, notwithstanding the issues with Microsoft Works which force me to use an imperfect reader; all my E-mails going back to the first ones in 1997 have been archived in multiple places, likewise my chats; all my photos are backed up; all my writings are backed up; et cetera. I missed a lot of the world, and I don't wish to lose anything else.
What do I wish I still had? I wish that my old Commodore 64 5-1/2 inch floppies had been archived somehow. After two decades random magnetic fluxes and dust have probably erased these disks, but I had a lot of stuff on them, materials I'd produced on my first computer, things like early stories and school essays and so on. Having those files available, and readable, would have been nice.
And you? What have you archived? What do you wish you had archived?
Discuss.
One of the things that I liked most about Alistair Reynolds' hard SF space opera/alternate history wonderfully crowded Century Rain was the way it made me realize that records contain data, a phonograph cylinder no differently from a LP no differently from a Commodore 64 Datasette. It's all data, just stored at varying densities and to varying degrees of fidelity and with varying degrees of retrievability.
We live in an information culture; they lived in an information culture. One thing that still fascinates me about Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet is the way the telegraph fostered a culture of its own despite its very low bandwidth. It also frustrates me how, despite the many conceivable uses of Babbbage's famous difference engine, they never were built and they were never linked together with the telegraph. A fully-fledged Victorian Internet formed nearly a century and a half before the one we use: How cool would that be? How much would have been changed? (Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine is probably a good first approximation.) How much irreplaceable data that we've lost irretrievably--turn-of-the-century Parisian opera, say, or African-American folk songs--would be intact?
Me, I have almost everything saved. My school notes are neatly boxed up on Prince Edward Island, thanks to my mother; all of my university notes are saved, notwithstanding the issues with Microsoft Works which force me to use an imperfect reader; all my E-mails going back to the first ones in 1997 have been archived in multiple places, likewise my chats; all my photos are backed up; all my writings are backed up; et cetera. I missed a lot of the world, and I don't wish to lose anything else.
What do I wish I still had? I wish that my old Commodore 64 5-1/2 inch floppies had been archived somehow. After two decades random magnetic fluxes and dust have probably erased these disks, but I had a lot of stuff on them, materials I'd produced on my first computer, things like early stories and school essays and so on. Having those files available, and readable, would have been nice.
And you? What have you archived? What do you wish you had archived?
Discuss.
