Vint Cerf, a pioneer of creating the Internet, has warned that data people have been saving on our computers could be lost forever. Currently serving as a Google vice-president, Cerf fears there could be little or no record of the 21st Century for future generations as we enter what he describes as a “digital Dark Age.”
In an interview with the BBC, Cerf suggests that information, including photos and documents, could be rendered inaccessible as hardware and software become obsolete.
Here, Cerf said: “I worry a great deal about that. We are experiencing things like this. Old formats of documents that we’ve created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed.”
“And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is.”
Cerf also made a presentation on the subject at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. To address the problem, Cerf is proposing that humankind preserves every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.
He explains: “The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future.”
Vinton Gray “Vint” Cerf is recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet”,[6] sharing this title with American engineer Bob Kahn. In the early 1980s, Cerf led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. He has been involved in Internet related technology ever since, and made headlines on Digital Journal when, along with rock star Peter Gabriel, he launched the “Interspecies Internet,” aimed at allowing animals to communicate with each other and with people on-line.
