Perhaps he did not envisage the speed technology would move on or the way people would utilise the service but either way he and others unleashed a monster. Whether it will ultimately be a friendly monster or not remains to be seen. But with hard copy books being discarded in favour of Kindle reading, photograph albums becoming a thing of the past, newspapers struggling to survive offline, emails flying out each minute and authorities storing information on computers with no hard copy back up technology is mapping our lives in a way that could be problematic If the plug is pulled in old programs used to access information online, and doing so becomes impossible, how will future generations even glimpse life today? Prior the 20th century information and images were laboriously recorded by hand. That system had problems including time, cost and reliability but enough of the end product survived for future generations to view. The 21st Century could become a 'forgotten century'. Information may be stored but access could be impossible. Cerf pushed for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are.
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