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Data extinction

A great article by MIT Tech, which looks at work being done to combat data extinction – you know, when you suddenly discover that no players now exist to let you access your old archive of 8 track music cassettes or Betamax movies.

‘But digital things, be they documents, photographs or video, are all created in a language meant for a specific piece of hardware; and neither computer languages nor machines age well….without some sort of digital resuscitation, every application�from the original binary codes written in the 1940s to WordPerfect to the latest million-dollar database application�eventually stops working, and every data file eventually becomes unreadable. Every application and every file.’

Hugely important topic. [via Techdirt]

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