Vint Cerf: old digital documents are lost

Old digital documents are at risk of being lost because they are stored on hardware and in formats that will soon become unreadable. Vint Cerf, inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, warns against this. “We’re throwing our information into a black hole,” Cerf said.

The tcp/ip creator warned about this during a meeting of American scientists, writes The Guardian. Humans’ first steps in the digital world could be lost, warns the computer scientist.

According to the scientist, a large part of digital history can be lost. “If we want to preserve them, we need to ensure that the digital objects we create can still be accessed in the distant future,” Cerf said.

An example of documents that have become difficult to open are files stored on floppy disks or tape files. Cassette tapes from the seventies and eighties in particular are now difficult to open, because the equipment required for this is now scarce. Also, music, videos and documents would be stored in files that are not necessarily future-proof.