Saturday, November 18, 2006
No Pictures, No Memories, No History
Wink: If you want to have the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.
This topic caught my attention when one of the veterans (Mr. Black) commented on November 11 that future generations may not have any preserved history.
I am one that loves modern technology and all it offers having spent far too much time with computers and as many digital products as I can afford.
Our family memories consist of old snap shots, lots of 35mm slides and other paper bits and pieces. In fact I even scanned all of those and put everything on CD or DVD so they will last forever. I changed over to digital media to ensure more recent events will be recorded forever as well. Forever? Maybe not.
The gentleman said: "Today's cutting-edge technology can become tomorrow's junk. To preserve it, you still need it on paper."
Can that be so? Look at what has happened to reel to reel tapes, vinyl records, cassettes, cds and now there is talk DVDs will be replaced by solid state memory chips. Will someone keep transferring those scanned and digital images to the new medium every so often? Likely not.
What about documents that were saved on the old 5.25 inch floppies, the 3.5 "micro" floppies, the zip disks, and to the present day cds/dvds? A lot of those are inaccessible to many these days.
One final thought. Most correspondence, congratulations and like greetings are passed on by email today, especially by those that are separated because their jobs take them to far away places. Both live picture and words are instant communication today and who would give that up? But it is all gone forever in seconds with the touch of the delete key.
Who bothers to save email, or an instant messenger message both in our personal and our business lives? Not many.
No Pictures, No Memories, No History!
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
This topic caught my attention when one of the veterans (Mr. Black) commented on November 11 that future generations may not have any preserved history.
I am one that loves modern technology and all it offers having spent far too much time with computers and as many digital products as I can afford.
Our family memories consist of old snap shots, lots of 35mm slides and other paper bits and pieces. In fact I even scanned all of those and put everything on CD or DVD so they will last forever. I changed over to digital media to ensure more recent events will be recorded forever as well. Forever? Maybe not.
The gentleman said: "Today's cutting-edge technology can become tomorrow's junk. To preserve it, you still need it on paper."
Can that be so? Look at what has happened to reel to reel tapes, vinyl records, cassettes, cds and now there is talk DVDs will be replaced by solid state memory chips. Will someone keep transferring those scanned and digital images to the new medium every so often? Likely not.
What about documents that were saved on the old 5.25 inch floppies, the 3.5 "micro" floppies, the zip disks, and to the present day cds/dvds? A lot of those are inaccessible to many these days.
One final thought. Most correspondence, congratulations and like greetings are passed on by email today, especially by those that are separated because their jobs take them to far away places. Both live picture and words are instant communication today and who would give that up? But it is all gone forever in seconds with the touch of the delete key.
Who bothers to save email, or an instant messenger message both in our personal and our business lives? Not many.
No Pictures, No Memories, No History!
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
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