Sometimes archeologists find ancient inscriptions on tablets, walls, leather, etc. written in languages that are long lost. Researchers try to decipher those unknown symbols and peek into the past – the lives and events of people who once thrived on the Earth.
Old documents, letters, pictures, and cards from a few generations back bring up history and nostalgia. We can touch them, and view them. But now we have arrived at a digital age. We no longer write on paper, we write on computers, tablets, and smartphones. Our writings are preserved in electronic form on storage devices that can’t be accessed without using proper gadgets. Sometimes they are stored in the cloud – in data centers somewhere in the world that we don’t even know. Our greeting cards and pictures have all become digital. We view them on electronic screens and send or receive them over the Internet. Of course, these developments have enormous benefits.
Take the example of letters. Even with today’s fast transportation by aircraft, a letter to a loved one living in a distant country will still take several days to reach. But an email reaches almost instantly. However, there is a trade-off. Consider this scenario in the future: a girl is reminiscing about her grandfather and telling a friend how knowledgeable and humorous, he was. Unlike our times she can’t show her friend his handwritten letters. Instead, she shows her his emails. But those are just typed words. They lack the uniqueness of handwritten letters – everyone’s grandfather’s emails would look alike, and some could even be composed by AI. The digital future will have to let go of personal touch and authenticity.
Technology is fast changing and new technology is quickly becoming obsolete. In the last few decades, storage technology has evolved from tapes to discs to SSDs. Retrieving data from each type of storage requires specific devices. A cassette tape can’t be played on a CD player and an SSD can’t be run without a computer.
Invented in 1971, floppy disks, a portable storage device, were essential equipment for computer users. However, with the arrival of external hard drives and USB flash drives, they have become extinct. Today, young people may not even recognize them and the old floppy disks can’t be accessed either, because the disk drives required to read them are nowhere to be found. This has happened only in a time gap of around half a century.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on April 06, 2024. Please read the full article here or here.