I read with interest the story that the father of the internet fears we could lose our files, pictures and documents as software/hardware moves on. I bet not many of us here with the exception of the amateur photographers have many real photographs. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31450389
I am not quite sure what this chap is getting at to be honest, surely new software and hardware will remain compatible with earlier versions as time moves on.
Well yes it can be. It depends on how important they view those pictures, files etc. It's do-able but depends how inclined they are. Anything in IT is do-qble. Well maybe not an NHS IT implementation
Just to be clear, the internet existed long before the world wide web (www) this guy was one of the REAL pioneers, he was around when TCP/IP was being invented, that's the protocol stack that almost all modern communications is based on, he was around when SLIP was a common way to connect and UUCP was the way you moved stuff from one machine to another (without TCP/IP). What most of you think is the internet (not you Halo I know you know this stuff) is just one simple protocol HTTP, you see it as www or WWW the world wide web, but that was only a small part of the internet in the old days, Tim Berners-Lee was the father of what most people think the internet is, but that was only HTTP, the Internet is much much more than that. The Internet as such was invented in the 1970's in fact the first message sent on ARPANET was in 1969, ARPANET used TCP/IP as it evolved and it lasted for 20 odd years even as the internet itself expanded. I remember the first time I connected to the current Internet via a terminal back in 1990 using a 2400 baud modem with a custom 9600 baud protocol that some BB's supported (BB = bulletin board just like us now) , years and years before browsers, it was amazing, I was able to get a terminal session to NASA, if I remember right I was using a gateway on CIX, it was amazing and really really hard, you don't know how easy you have it these days WordStar anyone? Not sure if anything opens WordStar documents any more and I can't remember if it was a complex or simple file format? I have a shed load of tapes and disks from way back that are intrinsically unreadable because the tape drive hardware and protocols they used no longer exist, I have Iomega Zip disks that nothing could read now. He is right, even in the last twenty years we have lost vast amounts of history and we will lose more and more as time goes by. Digital Dark Age! Totally Agree!
