Ah, the importance of hard copy…
I forsee a future where small legions of knowledge-guardians, like mad priests or wise old men in caves, stoop over cobbled together PCs running off of rusting generators, print bits of the internet off using dot-matrix printers, pulling their material from incomplete backups, to be dissemated to the local population. I really do.
*snip*
…
Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity’s knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?
…
Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge – tech – 02 February 2010 – New Scientist.
via booklifenow
