Google's Vint Cerf (Photo : www.theguardian.com)
American Internet Pioneer and one of "the fathers of the Internet," Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf, warns the modern society about the Digital Dark Age or the forgotten century. Most of what we have now are digitized, from documents, images, photos, videos, audios, emails, to legal documents, these may soon be useless since the programs needed to access them will be defunct.
Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in San Jose, California, that we are to face the forgotten century or the forgotten generation, where old computer files become obsolete and useless, The Guardian reported.
Cerf asked for the development of "digital vellum" where old hardwares and softwares can be preserved so that obsolete files can still be recovered no matter how old they are.
"We don't want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future," Cerf stated.
Cert made his comments at the Science conference in San Jose, California.
The internet pioneer legend wanted to promote his idea of preserving every digital data, software, and hardware so that it will never be obsolete. The same idea of a museum preserving ancient artifacts, but his concept is in digital form in the "cloud," according to BBC News.
The "digital vellum" concept was demonstrated by Mahadev Satyanarayanan at Carnegie Mellon University. If Cerf's idea works out, people will be saving memories and will be accessible in the generations to come.
