Old Goats

The co-founder of the Internet warns that your grandchildren might not be able to see any photos of you.

I met Vint Cerf through my wife, Emily, who booked him in 2014 on “The Colbert Report.” Born in California and trained at Stanford, Cerf and his colleague, Robert Kahn, played the key roles at Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)  in developing the Internet and Internet-related technologies that made the advent of the World Wide Web possible. In 2005, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and joined Google, where he serves as VP and Chief Internet Evangelist.

JON:

You gave a TEDx talk about what you call “the digital dark ages” but could you briefly lay out the problem and the need for what you call “digital vellum”? (Vellum is fine parchment made from calfskin that lasts for millennia).

VINT CERF:

The problem breaks out in several different dimensions. One of them is very physical. We have a variety of digital storage devices we invented over the years. There’s the five-and-a quarter inch floppy and the three-and-a-half inch floppy. There’s the disk drives, the CDs, the DVDs, external disks, memory sticks. The problem is that none of it lasts forever, certainly not as long as vellum does. And eventually, the machines that can interact with those devices stop working, or they’re in the Smithsonian. So if you don’t copy digital content from one medium to another, it may just disappear—either because bits go away, which can happen, or, like magnetic tape, eventually they deteriorate, or there isn’t any hardware available that can read the stuff because it’s been superseded by some new product which isn’t backward compatible.