Digital storage is easy; digital preservation is hard

"When we finally shut down the old PDP-10 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, there was no place to put the files except onto mag tapes that are by now unreadable. So we lost the world's first text editor, the first vision and language programs, and the early correspondence of the founders of artifial intelligence." Sciene historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s. (from Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now 1999:84)