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)