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Silicon Insider: Digital Toys in the Attic
Aug. 7 -- — Each year, the City of Santa Clara, at the very heart of Silicon Valley, offers a special garbage collection program. Anything you want to pile on the curb, the city will take to the dump.
It's the perfect opportunity to clear out that old filing cabinet in the den and the box of old company documents in the garage. And they take full advantage of it: By the night before, the streets of this suburban city look like one gigantic, unattended flea market.
Santa Clarans love the pick-up. I hate it.
Living next door in Sunnyvale, I lie in bed the night before the pick-up thinking about the high-tech history that is about to become landfill. Old laboratory notebooks, aging 4-bit PCs and home video games, the motherboard with the 8008 chipset, the 64K Macintosh. The crucial Intel memo, the forgotten Atari prototype, the dusty of HP audio oscillator still in its original crate, the unrecognized Apple I. Gone forever.
Not long ago, The Wall Street Journal ran one of its slice o'capitalism cover features on a guy named Henry Wilhelm. Wilhelm, a 60-year-old engineer based in Grinnell, Iowa, is an expert on the durability of graphic images, especially photographs. He puts the output of laser printers and other devices through a gauntlet of environmental forces designed to replicate, at an accelerated rate, the affects of time and age.
Why? Because over the last century we've learned, to our rue, that the products of modern technology don't endure the way we thought they would. Like silver nitrate film. And high wood-pulp content paper. And videotape.
Remember when CDs were going to be the all-but immortal replacement for LPs? Even solid-state semiconductor chips, seemingly as durable and stable as rock crystal, have proven to be delicate little creatures ready to succumb at any moment to static electricity, a bad cooling fan, or a good bounce on a lobby floor.
But even as we struggle to find better ways to better preserve the past, we also face the attendant question of what it is that we should save. The former is a task for scientists, the latter is a question posed to all of us.
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