Emulation For Preservation of Digital Artifacts 81
An anonymous reader writes "Author Salman Rushdie donated his papers and notes to Emory University a while ago. Not surprisingly, many of Rushdie's original notes, drafts, and correspondence existed in electronic form. Rather than printing them out or converting them to other formats, archivists at the university created an emulated image of Rushdie's old computer, complete with old software. Researchers visiting the archive can read his email in Eudora and his Stickies notes, or read drafts of his books in ClarisWorks. When you leave your legacy to future generations, would you like a virtualized copy of your personal system to be included?"
I was just pondering that notion. (Score:5, Interesting)
My ideas are not original. In fact, the idea sort of comes from various story lines from popular SciFi shows like Star Trek and SG-1. Not only should we be creating digital archives, we should be creating digital archives inside of orbital vehicles that are capable of sustaining their own orbits indefinitely. We should then beam up any and all data we can about ourselves to survive as evidence of our existence. If 2012 "end of the world as we know it" really were to happen, such digital archives in space would be at the very least pretty interesting to any beings that emerge after us or who happen along through our star system.
This would be rather like voyager but would be continually updated as time and technology progresses. Keeping it in orbit is just about the best way to preserve it whether the data storage is in our local orbit or on the moon.
Re:I was just pondering that notion. (Score:1, Interesting)
Until the public get spaceships, then someone will drunkenly ram the digital archive with a megatanker and deorbit it along with hundreds of years of history. On the other hand, bounty hunters chasing outlaw ship jackers may get it blown up as collateral damage. Orrrr someone accidentally feeds the wrong targeting data into a kinetic kill missile.
Pff, orbital museums. It's just best to store that data in the 'net, cyberpunk genre systems are more reliable than space sci-fi.
Good Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
When my Dad died last year, I made a VM of his laptop so I could help my mom out finding documents and other things that she would need for taxes and getting everything sorted out in her name.
That is pretty much done now, but I still keep my dad's VM around. I was his tech support and I was always answering questions and sorting things out when they got messed up. He had made some funny personalizations to it (sounds and such). So even though I don't need it anymore, I still fire it up when I miss him. I even apply all the pending updates - I guess it is part of my grieving process.
In case anyone actually /wants/ to read my crap (Score:3, Interesting)
my journal is in flat 7-bit ASCII, a choice I deliberately made back in the '90s.
I don't expect anybody but my daughter to be interested, though.