Do you remember… or did you forget it all later on?
This is about something you don’t usually think about every day. Still, I find it an interesting and inspiring topic—for both people and organizations—to explore in more depth. It has to do with generational differences, which sometimes prevent us from understanding one another. It’s about information carriers from the past that we took for granted, but which suddenly ceased to exist due to a disruptive technology…
Do you remember this one?
Give children a Sony Walkman from the 1980s. No, it’s not a cell phone, and it’s not a walkie-talkie either. They have no idea what it is. The same is probably true for a floppy disk or a VHS tape. Here’s another example: anyone who had to work with text in the 1990s used the world’s most popular word processor, called WordPerfect. It was the first digital precursor to what we now do every day with Microsoft Word. Today’s generation can’t even imagine it.
Still, all these technologies have something in common: they are carriers of information. That is why we recommend giving this some thought more often. Even just because of laws and regulations, it is sometimes mandatory to retain information for the long term. In that case, you must be able to access it in the future.
Passing on Information to Future Generations
Years ago, when WordPerfect files had to be converted to Microsoft Word, the text would appear in blocks. Nothing was legible anymore, and integration was virtually nonexistent. As long as you still had an old WordPerfect machine, you could retype the text. Transferring information, however, will become even more challenging in the future.
As technology advances at an ever-faster pace, data storage formats will undoubtedly change more quickly. Take Adobe, for example. They regularly release updates that suddenly make older PDF files unopenable. And do you really need to keep old (legacy) systems running just to be able to view information years later and pass on historical material to future generations? We don’t think so, because that’s costly and, moreover, less secure if software updates are no longer released for these outdated systems.
Do you remember…
You can ensure this is possible in the future by storing all information from various media in a smart archiving format. We’d be happy to explain how that works, so that the growing mountain of data can still be accessed years later, allowing future generations to learn from it.