Inaccessible material
Sir: Charles Leadbeater (‘The web is a conservative force’, 12 July) may be right that the internet enables us to record for posterity more of the ephemera of our daily lives than ever before. But will posterity be able to read it? The Domesday Book is nearly 1,000 years old, the Dead Sea Scrolls around 2,000 years old and the Minoan tablets in Linear B well over 3,000 years old — all can be read, and while none are easy to decipher for the layman, it takes just human intellect to do so. But I cannot put my old 5 1/2 inch floppies in my new PC and even if I could the computer would not be able to read them; the operating system I used to create them is obsolete.
Far from a cornucopia awaiting them, future historians may find that while there is certainly an abundance of material for their researches, it is all tantalisingly inaccessible. John Nugée
New Malden
Previous page
