What is 'bit rot' and is Vint Cerf right to be worried?
by Samuel Gibbs from Technology | The Guardian on (#31EM)
Being able to access digital content in the coming decades could be less of an issue than one of the 'fathers of the internet' has implied.
Vint Cerf, Google's vice-president and one of the fathers of the internet, has warned that "bit rot" could lead to a "forgotten century" as our masses of digital files are lost to progress and become unreadable as technology evolves.
Cerf said that the applications to read files are being lost because they will no longer run on newer computers, rendering some files unintelligible and the data, memories and important happenings they contain lost to future generations.
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