Anyone who followed our office blog last week will have noticed that we were hosting our bi-annual Study School, which is a week where the new intake of distance learning students come to Dundee and we introduce them to our VLE, to some of the ideas they will encounter during their studies, to each other and to us and some of the other CAIS tutors.
One of the sessions that got the biggest response this year was on the fragility of digital information and how the rapid pace of change creates incredible challenges for record keepers. There's a post about the session here and Chris, who helped lead the session with Philip Lord, Susan Thomas and I, posted his impression of the afternoon here.
Susan and Philip used a variety of old media to emphasise the points around rapid change and obsolescence and the students were presented with a Fortran program on punched paper tape, disks of various sizes and vintages (3", 3.5", 5.25" etc), a variety of usb keys, minidisks, backup tapes and compact cassettes. (Those of you old enough to remember the C64, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair Spectrum will nod approvingly and remember that those humble C60s and C90s could, and did, contain digital information).
The discussion prompted me to think about the variety of different platforms and operating systems I've used at various stages, as opposed to the media on which the information is stored. With the help of Wikipedia I've come up with the following list and, to be honest, given myself a bit of a shock. Admittedly, some of this dates back to my school days and I don't have digital information from all of these systems lying around, but my experience does illustrate how far we've come, how quickly and the multitude of computer platforms that record keepers may have to cope with.
General
Amstrad CPC 464
BBC B
Acorn Archimedes running RISC OS
PCs
MS DOS 5 and 6
Windows 2
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows NT
Windows XP
Windows Server
Macs
(For the purposes of this post I'm interested in the generations of the OS rather than the machines)
OS 9
OS 10.3 'Panther'
OS 10.4 'Tiger'
OS 10.5 'Leopard'
OS 10.6 'Snow Leopard'
I may have forgotten some of the iterations of the different operating systems and I'm not including platforms I have used belonging to friends and family (but that would expand the list with mentions of C64s, Atari STs, Amigas, a MMX MSX, and PCs running OS/2). What strikes me is that I am by no means a power user, yet I have used at least fifteen platforms fairly regularly at various times.
Whilst many of the platforms noted above are backwards-compatible (to a point) and can read data from their earlier iterations, that backwards-compatibility is not infinite and the capacity to read information created on older systems is dropped periodically. Similarly, each new version of platform brings changes. Some are obvious, like Apple's recent move Snow Leopard dropping support for Power PC hardware, but some are more subtle. This article from Ars Technica examines the way that Apple's move to Snow Leopard changes the way that the system controls the metadata that governs application binding.
The point of all this? That every change compounds the problems faced by record keepers in attempting to ensure that our digital memory is not lost. Arguably, this has become and remains greatest challenge faced by our profession.
Oh, and I didn't mention the different iterations of the software running on all these different platforms.
EDIT: I meant MSX, not MMX (which was an instuction set on a Pentium processor). I also forgot the Acorn Electron and the Amstrad PCW. Gordon Laing's Digital Retro is a great source for this stuff and something I should have looked at before writing the original post!