Dead Media Beat: Vint Cerf decries data decay

Don't say you weren't warned

When it comes to keeping our history and our scientific legacy, Cerf is passionate. He says that many of our greatest historical treasures, like the 2,600 year old cuneiform clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal, once located in modern Iraq, were preserved by accident, when a fire baked them into more durable pottery. The same fire, presumably, destroyed everything kept on wood, paper or papyrus.

He brings up the Archimedes Palimpsest as another example of accidental historical preservation. In that case a church scribe scraped a priceless one-of-a-kind paper based on the ancient Greek mathematician's work so he could put a liturgical guide on it. “Someone found the document around 1900 that there was this barely discernible Greek in there, then it was lost again 1988 and found in a Frenchman's attic. Then a friend bought it,” Cerf says without elaborating. (The buyer who lent the document to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for study has never been publicly identified.) The paper by Archimedes was eventually recovered with the help of modern science. But Cerf sees this all as a cautionary tale….