“people want to use all these different technologies
in producing and searching for information,
but at the same time they do not consider guidelines
designed to help us preserve information.”
— kinga perzynska
When I was a teenager, I owned a somewhat mysterious electrical
device. It was a metal box, olive green and seven or eight inches
square, with a power cord, a small speaker grill, and a little door
that opened to reveal primitive electronics and a mechanism whose
function was obscure. The only clue to the device’s identity was
an embossed metal plate stating that the box was a wire recorder
manufactured in the 1930s.
although i’d never heard of wire recorders, i had a tape recorder and could extrapolate
that wire recorders must have been the first devices used to imprint electromagnetic
signals onto a metallic medium. how cool, i thought, and i immediately desired a
recordable wire to see if the thing still worked.
unfortunately, this was 30 years after the recorder’s manufacture, and the company
that made it was no longer in business. my dream of testing the device waned, and
i soon went off to college and lost track of it. maybe my brother dismantled it, or
maybe my mom tossed it out. Whatever happened, it vanished from my life, and i
quite forgot about it until a newspaper article 15 years later brought it to mind.
The article was about two university researchers who had run across a carton filled
with mysterious spools of wire. after determining that the spools were wire record-
ings, they wondered what was recorded on them, but they were unable to find a wire
recorder to play them.
i should have taken it as a warningt— he canary in the information age coal mineb— ut
it would be another 10 years before the truth really hit home. By then, i was watching
in dismay as my vinyl Lps, Betamax tapes, and other media in which i had invested
considerable time and money grew obsolete almost overnight. even worse was what
was happening to my digital data. in the early 1980s, i was the proud owner of one
of the first personal computers—a kaypro that used the cpm operating system and
5.25” floppy disks—and when it finally crashed, the manufacturer was out of busi-
ness, cpm had evolved into dos, and 3.5” floppies were the medium of exchange.
all that data on those old 5.25” disks was essentially unretrievable. sure, there were
technicians who could convert the data, but they wanted an arm and a leg to do the
work. The boxes of backup disks that i had assiduously recorded to preserve my data
in case of a disk malfunction sat there, mute and mocking me.
18 rice sallyport
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