Communications of the ACM
The Inventors of the Internet Are Trying to Build a Truly Permanent Web
Vint Cerf and some of his fellow inventors of the Internet are joining with a new generation of hackers, archivists, and activists to reinvent core technologies that underpin the Web.
Credit: April Greer/The Washington Post/Getty Images
If you wanted to write a history of the Internet, one of the first things you would do is dig into the email archives of Vint Cerf. In 1973, he co-created the protocols that Internet servers use to communicate with each other without the need for any kind of centralized authority or control. He has spent the decades since shaping the Internet’s development, most recently as Google’s "chief Internet evangelist."
Thankfully, Cerf says he has archived about 40 years of old email—a first-hand history of the Internet stretching back almost as far as the Internet itself. But you’d also have a pretty big problem: a whole lot of that email you just wouldn’t be able to open. The programs Cerf used to write those emails, and the formats in which they’re stored, just don’t work on any current computer you’d likely be using to try to read them.
As fragile as paper is, written documents and records have long provided historians with a wealth of insight about that past that often helps shape the present. And they don’t need any special technology to read them. Cerf himself points to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 bestseller Team of Rivals, which she based on the diary entries and letters of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet members. The book influenced how President Obama shaped his own cabinet and became the basis for the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln. In short, old records are important. But as Cerf’s own email obsolescence shows, digital communications quickly become unreadable.
Don’t believe it? What would you do right now if you wanted to read something stored on a floppy disk? On a Zip drive? In the same way, the web browsers of the future might not be able to open today’s webpages and images–if future historians are lucky enough to have copies of today’s websites at all. Says Cerf, "I’m concerned about a coming digital dark ages."
That’s why he and some of his fellow inventors of the Internet are joining with a new generation of hackers, archivists, and activists to radically reinvent core technologies that underpin the web. Yes, they want to make the web more secure. They want to make it less vulnerable to censorship. But they also want to make it more resilient to the sands of time.
From Wired
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