Only seven great dramas survive
Of the seventy Sophocles wrote.
From the Book of the Wars of the Lord
There is only a fifteen-word quote.
The paintings of Zeuxis were splendid
Now nothing is left from his hand.
The ancients had seven great wonders
But now only the Pyramids stand
In the twentieth century as well
This great disappearance goes on.
Half of all American movies
Made before 1950 are gone.
Languages, art work, and dance
Have also met annihilation.
Le Sacre de Printemps marked an epoch
What we have is a new fabrication.
"But this sad disappearance and loss
Is surely a thing of the past.
Now that all is in digital form
Our creations eternally last
Our descendants will always have access
To everything good that we've done."
Alas, digital records as well
Can vanish from under the sun.
Thousands of magnetic tapes
That were made from the Viking Mars landing
Were left for a decade, and then
They were almost past all understanding.
The BBC Domésday project,
The labor of millions of folk,
Was nearly eternally lost
Quite unlike the original book.
To preserve a digital record
There are three things that have to survive:
The hardware and software to read it
And the medium where it's inscribed.
But media deteriorate
If neglected for multiple years
And hardware becomes obsolete
There's now no one who makes VCRs.
And software is worse. In the scramble
To make everything better and faster
Making sure code is backward compatible
Is forgotten. That leads to disaster.
The program, the language, the drivers,
The OS on which all this relied
Each came from a separate vendor
who retired, went bankrupt, or died.
And as for the Web, just forget it.
Eighteen years ago, looking ahead
I assembled a page of resources
Those links are now almost all dead.
And don't even allow me to start
On the problems of trying to show
Masterpieces of digital art
From merely a decade ago.
You can read the Aeneid of Virgil
Composed in Augustus's day.
You can study the Gilgamesh epic
Which was written on tablets of clay.
The Pyramids stand as they did
In 2500 BC.
Five millennia into the future
What record of us will there be?
This is part of the collection Verses for the Information Age by Ernest Davis