3000 years ago, a sect of monks placed copies of a writing into stone jars within a cave as they were fleeing an invading army. These precious relics sat there until the 1950’s, when a group of archaeologists discovered them. After several years of translation, they discovered that the then-called “Dead Sea Scrolls” contained the earliest known copies of much of the Old Testament. The only reason that these documents were preserved was because of the pristine environment in which the volumes had been placed without being disturbed for centuries.
Dust To Dust
The story of the Dead Sea Scrolls is steeped in our culture now, as an example of how long paper lasts, as a nearly indestructible force. The truth, however, is far from it. With the presence of oxygen, humidity, vibration, and sunlight, paper and ink quickly turn to dust. Paper was well known, even then, to be a transient method of archiving information, and as such was given rise to an entire subculture with nearly every literate society: the scribes. The sole purpose of this sector of society was to not only write down the events of the day, but to copy letter for letter works which were in danger of being lost due to rot or other environmental factors. Oftentimes kings and lords of far away lands would send for copies of a certain text to have read in their court, and the fees incurrred in the process would pay the salary of these learned scholars.
The beginning of the end
As time went on, the scribes underwent several periods of rise and decline, though their worth was more often than not overlooked. Such writings as the Book of Kells still stand today as a testament to their skill throughout the ages. However, a Chinese invention was brought to the West which changed everything: Gutenberg’s movable type printing press. The invention made hand-copied texts obsolete nearly overnight, as speed increased a hundredfold. Lost also was the care with which the information was preserved, and the rise of mass media created a lust for new information at the cost of the old.
Enter the Underwood
For centuries more, the press was the only way to create many copies of the same document, and had dominated news, fiction and nonfiction. But in the late 19th century another invention came along and into the office an home: the Underwood #5. This revolutionary typewriter was the first to show the typist what was being typed, and subsequently became the primary correspondence tool for businesses in all of the English-speaking world. While copies were still made by hand, the scribe had been forgotten and replaced by the secretary.
Cellophane Coffins
As the typewriters of the West utilized more and more paper, space became a problem. The piles of triplicate copies of tax returns and grandma’s recipes were taking their toll on the archives of various offices in businesses and had to themselves be archived. A couple of mirrors, lenses and cameras later, the microfiche was born. Able to hold an entire newspaper on the size of a 5x7 note card, the microfiche again saved the day for those paying rent of archival storage units. But still, it’s components were not long lived, and had to be maintained as much as paper, dutifully copied before they too turned to dust.
Electrons in the Cloud
In the 1940’s, the first adding machines were created, to break the codes of the Japanese and Germans in WWII. Hand-wired from thousands of mechanical relays, they were a marvel of engineering and sheer will. With the advent of the transistor, along with later miniaturizations, the computer was born. Much more than a code-breaking machine, we now have access to more information than has ever been recorded at our fingertips. Yet, where are the scribes?
The Pace of Failure
Audio cassette, minidisc, 16mm, Super-8, Beta tape, VHS, Laserdisc, 35mm slides, magnetic wire, zip drives. All these and more have come and gone (Just ask Bonnie Burton of grrl.com, who was infamous at ILM for looking for a zip drive), and few are available to play in their original form. The pace of technology fast outstripped the ability to maintain the machines needed to reproduce the information contained on the various formats. As each new wave of faster, smaller, or cheaper materials arrived, the market dropped out from underneath the companies who made the players, and so left behind mountains of information which could no longer be accessed.
Every Man For Himself
With nobody to pawn the job off to, the scribal tradition falls now to every individual. “Bit rot”, or the ability of a static file to lose it’s magnetism on the disk, is as much of a problem as the physical rot of paper journals and magnetic tape. So it turns to the sons, daughters, and grandkids of those who so painstakingly preserved the last 75 years in lost formats to convert them and keep their bits fresh so that future generations can enjoy the first hand accounts of some of the richest history we have ever been able to record.
(originally published on my blog, Cookies and Napalm, 9/7/2014)