Web pioneer Vint Cerf warns of Internet history ‘black hole’

Future historians will see the early 21st century as “an information black hole” unless “digital vellum” is introduced to preserve the content of the Internet for millennia to come, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf has warned.

Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting that the issue was not that the digital bits will disappear -- they can in principle be replicated and preserved indefinitely in new storage media -- but that their meaning will be lost. Preserving it will involve saving not only data but also full details of hardware on which programs run, together with applications software and operating systems. “If we want people in the future to be able to recreate what we are doing now, we are going to have to build the concept of preservation into the internet,” said Cerf, a co-designer of the internet’s basic architecture. As a candidate for digital vellum, he advocates a system called Olive under development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, in collaboration with IBM Research.