'Backing it up is one thing. Restoring it is another.'

Paper is technology. Cassette Store Day is October 13th.

Paper’s not a bad technology. It is really a good technology for the storage and retrieval of information. After 500 years, we still can turn the pages of Leonardo’s notebooks. From the 1990s, Steve Jobs had some memos on a NeXT Computer in his house. Even with his tech [abilities], we couldn’t retrieve that, because the NeXT operating system no longer can retrieve the documents that well. So every now and then, one of the lessons I learned is take notes on paper in a notebook. They’ll be around 50 years...
--Walter Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci biographer, as told to Kara Swisher on Recode

We all keep notes digitally these days. When I tried to do Steve Jobs’ period in the 1990s — when he was in the wilderness between his stints at Apple, he worked at NeXT Computer — we went back to try to get all the emails and memos. He couldn’t get them out of his machine. The operating system couldn’t retrieve them anymore. But paper is a really good technology for the storage of information.

I asked Simon & Schuster, the publisher who did Leonardo da Vinci, to “do it all on art paper and not one of these things where you put the things in the center.” I want it throughout to be that heavy quality, coated, color images because I wanted to show that paper is actually sometimes good for transmitting information.
--Walter Isaacson, biographer, as told to Adam Grant

Forbes: What Do Older Programmers Know That Younger Programmers Don't?  One answered "Backing it up is one thing. Restoring it is another."


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Further Reading:

10/4/2018:  The red zone is for unloading...:   seths.blog





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.