Digital "Archaeology"

I think the future will have fields of archaeology devoted towards digital artefacts and data from bygone eras that are found amongst collections of forgotten hard drives and CD ROMs.

I have a huge amount of my digital history going back to very naive days on the Internet or World Wide Web or in Australia it was known as the "Information Superhighway" in the 90's as people became slowly aware of it. As a Unix newbie back then I find it hard to imagine now, those days where you'd connect to your ISP with a telephone modem (56kbps was fast!) with the associated tones anyone alive at the time will know well.

As an OS fan, I'd be collecting whole floppy disks worth of boot disks (a whopping 20+MB) in order to install on one's latest machine. It was a process that required getting together meticulous printed notes on a pathway towards the goal. This was because if you had one machine your internet connection was down until you could install the new system and get the connection going again. One had to have done alot of research on the entire install and potential recovery process and sometimes plan B, C, etc...

I have virtual machine hard disks and floppy images going back to the early 2000's with Windows XP and interesting software I own like Lotus Improv installed and a late NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP distribution.  Maybe these sorts of files will be important to preserve for the researchers of the future. I'm certain that these files are probably available in other's collections also but I have a thing for hanging on to old hard drives etc that have all this ancient (a relative term, but somewhat applicable when it comes to computing in the 1990's vs today).

I am glad I had the luxury to be able to keep this data for the future. I'm certain that most of the digital mining will happen in the vast data banks on the wider Internet that are now called cloud services. But maybe the little guys like me might have a role though when researchers wants to see what computer enthusiasts who were active through this time did with their machines. I don't know maybe it will matter, maybe it won't. Time will tell.