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Dr Vint Cerf warned that as operating systems and software get updated, documents and photos stored on old tech are becoming inaccessible
Future historians may find little hard evidence of our existence
21st century could become a digital desert, comparable with the dark ages
He urged people to print off important documents and photos for posterity

Published: 05:26 EST, 13 February 2015 | Updated: 09:32 EST, 13 February 2015

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He may have helped to build the internet, but Dr Vinton ‘Vint’ Cerf has urged computer users to print out their most treasured photographs, or risk losing them.

The Google vice president warned that as operating systems and software become more sophisticated, documents and images stored using older technology will become increasingly inaccessible.

He went on to say that our dependence on technology could lead to the 21st century being a new dark age in history, with any evidence of our culture lost in a digital 'black hole'.

'Father of the internet' Dr Vinton Cerf (pictured) has warned that digital technology could turn the 21st century into a new dark age lost to history. He said that as operating systems and software get upgraded, documents and images stored using older technology are becoming increasingly inaccessible

In centuries to come, future historians looking back on the current era could be confronted by a digital desert comparable with the dark ages - the post-Roman period in Western Europe about which relatively little is known because of the scarcity of written records.

Dr Cerf, who also has the title of Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, said: ‘If we’re thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?

‘We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.

Dr Cerf suggested that people print off important photos and documents to preserve memories. A photo of the British Library is shown

‘The 22nd century and future centuries after that will wonder about us but they’ll have great difficulty knowing much because so much of what we’ve left behind may be bits that are uninterpretable.’

He urged people to think about printing out their treasured photos and not rely on storing them as memory files.

‘In our zeal to get excited about digitising we digitise photographs thinking it’s going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong,’ he said.

‘I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out.’

Dr Cerf was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California.

To illustrate his point he referred to an ‘amazing book’ by American Pulitzer prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, titled ‘Team of rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln’.

Her material was obtained by scouring libraries for copies of written correspondence between Lincoln and the people around him.

Dr Cerf said: ‘Let us imagine that there’s a 22nd-century Doris Kearns Goodwin and she decides to write about the beginning of the 21st century and seeks to reproduce the conversations of the time.

‘She discovers that there’s an awful lot of digital content that either has evaporated because nobody saved it, or its around but it’s not interpretable because it was created by software that’s 100 years old.’

Mr Cerf said: ‘We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.' For example, it is hard to read documents saved on floppy disks (pictured)

The problem also had serious implications for the storage of legal documents that needed to be kept for long periods of time, he said.

‘We’re going to have to build into our thinking the concept of preservation writ large,’ Dr Cerf added.

One possible solution is what he called ‘digital vellum’, a concept now being explored by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

This involves taking a digital 'snapshot' at the time an item is stored of all the processes needed to reproduce it at a later date, including the software and operating system.

VINT CERF: FATHER OF THE INTERNET

Vint Cerf was among five men who won the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for the creation of the internet as we know it.

He shared the £1million prize with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen.

The citation panel said the five men had all contributed to the revolution in communications that has taken place in recent decades.

Vint Cerf (pictured left) shared the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, presented by the Queen, with Robert Kahn (second left), Tim Berners Lee (second from right), Louis Pouzin (right) and Marc Andreessen (not pictured)

Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf provided the engineering insights that actually made the internet work. Their TCP/IP protocols define the way data travels around the internet.

Sir Tim Berners Lee told the BBC: ‘The prize recognises what has been a roller-coaster ride of wonderful international collaboration.

‘Bob and Vint's work on building the internet was re-enforced by Louis' work on datagrams and that enabled me to invent the web.

‘Marc's determined and perceptive work built on these platforms a product which became widely deployed across nations and computing platforms.’

It’s estimated that a third of the world's population now uses the internet.

Around 330 petabytes of data are estimated to be carried across its servers each year, which is enough capacity to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 times over.

The snapshot could then be used to reproduce the game, picture file or spread sheet, on a modern computer, perhaps centuries from now.

‘Some people make the argument that the important stuff will be copied and put into new media and so why should we worry,’ said Dr Cerf.

‘But ... historians will tell you that sometimes documents and transactions images and so on may turn out to have an importance which is not understood for hundreds of years. So failure to preserve them will cause us to lose our perspective.’