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I have this idea in my head that one of the niche communities in fifty years will be people who trawl through discarded mass storage devices: cobbling together hardware fixes, undeleting files, and scanning them to see whether they contain anything interesting, like cached pages of lost websites, photos containing the faces of celebrities but from decades before they were famous, troves of old corporate emails, and so on.


Like historians? I also think they will exist in fifty years.


I think more like Verner Vinge's Programmer Archeologists[1], rather than Historians.

1. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4424


Like digital archaeologists, is more what I'm imagining. Not interpreting the primary sources, discovering them.




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