It’s the year 2054 and my grandchildren are exploring the attic of my house. They find a letter dated 2004, along with a CD-ROM. The letter claims that the disk contains a document that provides the key to obtaining my fortune. My grandchildren, understandably, are excited, but they’ve never seen a CD before—except in old movies—and even if they can somehow find a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How to read my obsolete digital document? Within fifty years the only directly legible thing will be the letter.
JEFF ROTHENBERG