Brewster Kahle is a man with a long-held dream. He envisions the day when all published works, including books, music, video, Web content, and software, will be online, accessible to everyone and preserved for generations. He claims that, if Moore’s Law continues to hold, the storage requirements for such an endeavor will be quite manageable at a reasonable price. The implications would be profound. Kahle posits, for example, that library books would be printed on demand, and discarded after one reading. To foster his dream, Kahle founded the Internet Archive in 1996. This archive has taken preliminary steps in the direction of the dream, by making “old” Web sites available (see http://www.archive.org).

This eight-page interview is an easy read, and the dream is thought provoking. But how realistic is it? Paper as a medium has served us well for a long time, allowing documents to be reused or copied for generations. Contrast this with the virtual impossibility of accessing computer data stored less than a quarter-century ago. This lesson became apparent to me a decade ago, when I tried, but failed, to locate a device to read the 200 bits per inch (bpi) reel-to-reel tapes that were being used to record air traffic control data. If you don’t believe the problem is real, try finding a drive to read 8-inch diskettes. The ability to record all of the information may be doable, but the ability to retrieve it a short time later, let alone centuries from now, may not be.