Brian Roemmele

this um we are running out of data from the online world the internet and we assume unfortunately that 99 of everything of any value was digitalized that is fatally incorrect in fact my calculations is about 12 percent if that

And the unfortunate part about it is it's in modernized vernacular.

And what that means is to get this microfiche, I don't know if you can see inside there, but inside there is data.

And this one happens to be one page.

This one is four pages.

yeah four and i don't really care so much about the hollerith punch holes that you might see in here i use that what i care about is what that microfiche it's a photographic negative for anybody who remembers that what it recorded it recorded the work product of today billions of dollars yeah it translated maybe trillions i could be off by an order of magnitude

they're being thrown away.

In fact, most of them are gone.

And most of them have never been digitalized.

What that means is they are gone.

The work product, the notes, the lab notes, the research, the parts, the layout, the architectural drawings, the schematics, gone.

And the problem is the chain of custody

so bad within government and industry because a lot of this is from the government none of this is classified none of it ever has ever been classified I'm not diving dumpsters necessarily I have at the CIA so nobody coming after me this has been decommissioned by the federal government and they are left in warehouses and

And then decades later, after one librarian or curator is gone, somebody sees that they have 40,000 square feet in a warehouse.

What's in there?

IBM punch cards, boss.

What?

We don't even read those anymore.

Throw them away.

And that's what happens.