For all our advances in technology, particularly on the computing front, it was with some surprise that I read about one element of this recent revolution that actually seems to be going backwards. That is, data stored electronically decays!

It’s become so bad that many floppy discs from the early digital age are already unreadable. One article I read reported that NASA has lost data from some of its earliest missions because the readers that were built to run the tapes are no longer made...