The man who imagined all of this never saw the web.
In 1960, a psychologist named J.C.R. Licklider described a partnership he called man-computer symbiosis. People would hold the questions, the insight, and the discernment. Machines would take on the repetitive work of collecting, formatting, and calculating. Two years later he ran a research office at ARPA, where he funded the people who went on to build time-sharing, the mouse, the graphical screen, and eventually the network itself.
Licklider was born in 1915 and died in 1990. He never used a personal computer that matched his own description, and he never saw the web. The world he sketched arrived anyway, carried forward by the researchers he backed. One of them, brought to ARPA in 1976, was Vint Cerf.
A perfectly good file can stop being readable.
Vint Cerf co-designed TCP/IP, the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol that set the rules for how computers communicate and share data across the internet. That work helped earn him the title "father of the internet." For years he has warned about what he calls a digital dark age, and his warning is specific. A file can sit safe and complete on a drive for decades and still become unreadable, once the program that understood its format is gone.
That has already happened, again and again, to formats that once sat on nearly every machine.
A file you can't open is already gone.
The bits can survive perfectly long after the software that read them is gone. These ten formats were once everywhere. Opening their files today takes effort, luck, or specialist tools, and some of what they held is already lost for good.
A companion to Vint Cerf's warning about a digital dark age.
Each ran on millions of machines. Today they are orphaned.
An inventory is only useful if the files still open.
A digital estate plan usually starts with a list: accounts, passwords, where things live. That list does its real work only when someone can still open what it points to. A folder of .wpd documents or .pct scans hands your family a lock with no key.
Digital Asset Plans treats formats as part of the inventory. It records what you hold, flags what sits in aging or at-risk formats, and prompts the move to something a person can still open years from now. Digital SafeKeeper does the same for the documents, photos, and records you mean to preserve and pass on.
Inventory the assets, and the formats they live in.
Document the accounts, files, and media a family will need, with a note on what has to be migrated before it goes quiet.
Explore Digital Asset Plans →Preserve what matters in a form people can still read.
One secure home for legal documents, financial records, family history, and the instructions that make them usable.
Explore Digital SafeKeeper →J.C.R. Licklider imagined the partnership. Vint Cerf helped build the network it runs on. Both understood that a tool is worth only as much as our ability to keep using what it makes. Digital Asset Plans and Digital SafeKeeper carry that idea into your own records, so the files that matter stay openable for the people who come after you.
Read the companion field note: Vint Cerf and the digital dark age →