Digital Dark Age

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The digital Dark Age is a term used to describe a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical documents, because they have been stored in an obsolete digital format. This could cause the period around the turn of the 21st century, when viewed from the future, to be comparable to the Dark Ages in the sense that there will be a relative lack of written record. The term is not limited to text documents, but applies equally to photos, video, audio and other kinds of electronic documents.

The concern leading to the use of the term is that documents are stored on physical media which require special hardware in order to be read and that this hardware will not be available in a few decades from the time the document was created. An example is that already today the necessary disk drive to read a 5¼-inch floppy disk is not readily available. The digital Dark Age also applies to the problems which arise due to obsolete file formats. In this case it is the lack of the necessary software which causes problems when desiring to retrieve stored documents. One example is that a word processor document saved in the WordStar format popular in the 1980s cannot be read by software typically installed on modern PCs.