I found my Grandpa’s notes 20 years after he died (2020)
medium.com
medium.com
From my father's address book (a DbaseII file that was last updated on December 15th 1992). This was a note associated with my contact info. Found on February 16, 2020.
Hi there, son. I doubt if anyone else will ever see these memos, but if anybody ever does, it will have to be you because you would be the only one with enough computer savy to dig them out. Hope you are doing well--and if I'm not still in this dimension when you see this--have a drink to your old dad's memory. Having you around gave me most of the pleasure in our family's growing up period! Live long and prosper...............
What did you do when you saw it?
What would you say back?
Are you leaving any easter eggs for your own offspring?
I would leave one of these for my wife, but she'd never find it. she will, however, inevitably discover my journal, and hopefully that will be nice for her.
I've always wondered how complete versus sanitised his hand-written book might be, but there is some pretty gruesome stuff in it including eating a dog to avoid starvation, which resulted in extra torture because the only meat available was the beloved dog owned by the very commander of the prisoner of war camp where he was held during/after WWII.
Perhaps one day, I shall scan, OCR/type in, and publish it.
edit: oh, no they ate the dog and were punished for it I see.
He said things became much better in terms of food, when later on he was imprisoned in some US prison (not sure that was in the US or in another place but managed by US).
He wrote it all down as well.
They had to work a lot as prisoners, so I guess both sides wanted their share of work from war prisoners and so he first had to be in a Russian camp and then later in a US managed camp.
In documentaries you can also see, that some more qualified people got moved to "in the middle of nowhere" in Russia and Siberia as "experts" to help with building something up, where before German soldiers had destroyed. If you are willing, you can watch some kind of war documentary at least every second day in Germany. After you have seen your 20th documentary, you might get tired of it. However, many of the old people watch that stuff over and over. I guess it is because of the huge impact those events had on so many lives in their youth and to keep in mind how horrible things went. Perhaps also to try and get some kind of understanding of how a society could screw up so badly. And perhaps they want to know about all the evil things that happened, which they did not know about. The things that happened outside of the eyes of most people.
There is no lack of educational material at least. Just a day ago I saw an announcement on TV for another documentary for one of the almost infinite sides of that history: A documentary showing photographs and short clips taken by hobby photographers in 44 or 45 or so, showing a deceptive calm in some places in Germany, basically before things rolled all the way back, with only few indications of impending doom. You see, there is always something TV stations can send about it. Every little detail can be looked at and a documentary made about it.
When my grandfather had was called into the army, he was 15 years old. Send to the east, to fight a war. Many young people of that generation never finished school before entering the army. Basically children soldiers. They had to go back to school, as adults, when they returned from war and imprisonment. Re-education and further education. Imagine that contrast. I think it must have been hard for many of them, with post war trauma and all those memories.
He was either extremely fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it. Came into a field hospital with a headshot wound, but somehow survived. The doctor told him, that he could drink and smoke as much as he wanted to, because he wouldn't make it much longer anyway. I think that must have been a German field hospital and then later he must have been captured, and of course, as part of the army, taken prisoner of war.
Well, he managed to stick around until a few years ago, reaching old age of over 90 years.
As a practical matter, it may also be easier to guard and manage prisoners who are busy and tired from work, rather than idle and restless. For a detailed view of the late-war and early post-war years, I can suggest: _Savage Continent_, by Keith Lowe - https://www.npr.org/2013/07/24/204538728/after-wwii-europe-w...
When it's said that the concentration camps were "liberated", this mostly means that the guards on the fences were changed, and any intentional killings were stopped. But it took quite some time to actually empty the camps. From the Harrison report:
>We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.
This was in August 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Moving millions of people around in postwar Europe wasn't easy, or quick.
Obviously, all sides destroyed railways or bridges when possible. What few left operational were running at capacity just moving food, troops, and critical replacement parts. If you're a Allied junior lieutenant, and you're put in charge of a camp of 50,000 people, do you just throw open the gates, and tell them to walk home? If there was food to buy, which there wasn't, (Everyone had conscripted all their farmers. Europe had food supply problems for years afterward) they didn't have any money to buy it. Nobody had ration cards. They were lucky to have identity papers at all.
And, of course, the Allies were correctly paranoid about security. The countryside was littered with weapons. Let a starving DP out of a camp, a few days later he might be sorely tempted to pick up a fallen rifle and ambush the next checkpoint he sees.
Or... you could just leave them in the camp, where they're all in one place, not clogging the roads, where you can more or less feed them, and where you can eventually get around to handing out Nansen passports, when you feel like it.
My grandpa (who I never met) was in Fiji during WW2 - not combat but support staff on some base. Turns out he kept a journal that my uncle now has. He made a photocopy and gave it to my dad. I was super excited to read about his experiences, so I asked for my own copy. I typed the whole thing up and even looked up references to what he was talking about. (There were a lot of entries about him going to see this movie or that with his buddies, but I hadn't heard of 90% of them, so I added IMDB links.)
Almost the entire thing was mundane day-to-day goings-on and temperature and weather comments. He built cabinets for the base, went for beer with his friends, got letters from home, etc. I was expecting/hoping to at least hear his thoughts on things or what he wanted to do when he returned to the States.
It is written by a homesteader in 1930s North Dakota, and she just relates bits of her life, her family, and her favorite recipes. Simple, yet it's still a remarkable way to evoke the life of the era, and worth preserving and sharing as you are comfortable.
On a related note, you may want to be sure you take care with the actual physical media you have as well. Time and improper storage can render things unreadable - archival boxes (https://www.archivalmethods.com/ and elsewhere) are made to be neutral/alkaline rather than acidic, and are the sort of things museums use to preserve artifacts.
Unfortunately, I am speaking from experience: just recently, I discovered that many years of my own notes were quite water damaged by a leaky pipe I wasn't even aware was there... and the slowly dripping water found its way to it through and over a random maze of random things worthy of the Rube Goldberg himself.
I don't think you should feel narcissistic at all. Family is one of the prime places where we share our wisdom and values. Where we pass on the results of our mistakes in the hopes that the next generation avoids them. Don't feel bad for trying to do that, it's one of the fundamental elements of human progress.
Reading the prosaic thoughts of my parents when talking to other adults was like peeking behind the curtain, and it helped me understand them better as people, not just Mom and Dad. I am grateful for it.
A very common trigger for this, as I've asked about this topic to other people with elderly fathers, is becoming a parent. But for me it was leaving home.
Also make room for such conversations. We had a month long vacation, just the two of us, which I remember fondly, even though there was no big event or deep discussion.
It's typical that most people will tell you their grandpa was in the resistance, rarely they will tell you that they collaborated.
And people are more likely to talk about their family past if it sounds cool and good. They are less likely to talk about ugly parts of it.
Regardless of whether ugly is personal, business related or political.
There was a strong desire for revenge in the first years after the war. That meant anyone who did anything 'wrong' was not going to talk about it.
You could then ask them about it in non detailed ways.
(Speaking as a Jewish American with no SSS relatives but many who perished in the Holocaust, FWIW)
And the worst case scenario is that his diary demonizes him. Given the stories they mention and the potential SS division they hint at (perhaps one of the mobile death squad or extermination camp divisions), it seems quite possible.
But, especially so long after he's died, it might be better to know who he really was, whichever way it turns out. If I had a relative who potentially did and expressed terrible things, even though it'd hurt, I think I'd want to know the truth.
Or, as another commenter said, they could ask someone else to read it and give a vague but honest summary. If the contents are bad, they can learn that fact without the additional serious emotional impact of reading the lurid details.
They might be willing to leave your great-grandfather's name out of it, if that's a concern for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIOD_Institute_for_War,_Holoca...
> Even today, interesting things from the Second World War resurface. When people move house, when a house is demolished or when an attic is cleared. These finds can range from a pile of letters, to photos, films, diaries, documents or objects. Don’t throw these documents away. NIOD welcomes donations of new material.
Oh, yeah, undoubtedly. "History is written by the victors" is one of the truest cliches. But whether crimes or atrocities are acknowledged or punished tells you nothing about the impact or severity of the actions.
So, while one could certainly recite a laundry list of atrocities committed by the Allies which a victorious Nazi Germany would have prosecuted, and many by Imperial Japan that went unpunished (though you're wrong that none of them were charged with war crimes - many were, even if many others like Unit 731 escaped prosecution due to the US wanting their research [edit: I see someone else responded with this before I finished my reply]), WWII is difficult to write off as "everyone and everything was awful" like a lot of wars.
Every side was indeed awful, but Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's actions in particular were so unprecedentedly awful that far-future generations in those countries probably would've eventually had a reckoning and realized they were the worst actors in the war, like what eventually happened in the US when it comes to treatment of Native Americans, propping up brutal dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, and other things.
All this to say - if the parent poster's great-grandfather was a member of a Waffen-SS division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity, for example, it can't and shouldn't be dismissed as "well, that's war, everyone is culpable, and you can't know what it was like to be in their shoes, and either side would be considered as evil if the other side won". (I know you didn't quite say that, but there is a certain false semi-equivalence here, I think.) It's not exactly wrong, but it misses a lot of the bigger picture.
Britain and Belgium especially have this all over their history, and no one cares.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes
Even today that are recent British war crimes where the perpetrators are alive and yet will never be prosecuted.
"division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity"
I thought you meant that. It's not more palatable, but actions abroad have a different complexion somehow. Governments can get away with actions the citizenry don't witness (or citizens can claim ignorance) which is different to if there's literally squads picking people off the streets in front of your own eyes; which is what you referred to.
Like I said, I'm aware of many atrocities by British people but just not of that particular one in recent history?
It really, really isn't. Like, at all. No Historian would agree with you.
Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
Maybe it'd be more accurate to say "the immediate history that holds the most power in a certain area tends to be the history that's written by the most powerful entities in that area at that time", or something?
Nazi Germany wasn't able to spread its narrative anywhere once it lost its power, while the Allies were able to spread theirs in most places. If Nazi Germany had decisively won and became the top global superpower, I that situation probably would've been reversed.
Genghis Khan didn't hold the most power in certain areas after a certain period of time. When he did hold that power, even if the literary classes under his rule hated him, I assume their narratives probably wouldn't have spread or been believed very widely? Due to self-censorship, direct censorship and violence from his forces, and his counter-narratives. But maybe I'm wrong; I know very little about historiography.
You honestly think Americans are aware of even the most common atrocities committed in the name of colonization? My read is a) they mostly don't and b) there is an ongoing effort to victim-blame Native Americans going back centuries.
The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.
For example, CNN's Rick Santorum:
> We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.
https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/138668534052253696...
Santorum is on CNN's payroll. Who or whatever is supporting Santorum isn't stupid, likely it supports some revenue/marketing scheme. All of this is fully funded.
[1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/indians-and-the-us-constituti...
Increasingly, yes. I'm sure it'll be many more decades before it becomes more widely accepted, though.
>The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.
Very likely, yes.
It doesn't care if its German run, Russian run (as long as it is market based and not marxist based), or “not-German” wink run like today
It would have been tolerable just like Saudi Arabia is tolerable
Liquidity, market depth, and less people to negotiate with is the American priority
The moral highground arguments that it upholds now and in hindsight are just to continue deriving support from its own people, who culturally eat that shit up, but it can successfully package any moral argument for any scenario even if they are complete lies
It makes very little sense to want simpler negotiations in lieu of a strong negotiating position
The country itself is a sideshow.
I don't think Germany's singular goal of racial domination - and specifically extermination of world Jewry - is comparable to most wars. Nazi Germany is viewed differently historically because it was different.
That is not to say OP's grandfather is responsible for all of Nazi Germany's actions, but it is not just "lots of people did shitty things."
That wasn't the reason for the war. Nor were there any country actually try to help the jews before or during the war.
It's also not different from thoughts at the time held throughout the western world. Britain specifically didn't help the jews during ww2 because they thought they would flood Palestine (a british colony) after the war. A famous quote in Canada before ww2 was that "We'd take as many as we can, but none was too much." America as well famously turned away boat loads of jews.
Depending on how you define "country" (as opposed to just "a large fraction or majority of its citizens"), Denmark did in fact help Jews, at least Danish ones.
And the story of Bulgaria is .. complicated. Again, they protected Bulgarian Jews in practice.
Portugal helped not only Portuguese Jews, but many others as well. In particular, they generally allowed a huge number of refugees (16% of the country's population), including Jews, into the country.
It's true that the main Allied powers were not particularly going out of their way to help Jews, but "any country" is a high bar.
>It was only afterwards that evidence of holocaust was verified and/or believed.*
The reports from the Polish government in exile did not make front page news. I'd still stand by the earlier statement:
> Saving the Jews was not on any country's radar entering WWII.
You might argue that Poland wanted to save the Jews, but at the point that reports of mass murder were coming out of Germany in 1941, the Polish government no longer had a country to manage. They had exited WWII as losers.
Reports of mass murder of Jews weren't verified by the USG until 1942. I would still argue that saving the Jews did not even crack the top 10 reasons for the USG invading Europe. After all, they verified these reports and still waited 2 years before making landfall.
I absolutely agree with these.
> That wasn't the reason for the war.
This is false. Hitler spoke and wrote at length about the "Jewish problem." It wasn't the _only_ reason for the war but it certainly was _a_ reason for the war. Even the war against the USSR was framed as against "Jewish Bolsheviks."
This is aside from the fact that OP referenced their grandfather being a member of the SS. The SS was _not_ the German army. The SS was the military organization of the Nazi party - often conflicting with the army to achieve their goals. They enforced racial policy in Germany and its conquests, ran the concentration camps and death camps, and were specifically tasked with eliminating Jews.
Perhaps it is because of the collective guilt of not having done enough for Jews at the time, but people often gloss over the explicitly racial and antisemitic aspect of World War II. The extermination of Jews was not a byproduct, it was one of the key goals.
For further detail, I encourage the interested reader to check out "The War Against the Jews" by Lucy Davidowitz.
Edit: “sins” -> “war crimes”
The Nazis invaded countries and then systematically got to the task of murdering their entire totally harmless Jewish population, simply because of their ethnicity.
There was no possible military or tribal gain or anything, it was just pure racial hatred.
What's especially horrifying is that Germany was a very advanced civilization using sophisticated and systematic means to accomplish this.
Very happy to make an introduction if needed
In my opinion, no. However, it gets complicated when one's status is derived from misdeeds of the predecessors.
I've found people's handwriting deteriorate as time has gone by... cursive is rarer to come by (leaving the 'legibility' argument aside), typing has certainly contributed to this, but some people still write on boards to explore ideas and boy are those diagrams and writings unreadable.
If the author posted some samples of the grandfather's notes (withholding personal information), that would have added a very personal touch to the article indeed, and also ensured his ancestor's work gets recorded by archive.com.
edit: grammar.
Other people here, what did you use? I see there are a ton of options - Getty-Dubay is mentioned below but there seem to be many other similar systems.
My writing was much more legible then.
What I suspect is most typical? - My grandfather on my dad's side was illiterate and my grandma (his wife) is barely literate, so I don't think she'd ever write down anything more than a grocery list.
Beyond that, if someone wants you to have/read something, they'd give it to you. If someone encrypts their writing or puts it behind a login, it's because they don't want you reading it.
1. There are many things I do not want my family to access to today while I am alive, but wish them to have access to them if I were to die. My password vault as an example, they will need access to that to close my estate more easily
2. Many programs by default today have some kind of strong security, simply enabling this security by default to keep unwanted third parties out does not necessarily mean I want to also lock out my family. I many not want the PUBLIC reading it but that is different than not wanting family to read it. It also could be related to #1
and/or you assume the only thing of value after a person is dead is the details of the financial institutions
both of which are flawed and erroneous assumptions
Also has the password to my yubikey - which also has the private key on it.
Only myself and my wife have access to said box, so if I die, then she can get to all my stuff, if we both die then the kids can get to stuff.
I hope we found every relevant friend and invited them to the funeral. But as he travelled a lot, they are all over the planet, and the chance we found them all is basically zero. The only reason we found out about his first serious girlfriend was because he told about her a week before on the phone.
We went to his country, hired a van, stuffed cleaned out his apartment, cancelled every service we found out, then went back home. We presume everything settled, but you have to know about a service to cancel it. I hope whoever hired his house did not get too much trouble with angry debtors and such.
We found out about sides of him we never knew about. There might be other things, we'll never know. This is very hard for my parents.
Some unscrupulous companies read obituaries and send a bill. Really. We had 2 companies billing him for services never delivered, just hoping the heirs would pay them.
We did not manage to enter his gmail account. Google did not grant us access even when presenting a death certificate. They suggested we contacted an USA judge, and required everything done according to USA law, even if everything relevant happened in the EU. I still feel bitter about their total lack of sympathy and cooperation.
We did in fact have access for a few hours by using his cell phone, for which he gave us the pin code. But moving the phone to another country triggerred some safety mode and Google wanted the full password.
Trouble with Google was: They agreed we had right for access. But their process was built with the assumption that only people in the USA could die.
All Kinds of things, I am 99% paperless at this point so all my info is digital...
It can arguably be morally questionable to read and/or publish some writings if the author wrote them with the intention of keeping them private forever. Of course, if the deceased doesn't tell you you'd have to guess. At the same time the person is dead so you can't exactly hurt their feelings, and presumably they knew the risk of writing something down is that we it might be read by the non-intended audience.
Though you can hurt the feelings of other people who know the deceased and/or have a vested interest in controlling their legacy. You might also hurt people who are the subject of those writings.
I think I understand what you mean though, with digital assets one can actually prevent private writings and thoughts from being read by others after death, if that's what the author actually desires, in a way you really can't do with physical assets. This is arguably good as it better honors the wishes of the deceased.
However, in this case this is a memoir, which are generally wrote to be read.
I'm with you though, I want my thoughts to die with me.
And also as a safety measure I ended up transcribing the physical version to digital anyway.
Most of it is notes in regards to studying and coming up with my game designs, but there are also personal life events and last year, some pandemic commentary I included in part just to document parts of this crazy period of time I lived through.
2020 was actually a bad year for writing though, and I only wrote about 47,000 words total last year (and 2021 even worse, I've still only written a couple of entries for this year). Pandemic screwed up my morning 'Go to Starbucks and write in the diary while drinking coffee' habit.
But one thing I'm planning to do for the digital years is to (eventually) print out a copy via Lulu or something, so there's still a physical copy somewhere. Also my digital version is in Markdown plain-text on my Dropbox, so it's in the cloud and on every computer I've got.
Also eventually I'll probably burn that plus some video/board game files onto a gold archive disc, so it will have a decent chance at still being readable 100+ years in the future, assuming there are still means of reading optical discs.
Also, a well considered 45,000 words might be better for the long term than 123,000 words that are stream of consciousness. A lot less to read later, if nothing else.
It also wasn't quite a stream of consciousness. I did have specific things I talked about, usually written as a quick bulleted list in a notes app to remind me ahead of time because I was always days or weeks behind anyway.
It's just that I was trying to explain full game ideas and the thought processes that led me to the different ideas I was trying with game prototypes, what worked and what didn't, and also served as a rough game manual when I wanted to revisit the game idea later (which I've done several times).
Also I tend to be pretty verbose, which is evident by my Hacker News and Reddit comments.
And of course I regularly export my entries to PDF and text files which I keep backed up in several places. While not fool proof I believe it is enough to ensure it is all available if I were to suddenly die tomorrow. Perhaps a few recent entries might get lost if they cannot access the most recent entries locked in Day One but the vast majority should remain.
Obviously I don't know if any kids or grandkids (if I have any one day) will ever read all I have written but it will at least be there should they want to :)
I don't journal for them though. I do it for myself. Day One prompts me each day to review past entries for the day which I love. I also like to sit down from time to time and read back to past memories. It is full not just for writing but photos, videos, news articles, conversations I've had online, voice memos and a whole bunch of other things. Obviously the videos and voice recordings are not possible in the printed versions but they are all exported and backed up.
If anyone reading this is thinking of keeping a journal I can't recommend Day One enough! It is one of the few apps I don't mind paying the yearly subscription for which says a lot as I detest subscription apps generally.
Treasures of history right there.
My family probably won't be able to log into my custom made blog. It will go on for a few years then the domain will expire.
My phone which gets unlocked with fingerprint or a 6 digit pin will remain locked forever. My computer, also with a secure password and encrypted hard drive will remain locked.
All my accounts with secure passwords will remain unreachable.
My dropbox which contains all my unpublished notes and books will probably expire and get deleted.
I'll have to print some instructions and lock them in a safe for my family.
Emigration stories to America are really interesting. My Great-Great-Grandfather was tied to the ship's mast 2x for being a "bad" boy at 10 years old.
Another ancestor was one of the first martyrs of my church when a mob marched against them in Nauvoo. He deterred the mob at gunpoint 2x and was a marked man after that. He was later caught, beat and whipped to death.
I believe family history/geneology is very important, and we should be researching to see what was sacrificed on our behalf, and also documenting our own lives for our descendant's benefit.
Some resources: ancestry.com familysearch.org
Q: In the Singularity is Near, you also discussed an intriguing invention, which you called the "Document Image and Storage Invention", or DAISI for short. But you concluded that it really wouldn't work out. Could you talk a little bit about that?
RK: ... The big challenge, which I think is actually important almost philosophical challenge -- it might sound like a dull issue, like how do you format a database, so you can retrieve information, that sounds pretty technical. The real key issue is that software formats are constantly changing. People say, "well, gee, if we could backup our brains and I talk about how that will be feasible some decades from now. Then the digital version of you could be immortal, but software doesn't live forever, in fact it doesn't live very long at all if you don't care about it if you don't continually update it to new formats.
Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted. ...
Q: You said there's no technological solution. What about creating standards that would be maintained by the community, or would be widespread enough that future …
We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work. I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes.
And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn’t really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access.
So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest.
As a genealogist, I have thought a lot about solutions to preserve data long term that don't have physical limitations of microfiche or paper media, or the problem of computers crashing, subscriptions lapsing, or for-profit online services shutting down (see "Ancestry deleted 10 years of my family's history", https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/myfamily-shuttered-ance...)
Maybe 10 years ago, a few people in the Silicon Valley futurist community came up with the idea of a ball or disc etched with gradually smaller text an excerpt from the Old Testament, translated into multiple languages. It was kind of a Rosetta Stone ideal ... The plan was these balls/discs could be seeded across the world so even if there was some great calamity or the loss of written languages, future civilizations could resurrect them.
There are many limitations of applying this idea to genealogy or any written record, including cost and the inability to update the text.
It made me think that a more realistic solution to the genealogy preservation problem aligns with Kurzweil's "most primitive" take: Preserve core records on paper, share them widely with relatives and cousins, and use an easy-to-understand versioning system. This could also be applied to other family records, such as the grandfather's notes.
We know high quality paper can last hundreds of years. It can be easily copied and spread, potentially allowing the information to last thousands of years, as evidenced by Roman, Greek, and early Chinese dynastic records and literature that can still be read today.
What encoding - ASCII or Unicode? UTF-8, or UTF-16?
What type of filesystem - FAT32, exFAT, ext4?
What physical medium - HDD or SSD?
OP's question goes deeper than just the file format.
.txt doesn't address the content - something like tables of rainfall needs structure inside the text rather than runs of words. CSV? XML? Markdown or HTML tables? Audio, image, video, or more intricate things like a 3D model of a building?
And it doesn't address the hardware (that PDP tape drive), who has a laptop with an floppy, Iomega Zip, CD or DVD or Blu-Ray drive at all these days? What are you going to do with grandad's SSD with built-in encryption?
http://blogs.harvard.edu/lamont/2021/05/05/ray-kurzweil-on-l...
"The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history." (https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/)
"For the production of nano inscribed nickel wafers or plates, the archival data in the form of pdf format is first submitted and organized sequentially or indexed systematically. After file conversion and other preparation for NanoRosetta processing, the documents or other data are then recorded onto a glass wafer by modulating a laser beam in a spiral or concentric manner using a polar raster direct laser etch. A matrix process in electroforming creates “father” nickel master from the inscribed glass wafer. An intermediate “mother” and final ”son” can then be generated from this nickel “father” master wafer. For mass production, polymer copies can also be provided in lieu of nickel “sons.” We also have the ability to combine digital data (CD or DVD) and analog human readable formats on the same disc." (https://nanorosetta.com/technology/)
A stopped clock is right twice a day, so it's all the more impressive that Kurzweil is always wrong.
In 2001, the dominant OSes was Windows NT (still around), Apple was experimenting with BSD (experiment succeeded), and Linux was moving up fast (yup). The file formats were ASCII (still there), DOC 97 (still read by modern Microsoft), and PDF. Unicode support was still spotty, but it doesn't really matter because you can easily convert any known format from that time with iconv.
Why was Kurzweil so wrong? For the same reason he always is: simple minded extrapolation. Yes, if you took computer formats from before the 90s, they changed rapidly and quickly became unreadable. But that stopped happening as standards became solidified and (importantly) as billions of consumers started using the standards. There was a time when you could buy a computer with a strange byte size or that used EBCDIC instead of ASCII. But once there are a billion users for something, it's going to be supported effectively forever. The 8 bit byte and ASCII format are never going to be revisited until our civilization has collapsed because they are good enough. Why do we use the Roman alphabet instead of something better, like Hangul? Because the advantages of Hangul are not enough to override centuries of inertia.
I should go through it someday. I know it’s probably a psychiatric students dream. A complete documentation of someone’s entire life, with associated medicine schedule (and eventually, ECT schedule). I imagine there’s some value to it.
Really don’t know where to start with it though.
> he was a man like any other. He had hopes and dreams. Triumphs and failures. Faith and doubt.
I write a lot of notes. I imagine there are some great takeaways in there. And sadly, I'm not very optimistic about those having any impact, especially if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. Mortality... Blah.
For just one example: one of my great great grandmother's was living in the desert and quick thinking when a son was hit in the face with an axe blade, stitched it up with her sewing kit and needle. He survived and recovered. Its just one story, but it's fun to tell in the family
Having the "revelation" that XYZ important person are simply humans like the rest of us is an adjustment of those views.
And I would argue that while it may not be groundbreaking, it is no less poignant.
By taking the hero off the pedestal they become our equal, which means we too are capable of being important to someone.