Many of the NPR audio archives were at risk because it turned out that the audio tape formulations of the 70's were defective. Many CDRs and writable DVDs use dyes that will become corrupt in about a decade. Charles Stross has the early 21st century comprise a "digital dark ages" in some of his books because of a proliferation of proprietary/DRM formats.
Oh yes, Iron Sunrise was cool. Love Ian M Banks too, The Culture is incredible as a vision of a far future utopia. I've not read any Vernor Vinge but will check it out, recommend any starting points?
Read "A Fire Upon the Deep" then "Deepness in the Sky", those are his best works that I've read. His other stuff is solid ("Rainbow's End", "Tatja Grimm's World", etc.) but not nearly as excellent.
Most floppy disks only have a life span of 10 years, there are a number of computer games form the 90s for which we only have hacked/pirated versions of because no-one has a 100% working original anymore.
I went to a lunch-time talk at WWDC'09 on this stuff (I forget the name of the guy presenting unfortunately, but I presume he was mentioned in those articles). Absolutely mind-blowing.
Two things I recall, apart from the stunning images:
* This was all done in analogue of course; the camera of the lunar orbiter had a 24" aperture from memory, and essentially a mechanical film processing lab onboard (then stitched back on earth by manual layout and re-photographing). "They knew how to build stuff back then!"
* As you said, he was emphasising that while data formats are important, the hardware is even more crucial. For the tapes they were recovering, there were only 4 machines left in the world that could read them... and only one human who knew how they worked and could repair them! I went and started reading up on the long-now project after that.
* Bonus recollection: the reason the tapes hadn't degraded and lost their magnetic material, like many others their age, was because the binding agent used was... whale oil.
It's sad, but an aspect of human nature. It's all too easy to avoid responsibility, push it off as someone else's problem, concentrate on more immediate problems, etc. Or to live in denial about the limited lifespan of magnetic tape, for example.
