The Inventors of the Internet Are Trying to Build a Truly Permanent Web

If you wanted to write a history of the Internet, one of the first things you would do is dig into the e-mail archives of Vint Cerf. In 1973, he co-created the protocols that Internet servers use to communicate with each other without the need for any kind of centralized authority or control. He has spent the decades since shaping the Internet’s development, most recently as Google’s “chief Internet evangelist.” Thankfully, Cerf says he has archived about 40 years of old e-mail—a first-hand history of the Internet stretching back almost as far as the Internet itself. But you’d also have a pretty big problem: a whole lot of that e-mail you just wouldn’t be able to open. The programs Cerf used to write those e-mails, and the formats in which they’re stored, just don’t work on any current computer you’d likely be using to try to read them.