The digital culture that has developed in the last thirty years has so far failed to establish a system of memory and preser­vation. Computers and other digital media have penetrated everyday life to an extent that nobody was able to foresee only a couple of years ago. Yet little is done to preserve the legacy of the machines that are changing our world. So what will become of bits and bytes when they grow old? Hardware problems, ever-changing soft ware, "calculated wear and tear" are some of the reasons why digital media is extremely hard to preserve and collect. While computer gurus keep telling us that digital data is "forever" because it does not decay the way more traditional "hard copy material" (paper, vinyl, etc.) does, users of digital media know better: text files which were stored ten years ago on what was then a standard floppy disk are not accessible anymore with today's computers; JEPG-picture files that were encoded with one type of image processing software cannot be opened with the product from a competing company; and the hard disk on which this text has been saved is likely to crash within the next three to five years.