AllPeople is an idea that was born in 1988.

Back then, the Internet didn’t exist.

There were no laptops.

There were no smartphones.

We needed recording studios to create digital films or soundtracks.

You had to go through film and then scanning to get digital photos.

Only texts could easily be digitized.

But even back then, I was immersed in this new digital era.

It seemed to me to hold out so many possibilities.

A simple observation then occurred to me.

Digital content could be preserved indefinitely, without being altered, by transferring it to new media as they deteriorated.

The 0s and 1s are preserved identically, they remain exactly the same on the different media.

So it was already possible to keep these digital files forever.

But what could be done with them?

And that’s when I thought that we could probably keep what people have in them and want to share.

What they want to give to others, their unique points of view, their tastes, their know-how and lots of other things.

That’s when I said to myself that we had to stop burning libraries every time someone died.