But at the same time, those recent warnings from the internet pioneer Vint Cerf about storage technologies becoming obsolete and the advent of a "digital dark age" highlight a profound fear: precious things are now only a corrupted hard drive or system upgrade away from being lost, for good.
All this makes him quite the exception in Iganga, but across Uganda this young man is by no means a solo pioneer and his store is by no means unique.
A pioneer in labour activism and a prominent Red Clydesider, she was one of five activists who in 1920 became the first women to be elected to Glasgow city council.
One of Blake's heroes is Mala, the dubstep pioneer who shook dub's steady beats on to a parallel axis – Blake traces the line further, going past Burial's night bus and into the coffee house and the jazz club.
From more recent times there are the Bulgari pearl earrings that Taylor wore in the 1973 film Ash Wednesday, alongside Monroe's pearl necklace given by the baseball superstar DiMaggio, made by the company of the pioneer of cultured pearls, Kokichi Mikimoto.
In DECC, as well as stickers showing people the stairs as a reminder not to use the lift unnecessarily, staff get regular briefings about energy saving and talks from outside speakers such as celebrity sociologist and Third Way pioneer Anthony Giddens, and Science Museum director Chris Rapley, while a competition to cut energy use is about to be launched between different floors.
The son of a doctor who helped pioneer the treatment of HIV, he was clearly upset at Nigel Farage's contemptible pre-election attempt to tap into resentment of foreign-born HIV-positive patients.
He was briefly infatuated with Arnie Graf, an American pioneer of "community organising," but not committed enough to stop him being bulldozed by the old machine as the election came into view.
"We questioned why we would use the surname of the father," recalls Jo Robinson, commune pioneer, "then we thought, why should it even be the mother's surname?
The Los Angeles-born special effects pioneer famous for his fighting skeletons and cowboy-fighting dinosaurs influenced generations of film-makers.
Mumbai is in some respects well placed to pioneer new forms of what have been called 'post-car' approaches to urban transport planning.
