Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Well, mostly it's a good argument for backups and standardized formats. I can open an HTML document from 10 years ago, and a TXT file from 20 years ago. Acting like digital files will ultimately fail, so why back them up, is a lot like assuming paper books will rot, so you leave them out in the rain. Properly stored digital files can last as long as paper, if not longer, if you store them properly.
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Text files lack italics and a lot of other important stuff. They are VERY basic.
This discussion reminds me of a recent experience. My dad is an amateur writer of sorts. I was trying to pull some files from his old computer - it used to be my grandpa's - an old Packard Bell Pentium 75mhz computer.
First I tried hooking up the drive using the cabling in a USB enclosure (can't get the drive out of the system easily). It is IDE 200mb HDD but with no master/slave jumper - I couldn't get anything to pick up the drive properly. I ended up shuffling files via floppy disks (luckily we found some around, because no one sells them any more). I had to wire up another floppy drive because the one in the box is dead - luckily I had one circa ~2000 that still works (given I bend the pins a little).
The files are
probably StarOffice files (after much googling). They are .doc extension. Originally they came off of a Tandy computer ~1990s.
At first glance, Word opened them OK, with a conversion of sorts. But scrolling 7-8 pages in, the doc kinda self-destructs and goes to funky random characters. They open fine under Windows 3.1 / Wordpad / Wordperfect 6.0 for Windows on the 75mhz PC.
I tried special StarOffice converters. They won't install under win7. I installed manually (more googling). Converters don't recognize the files (don't know if they are really StarOffice or not) and require some trickery to work under anything newer than Office 98. I tried OpenOffice. No luck. Finally, I had luck getting them to open with a little effort under Wordperfect for Windows - it seems to the be only program that still has the legacy conversion code loitering around.
All of this for some .doc files.
Now imagine how this kind of thing is going to happen over the coming decades. Programs from the 16-bit era already won't run most of the time without emulation (thus, DOSbox...so some solutions come about).
In another 10-20 years, those kinds of digital files probably won't be useful. You may have the files themselves. But finding something to read the media, to properly open the files, etc...is going to become more and more difficult.