Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
That said, it is arguable that digital copies will, in fact, outlast paper. Paper is an extremely stable medium, especially when made from the right materials (e.g. acid-free paper). It is unclear what will happen to the exabytes of data that will need to be migrated constantly in the future, lest it be lost.
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Agreed. I think your odds of using a 15-year old paperback book is easier than getting a word processor file open from the 90s. I just engaged in this recently , trying to get a ton of files open from a Pentium 60mhz computer. Win 3.1 files (originally sourced in some sort of DOS word processor). Getting it to open and convert without losing a large hunk of the file took me hours of tinkering. Even getting the files off of the 100mb HDD was difficult. The HDD would not work on a modern IDE or USB adapter. Ended up with file copying operations in DOS via floppy and shuttling via a USB floppy drive.
I still didn't convert them all. I gave my dad step-by-step instructions, the original files on a usb stick, and left it up to him. I don't have the hours it would take to open-convert-save every one of those files to turn them into relatively modern Word docs.
I imagine we'll see more of these problems in the future. At work we had some powerpoint files and such from Office 98 that cannot be opened under XP/Office 2003. Never did figure out how to open and convert them. I anticipate 16-bit files from the win98 era are the problem now...wonder how long until 32 bit files become the difficult ones.
The term generally used for this is digital obsolescence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence