[The Old Man]

In 1996, 97 Bill Gates wrote a book called The Road Ahead. It came with a CD ROM that contained a digital copy of the book and other video, audio and graphic files. It played on a Windows 95 computer and I remember at the time thinking this was fabulous. The future of publishing was here.

A few weeks ago I decided to read this book again to see how well Bill did in his prognostications. Alas, out of print. Used copies are available. I bought the book and CD on eBay. I remembered how advanced the digital version was. Links within the text to the web, video, audio, etc. Marvelous! The printed book, of course, didn’t have these links.

The CD will not play on a Windows 10 or 11 computer nor does there seem to be an app that will play it. I was able to “break” the CD. Well, sort of…
There are 259 BMP pictures, 36 video files in AVI and XVD format and 10 audio files in WAV format. These can be seen, and heard.

The digital book text, and I assume the hyperlinks, are contained in four files with an OMT extension. I fooled around with these with no results. Anyone know anything about OMT files?

It makes you think. 30 years ago a book published before its time, now unplayable on a modern computer. Will you be able to read those epub, mobi and akz books 30 years from now? And, if copy protected, you can’t sell them, give them away, leave them to your kids and - probably - not be able to read them on a modern electronic device.