The Road Ahead Left Behind

[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.

[Aleron Ives]

Have you opened the files in a hex editor to see what their magic (first four) bytes are?

It's unlikely that EPUB will become unreadable in the future, considering it's not a proprietary format; ZIP, HTML, CSS, and JPEG are all foundational elements of the web. Even if they get replaced by better formats in the future, there is such a wide variety of software that can read them you'd be hard pressed to find zero programs that work.

[Sirtel]

I have 15-year-old epub and mobi books in my calibre library and 20-year-old html files in Dropbox, all still perfectly readable. I doubt they'll become suddenly unreadable in the next 20 years. In 100 years, probably, but I'll be beyond caring then.

[nana77]

Searching a bit it gives this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_L..._template_(OMT)

https://github.com/CohesionForce/hla-toolkit
https://github.com/hla-dev/fom-tools

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...t_environments
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lis...t_environments

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by The Old Man

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.

Actually such CD existed on DOS, before Win95 existed.

I've installed old DOS, Win 3.x and win 9x multimedia CDs. Some needed an ancient copy of Netscape or MS Internet Explorer. No, they mostly won't work even on Win2K or XP, never mind Win7 or Win1x. You need DOSBox, or a VM. Some work on WINE 32 bit on Linux, if you add an old Netscape.

So Microsoft "Broke" loads of Multimedia over 20 years ago!

[jackm8]

Originally Posted by The Old Man

It played on a Windows 95 computer and I remember at the time thinking this was fabulous. The future of publishing was here.

The CD will not play on a Windows 10 or 11 computer nor does there seem to be an app that will play it

Windows ebook, not playing on modern Windows. And they wonder why they've a bad reputation amongst users.

[Quoth]

Loads of Windows stuff doesn't work on current Windows.

[JSWolf]

It could be the programs are 16-bit. 64-bit Windows will not run 16-bit programs.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It could be the programs are 16-bit. 64-bit Windows will not run 16-bit programs.

Also many 32 bit VB 6.0 doesn't run on windows, especially if serial I/O OCX iis used. They do work on WINE, even on 64 bit linux.

[The Old Man]

So, I imagined in 1996 a digital book, a biography, say about Jackie Robinson, that would not only have pictures but videos of his stealing home, prancing off first base before stealing second. A Civil War book with moving maps depicting the battle, sound clips from authors,, etc., etc., etc.
You get the idea. Never happened. Too expensive. Too many copyrights.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by The Old Man

So, I imagined in 1996 a digital book, a biography, say about Jackie Robinson, that would not only have pictures but videos of his stealing home, prancing off first base before stealing second. A Civil War book with moving maps depicting the battle, sound clips from authors,, etc., etc., etc.
You get the idea. Never happened. Too expensive. Too many copyrights.

You'd have to have created the content yourself and also used older PD content.

People often make this mistake with 1st books (full poems or lyrics owned by others) or play / movie scripts (included music). BBC discovered they had problems with Shoestring 2nd series home release due to music royalties. It might be why there were a lot of cuts on re-showing.