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Examples of Obsolete File Formats?
reedk writes "I was having a discussion with my boss about long-term archives, and we got on the topic of older files becoming un-readable by newer versions of software. Not only are those old Ami pro files unreadable by today's common word processors, but I have heard that newer version of Office can't consistently open very old versions of Office documents. With the increasing retention periods being forced by current and coming regulations, this could become a problem of compliance in the future. We want to pursue this topic, but to build support for it internally, I am looking for examples of older file formats that are no longer readable by newer version of the same software or due to the market death of the product. If true, this would lend a lot of force behind moving to products that have an open file format. Can Slashdot readers come up with examples of this, or ways they have had to get around these kinds of problems?"
Easy as that. I guess PDF/PS is common enough too stay for long, and it's possible too make all prints become PDFs.
Pee....
Dee....
Eff....
For this same reason I usually suggest to people that with very long term backups (assuming the backups actually survive) try to save your data in non propriatery forms. I am not trying to make a closed source vs open source argument, however if you want to save a large batch of word documents that you will not need to access in the near future try to convert them to plaintext where you can. Not fullproof, and not applicable for the majority of situations, but there are a few things that we can assume will not happen in the near future: 1) ascii will probably not die, so plaintext is often a good idea, 2) many of the more common image formats will probably be supported in one form or another (gif, jpg), you know stuff like that.
AppleWorks had no idea what to do with AppleWorks documents - assuming you can get a mac to read an Apple ][ floppy in the first place...
For that matter, is there anything that can read VisiCalc files?
Flame ON!
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Allthought not usable for all kinds of data I guess, but do you expect to find a format which can handle them all? I guess that atleast as long as you stay with free software you can find out HOW the format worked. With a proprietarian(spelling..) fileformat you might be screwed.
I'd shove it in a PDF. Even if you can't manage it, utilities like FileJuicer can strip the main parts out of the document.
Well, if it is an open format, nothing is stopping someone from writing something to read it and convert it to something "modern". If it is a closed format, and no longer in use, then the owner really should open it up. Would it be possible to setup an escrow of (closed) file formats - automatic open if the company goes defunct or individual dies.
Also, if you know what the end result data is supposed to look like, would it be possible to start "decompiling" it? Works with binary executables (sometimes)...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Formats that are worth using for old (and sometimes new) documents:
* RTF (quite universal)
* PDF (somewhat universal, will always have the same formatting)
* Plaintext (never becomes unreadable unless the file's character set ceases to exist somehow)
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
To start, they used open records requests to get the details of people who recently voted, and details of those who recently died.
The goal was to find people who continued to vote after they died, which may sound funny, but is still happening.
The data the government data gave us was on magnetic reels. The data on the reels was stored in a fixed-width EBCDIC format. Talk about a dead format!
It turned out the local college still had a working magnetic reel reader, and was able to help me get the data out of EBCDIC into ASCII, but the project was cancelled anyway.
Only kidding. I do have Wordstar 3.3 files made under CP/M that will still open though...
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Some of you can probably supply anecdotal evidence, No? I'd like to make broad reccomendations in the future, and hope that some of you have little else to do.
Thanks!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Smaller programs especially that we use in engineering become obsolete on a daily basis it seems. A lot of electrical/computer engineering programs especially for devices or programming these devices. Often these companies get bought out or lost forever. Then there's all the cad and simulation software. I can't even think of it all but i've come across a lot of essentially unusable stuff as a result.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Well, yes and no. Let's say Ami Pro file format were fully documented. (I have no idea whether it is or isn't.) At what point would it be worthwhile for your company to actually write a file converter? I can certainly imagine a situation where it might be a cost-effective thing to do, but it's not the kind of thing that anyplace I've ever worked does routinely.
And from a retention point of view, I don't know if you _want_ whatever scumbag lawyer is subpoenaeing documents from you to be able to demand that you write him a converter. I'd rather be able to say "Here are our VisiCalc files. Enjoy!"
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
To read TI-99/4A written Display Variable 80 (aka DV80) files- in which all of my early experiments with machine language and my high school word processing papers are saved in. But- and this is a big but- I've got to find a 5.25", 360k drive to do it. So I've kept a few around- I doubt I could still find them new.
Whenever possible, I convert those to plain text- and store them on CDs.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What about the storage media itself? I believe that the latest technology used in long-term durable media, in an easy-to-read format (at least for the moment), is quite old.
Here come da fudge!
A Boss I used to have that worked on many DARPA sponsored projects used to have to archive ALL data related to those projects. In order to this, not only did we have to archive the data itself, we had to archive a PC with all the pertinent software necessary to view/compile/manipulate that data including workstations, servers, you name it. Of course the government standard may be over kill for many companies.....
where possable use paper documents. there user readable and have a long life .
It was, frankly, awful. Someone had clearly designed it as some kind of "One size fits all" type thing, except that as it was text based it didn't really work that well. Typically graphics, for example, had to be represented by a block that contained a filename: yep, graphics, sound, anything more complicated than a word or a number had to be put in a separate file. Neither my collegues nor I could understand why anyone would try to put so much effort into making it look hierarchical and extensible, and then not include support for data that isn't well represented as text. Hell, most of the files on our PCs can't easily be represented efficiently or usefully as text.
It was also remarkably inefficient. To give you some idea, when we converted it into plain text files in a more efficient form, the files were typically 60-70% smaller. I've always found gzip a good indicator of the efficiency of a file format - usually, plain text compresses to about 30% of the original size. In this case, it was frequently 10%.
Absolutely horrible format. I hope I never have to work with it again.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
XML sukz0rz! I'll take the -1 flamebait as AC, so you don't have to.
While the file format itself may be a standard wrapper, there's many codecs out there that are obsolete and that only ever had proprietary drivers written for early MS Windows versions, for example.
It first depends on what you want to achieve with them, do you want them to be read only, or do you wish to edit them as well in the future? They may not be too much of an issue but something to think about.
For images, I would look at the past to see what file formats were around before the internet was mainstream, circa 1995. I remember Paintbrush PCX as a file format, but haven't since a file in that format since then. TGAs and TIFFs were around and still are today, that might be one possibility. You also have SVG formats, and that being an XML file format, allows you to convert it to another format in the future.
As for text documents, one definite possibility is XML. You can convert to many other formats from XML (HTML, PDF, RTF, etc.) Another possibility is RTF and plain text, though you might lose some of the more advance features. You might even have to extend the XML to deal with anything special in your files. Latex or Tex might be another solution since it's still around, though I have no experience with it, beyond being awware of them.
I would also recommend keeping a copy of the original software you used at the time, in case you need to get access to the files with a program that actually created. This way, you still have some sort of access. If that means you need to keep a copy of the original O/S as well, so be it.
But even so, the other day I got a shock, seeing how quickly the door closes.
A professor at the university where I work turned up with his original doctoral thesis from 1989 on disk. 3" disk, to be exact - the format that famously lost out to the ubiquitous 3.5" disk. He had written it on the Amstrad PCW 8256, a weird British CP/M machine from the mid 80s. No matter, I have several of these rotting in my loft!
But they don't boot. At this point you brace yourself for the long haul. The drive belts used to perish on those models, but look! There are loads of drive belts in the Maplin Electronics catalogue. You just need to order the right size.
No problem! You carefully dismantle the drive and dig out the belt. You broke it? No problem! Just makes it easier to measure. You can only measure the circumference, whereas Maplin only quotes the diameter? No problem! You are about to use Pi for the first and last time in your entire life! Order one that's slightly too big, and one that's slightly too small, just to feel safe.
When the belt arrives, you fit it. You carefully re-assemble the drive. You insert that CP/M boot disk that you carefully prepared in 1987, the one with the custom PROFILE.SUB that copies important utilities to RAMDISK. You power up and it boots! You feel young again.
Now your try your Locoscript boot disk - remember, Locoscript did not run under CP/M - it was an entire little operating system unto itself. It works, and when you swap disks (f7) you can read the Prof's work! It's yesterday once more! Shoo-bee-doo-lang-lang!
At this point I got lucky - I had the LOCOLINK package including the special Amstrad Bus PC parallel port link cable, so I was able to go Locosript PCW -> Locoscript PC -> Wordstar 3.3 -> Wordperfect 5.1 -> Winword. Those nice chaps at Ansible could have shortened that trip by a step or two.
In the absence of the proprietary LOCOLINK cable I could also have gone Locoscript 1 PCW -> Locoscript 2 PCW -> ASCII on PCW -> ASCII on PC via Kermit -> Winword. But I'd have lost all his bolds and underlines.
Now I got a fine bottle of Metaxa Greek Brandy out of this exchange, so I'm not exactly complaining. But I was shocked to realise that his files were younger than my eldest child, and she's got two years of school ahead of her.
In the absence of any credible international initiative to create a reliable permanent archive format, I'd say print it to acid-free paper, multiple copies in separate places, and hope for the best, like Cassiodorus.
XML! Open-source! Standards-compliant! Rag-doll physics! (Oh wait, wrong buzzword-bank...)
Sig Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I keep double clicking on these ".mpg.avi.jpg.Donkey Bukkake Porn.wmv.exe" files and nothing happens!
Maybe I should start using Windows?
Back in the day, mainstream software providers included "upward compatibility" in all new software releases. In other words, any data or files created by the software from PP1 release would be readable by whatever the current version happened to be, including any in between.
Modern code developers seemingly have no concept of upward compatibility. More's the pity.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I contract out as a technical writer. For my primary client, I strongly encouraged and then delivered a plaintext solution that uses plaintext files stored repositoried in CVS, using the reStructured Text markup conventions processed through Docutils; and an XSL:FO template that is used by XEP to render the DocutilsXML to PDF. An autobuild system updates our documentation on a nightly basis.
This system has worked superlatively. In addition to creating a documentation solution that will forevermore be accessible without special software, our authors can focus entirely on content without concern for layout and visual appearance, our customers get a reasonably open file format (PDF) that looks as good on-screen as it does in print. It's win-win all around, by my reckoning.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I used to work at a major corporation (you very likely own something made by them) who had a requirement to keep archives of their older engineering documents. The fire-safe was loaded with various tapes ranging back to many dozens of old open-reel tapes.
Of course, they hadn't had the (monstrous) tape drives to actually read these tapes for many years. I have no idea what they thought they were keeping them for.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
Before you can worry about reading individual files, you'll need to get them off the backup media.
Assuming that you've got some hardware that can physically read whatever it is, what about the backup software?
For example:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=305381, complete with quote "this behavior is by design".
No, don't laugh.
Realplayer 10 doesn't support Realplayer 2 "out of the box". It will happily connect to Real to download said codec if you want - although obviously this assumes that Real will always be with us.
Any MS Word ships with only one version of Equation Editor; it was 1.0 in Word 2, 2.0 in Word 6, and probably 3.0 or higher now. It means you cannot edit your old equations after switching to a newer version. Therefore most of those who tried to use Word for writing scientific papers left Word after version 6 came out, now only biologists and like still use it because they don't need no bloody math.
I wonder how many "mainstream" programs still read Amiga IFF files (for common types like Deluxe Paint/ILBM, WP files, etc) ... Sort of a more-efficient (binary) predecessor to XML; highly extensible with some basic functionalities you could extend (FORM, BODY, etc)
r /LW80/8lwsdk/docs/filefmts/ilbm.html
I know Gimp supports it via a plugin. Here's a Newtek/Lightwave link:
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/develope
You'd buy a converter from a company that specialized in converters:
http://www.w3.org/Tools/Word_proc_filters.html
Remember, YOU want to know what you're sending to the lawyer BEFORE he does. Being surprised in Court is not a good thing.
Classic example: sharing MS Word files with other word processors. The problem isn't getting at the data in .DOC format (not an easy problem, but one that was solved years ago). The problem is rendering Word formatting using the conventions of other word processors. As anybody who's tried to import complex Word documents into Open Office will testify, that's a problem that's a long way from being solved -- if it ever is.
I've been working on a project for an organization that has a bunch of certificates created in Adobe Illustrator 6. The files are saved in EPS format, which belongs to Adobe, but is very well documented. So accessing the files should be a snap, right? Wrong. I have Adobe Illustrator 11 (better known as Illustrator CS), which uses completely different conventions for creating an EPS file. It can read the old files OK -- but it horribly mungs the formatting. Somebody's going to have to sit down and undo all that munging, which will be a day or two of work. Then we can make the simple change (inserting a new signature), that's the only change we want to make!
So true openness has more to it than knowing what all the bits and bytes do. It's making sure that all the different design teams for different products that use the format (or the same product at different times!) are on the same page when it comes to the fine details.
but with certain companies that are based in the northwest US not following standards and using proprietary extensions
Would that be Nintendo? Or would it be the maker of the other major game console whose name doesn't have a P in it?
I don't understand where you're going there unless the spec allows embeded raster images?
It's straightforward to make an <img /> or <object /> element that contains raster image data. Look up the data: URL scheme.
In the absence of any credible international initiative to create a reliable permanent archive format
I'd guess that CD-R is here to stay, given that it shows 0 signs of becoming unsupported on newly manufactured HW. Every new DVD-ROM drive reads it, and likely so do BD-ROM and HD-DVD-ROM drives. If you don't trust off-site CD-R, then as you said, off-site paper backups using an OCR-friendly font are a safe way to go.
That is, unless you're thinking about timescales in which English is likely to become a dead language. But by then, Christ will likely have come back, and the God of Wisdom will have won the fight against the Entropy Devil.
1)Two copies of archival quality hardcopy stored off site printed using an OCR font.
2)Two copies of archival quality media stored off site saved as RTF as well as the working format.
3) Regular on site archives.
4) Regular on site backups.
At least one off site facility should be a secure storage facility. The other should be accessible 24/7/365, therefore it should be on company property. Each site has paper and media. Archive quarterly.
However, mostly it sounds like you need to hire a real Technical Writer and some competent IT people. This is 101 stuff.
I would guess that most of the retention laws only require that you retain the files, not that you be able to load them into any particular program to make the files useful. So by just retaining the files, you're most likely already complying with the letter of the law.
If someone asks for access to those files, it's their problem/responsibility to make use of them. Of course, if it's something that someone within your company needs, then it would be nice of you to help them access the files in a useful manner.
BTW, translating the files into a different format than that in which they were originally used probably violates the letter of the retention laws.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I was just thinking of that very thing, and was going to make a comment anyway.
Consider the old Motion Pixels MovieCD codec. By today's standards the codec isn't much, and yes, if you happen to own any of the old MovieCDs you would be better served just buying the DVD of the movie.
However, precisely because the MovieCD format was killed deader than hell by the DVD, Motion Pixels went out of business, and the codec source, if it even still exists, is probably in some bankruptcy liquidator's sock drawer - I doubt that short of hiring a private investigator that you could even FIND the person with the source - and even if you did, you would be unlikely to be able to get the code released so that anybody could do anything with it.
www.eFax.com are spammers
You have two different problems here:
1/ physical media: Has it has already pointed out, would you be able to read some magnetic reels, or a 8" floppy disks?
2/ Data format: Binary==Bad; Text==Better. Closed Format==Bad; Open Standard==Better. Closed Source==Bad; Open Source==Better.
But you are lucky. Believe it or not, you are not the first guy affronting these kinds of problems. Solution being:
1/ The lowest technology, the better. You still can go to Altamira or Lascaux and "read" what was painted there about 10/15.000 years ago. Rocks are quite tough too: you still can read Roman inscriptions. Pure vegetal paper (ie: no-chlorinated) on proper atmosphere is quite good too: egyptian papyres are still readeable after almost 4000 years. So: if it is possible (it depends on amount and kind of data) good old paper is the way to go; multiple copies, different places, proper environment conditions. Anything not directly readeable will need to be sure you store the "reading machine" with it *AND* unless we are talking about easy mechanical devices (ie: punch cards), which engineering blueprints should be added to the lot, in case you must build your own drive on an unkown future, you should deploy a strategy to test them from time to time. This way you will promptly discover a failing device and/or and overlooked issue (like your "engine" works at 110V where currently you are using 220V and you forgot about storing a transformer). If at all possible, these planned tests should allow you to move forward the physical support (maybe you can have problems now to read a 3" Amstrad diskette when moving it to 3.5" ten years ago and to a CD now would be trivial).
2/ About electronic formats, go with the Army, man! SGML is still the way to go: easily readeable/parseable, self-documented, and always customizable to your exact needs. Of course don't forget to include your DTD within your media!
That is one of the reasons why serious papers including any maths use LaTeX.
I'd say print it to acid-free paper, multiple copies in separate places, and hope for the best, like Cassiodorus.
How about that, with alternating lines of text and CODE128 (or similar) barcode to make it more easily machine-readable.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
yeah, true, you shouldn't uuencode it...
Best way to make this is to open the JPEG with a text editor and directly use the text data as is
For, after all, a jpeg is just text file with a specific meaning to a specific parser, and the data is already compressed, so...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I'd guess that CD-R is here to stay, given that it shows 0 signs of becoming unsupported on newly manufactured HW.
20 years ago, you could have said the same thing about a 3.5" floppy. When the iMac first came out in, what, 98, it was widely denigrated for not having a floppy. It's now getting increasingly harder to get floppy drives on PCs, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if they were special-order in another 5 years. In 10 years, your .sig file will be larger than the contents of a 1.4 MB floppy, so why would anyone include them on new hardware?
I think the only thing to do about data like this is to keep in on a fileserver, and then move the data as the server gets older. As long as it talks tcp/ip, you'll probably be able to get it off--that's one standard that's not going away for a long time, and will be backwards compatible when it does.
--
$tar -xvf
Actually, the first pioneer BluRay drive to hit the market BDR-1000 has absolutely no support for CD-R or even reading CD's, though it reads and writes every DVD recordable format. While this probably will not be the norm for BluRay or HD-DVD drives, it's certainly not out of the question to imagine a day when your computer can't read a CD-ROM.
1997 or so, seagate sent me a free "jet drive" competition to iomega jazz i guess. 1.3 GB (a lot, at the time) external drive w/ removable cartridges @$40 apiece if i recall correctly.
i loved the way it worked, i needed extra storage, and i put tons of stuff on a couple of the disks.
now i cant get drivers to get it working and all that old data seems to be lost forever.
Some might argue that Quattro Pro is still alive (they're still releasing new versions), but its default spreadsheet format is entirely unsupported by the rest of the world. Every time someone cracks their file format, they make a new one. WB1, WB2, WB3, and now QPW. QPW is already 8 years old and still few have figured it out well enough to even extract data from it. If Corel Office dies, many old spreadsheets will slip into oblivion unless converted manually (open, save as, close, and repeat for each of your 500+ spreadsheets).
The only problem with CD/DVD media is rot.o t.htm
http://www.mv.com/ipusers/richbreton/m/files/cd_r
it's a sig, wtf?
Well, retention periods aren't a major headache. Just produce given file on request and opening it should be a worry of whoever ordered it. Not changing the file format guarantees no original information is lost along the way.
But if you -need- these files internally, just keep one-two boxen with all the legacy software you'd ever need.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Now, playing viv files on windows is a pain, you have to install the archaic vivo player, which was designed for windows 95 or so. Also after years of searching, noone makes an app to convert them to mpg, sans some commercial screen capturing programs that I wouldn't touch. MPlayer plays the files, and Im pretty sure its a simple command to output it into an MPG.
Ever since I've been penguiny, I've wanted to do that - before the MPlayer team decides to depricate vivo support from the latest versions.
With the SDK, which you can download for free, you get full reference of the file formats of WP, Presentation and QuattroPro.
The problem is rather that nobody is interested in creating the conversion filters. For WordPerfect, there is now libwpd, which was built with the aforementioned reference. For QuattroPro, there isn't enough interest.
A secondary problem is that Corel Office programs have, for most of their programs, more powerful/flexible/numerous features than their competition, which can make conversion clumsy.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
"Hey boss, here is the new version"
"Hang on, didn't I tell you to remove that 4kb file reader for the last-last version?"
"Why boss? I mean then people using the old version will suddenly find it has become obsole...t...e...aaaaaaaah I see!!!"
"Good boy! Welcome to Microsoft"
Use open office, for some reason that don't care if you open old office formats, maybe because they are not trying to ass rape you.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
For long-term storage, I'd advocate rich text format, or straight-up text, maybe even HTML. Text is openable by anything, and hasn't changed since it was designed.
antipaucity
20 years ago, you could have said the same thing about a 3.5" floppy.
Difference is that nowadays the typical computer buyer is also the owner of dozens of not hundreds of musical phonorecords in CDDA format. The same couldn't generally be said about a floppy full of MIDI files in the floppy era. Until Sony brings out the SACD Walkman, CDDA is here to stay, and people are going to expect to be able to listen, rip, mix, and burn even on a new computer.
In 10 years, your .sig file will be larger than the contents of a 1.4 MB floppy
From dial-up to broadband, Slashdot's signature still didn't increase beyond 120 characters.
As long as [your file server] talks tcp/ip, you'll probably be able to get [your data] off--that's one standard that's not going away for a long time
Are you sure that 100BASE-TX, or PCI to add network cards that support a new layer 1, will still be supported?
Actually, the first pioneer BluRay drive to hit the market BDR-1000 has absolutely no support for CD-R or even reading CD's
The first few DVD-ROM drives' CD support was spotty as well. But as people demand combination BD/DVD/CD drives, those will become standard equipment.
The company I work for maintains among other things census data, the oldest of which is stored on punchcards. We have the cards, and a reader, but due to being stored in a too moist atmosphere, it's doubtful that the cards (a stack of about a 1000 cards or so) could be read by a punchcard reader.
Luckily, the data has long since been converted to something a little more modern, and stored in am SQL server, but I've always thought that if we needed that data, the most efficient way to get it, would be to use a scanner, with sheet-feeder, scan the cards, as images, and then write a script to process the images to numbers, and then convert that to something useful.
However, the bottom line is, convert data as you go. For some "trivial" data, eg letters and such, pdf/ps might be a good format. But for anything approaching an application, eg spreadsheets, documents with macros, your only bet would be to continiously convert and update the data, as you move from one platform to the next.
As for old text/wordprocessor documents, I've always had good success in getting the essential data with a simple "strings file > plain.txt". But it's not the same as having the actual formated file, ofcourse.
Going with openoffice might help -- not only is the format open, but the code is free, which allows you to archive the implementation as well as the data. I think you'll be able to run code for x86 linux for a long time, even if you might have to emulate the cpu in say 20 years time. It might be possible to do the same for windowscode, ofcourse.
On a personal note, I have some cad drawings made on the Amiga a few years ago, in a format I can't import anywhere; luckily I've exprorted most of that data as postscript so I can at least view it. But it's not good for editing.
Other posters have mentionend RTF as an alternative rich text format, and I think it could be a good choice. Spreadsheets, might be a tougher nut to crack. Although I expect MS Excel should be supported both by MS and varios competitors (open and closed source) for a long while still.
Does rot occur even in archival quality media stored vertically, at the proper temperature, in low humidity?
We have a backlog of Microsoft Works documents that could be traced back as much as 10 years. Unfortunately, these documents cannot be read by any version of Microsoft Office, or any later version of Microsoft Works, that I have tried. so to this day we borrow someone's copy of Microsoft Works 3.0 (ours is lost) every time we set up a new PC.
And, sadly, it wasn't until just recently, maybe the past year or two, that my dad was persuaded to stop making all of his new documents and databases in MS Works 3.0. (As an added bonus, I have gotten him to stop putting his documents in random locations around the hard drive, and start putting them in a folder on the desktop. He still refuses to use "My Documents" for any such purpose.)
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
Are you referring to the 3.25" floppies that look like little 5.25" floppies? I have some of those lying around. I've never seen 3" floppies, maybe that's a Brit thing?
Heh, how about wafer drives? On a Commodore 64? That's fucked up, right there!
For text-based systems you can try and capture the printer output.
Serial is simplest, you would need some trickery to capture the parallel port.
Then some perl to decode the printer escape codes and re-apply formatting.
OK, its not ideal, but it may have the most certain "finish time" of all the options, if you can do it with a serial port.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
You must mean Compaq^H^H^H^H^H^HHewlett Packard. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
...with embedded images and such that were created by Geoworks Ensemble back in the early 1990's, and converting them to another format has proven to be a bit of a pain due to the lack of good export filters in GeoWrite or its successors, and also due to the fact that nobody else seems to be able to read GeoWrite files.
Thankfully, I can still get the PC/GEOS environment to work on various PCs at home, but at some point that won't be an option.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I work in an aerospace division of a very large corporation. I was talking to a design engineer about the FAA's data retention requirements - he said in most cases, it's the life of the product, plus a little cushion. For us, that's about 40 years. In addition to preserving data, you have to be able to recreate the analysis - so if you used a visicalc spreadsheet to perform an analysis, you have be able to do it again. (I think this is more an "in case we get sued" requirement than an FAA one). I was joking about 40 years being a long time when the coworker said, "Just be glad you don't work for the medical division. They have to keep their design data for the lifespan of the patient. For a neonatal ultrasound product, that's effectively one hundred years!"
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Looks like one of these
Unusual things. Harder case than a 3.25" disk, and slightly rectangular. Only ever really used on Amstrad machines.
It's a step up from ASCII in that you have formatting but I have no idea how well it copes with non basic ASCII characters. You will always have the option to grovel some text out of the document by opening it up in a text editor if the worst comes to the worst though.
The main problem with RTF is that there are several mildly incompatible implementations to choose from and consequently formatting (along with other features) may not be preserved/read properly between differing programs.
These days RTF is a defacto MS format rather than a good interchange format between differing products but that's an aside from archiving (unless you change to a different platform).
In the absence of any credible international initiative to create a reliable permanent archive format, I'd say print it to acid-free paper
I still have source code (BASIC) I wrote in 1983 or so, along with old IBM Word Processor documents, etc.
It's just not that hard to copy your old files to your new computer when you get one. I mean, CDs may go obsolete, but there will be an interim period when you have a CD-ROM drive and a new whizz-bang drive.
Though it's been 12 years since I actually used removable media to do this, I just mirror directories across the network. The filesystems, storage hardware, and networking protocols have all changed in that period, but the files themselves just keep on coming along with me.
The only important thing to remember is to view your data as a library: any time you change storage formats, you need to copy the WHOLE library over. Luckily that's pretty trivial if you have any sort of organization for your files.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
This seems like a perfect extension of the disk recovery business. All you need is about 20 old computers with a bunch of old software. You can copy all the old files onto a CD-R in pdf format. Be sure to put your logo on the CD-R, so you can get their repeat business in 20 years.
... but I have a copy of my Masters' Thesis on a nine-track 1600 bpi mag tape, in a CDC 6/12 character set.
You could've hired me.
I have a lot of data from a very early version of Microsoft Word for Mac.
Now, to be fair, everytime I've come across someone complaining about MS Office not opening old MS Office files, it was simply that they didn't realize you had to specifically tell the installer to include the legacy filters. Pop the install CD in & pretty soon you're reading your old files.
The problem I have is that I no longer own (& have no desire to own) ANY version of MS Word.
Likewise, I have a bunch of data in ClarisWorks format & for a long time I didn't have a Mac, much less ClarisWorks.
I have a Mac again, but I don't know whether AppleWorks or NeoOffice could open my old Word & ClarisWorks documents. You see, I no longer have any way to read 800K Mac floppies.
(OK, not entirely true. Most of the ClarisWork stuff is probably on 1.44M floppies, so I *could* try to get AppleWorks or NeoOffice to open them. I just haven't had the need to try yet.)
When I did a masters' thesis and doctoral disssertation, I had to turn in two copies, one of which went off to University Microfilms in Ann Arbor, MI, for copying onto microfilm and storage wherever they keep it. Doesn't Britian (I'm guessing from his using an Amstrad that that's where he's from) have something similar?
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I have to admit I have never seen one of those.
I learned on Apple's, IBM PC AT & XT, and some C64 for spice. I did not get to the really juicy stuff until the mid 1990s when I worked for a pharma consulting company. We used to get mag-reels from the pharma companies to pull our data from. They were still using 10-15 year old tech and everyone that did business with them had to use it too.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Actually, very important papers that is intended to last for a very long time are printed on specially made paper. An example of this a treaty between two states.
Yes, but the media last longer with proper storage. What you need to do is to regulary copy the old media to a new media, say every year or few years. Do remember that machines to read the old media may not be available in the future. This is done by the Norwegian agency responsible for archiving, by the way.
Then there was the records of the regional Ornithologist's Club, basically bird sightings from the early 1990s. My brother requested them for research purposes, but it turned out they were stored in RapidFile (an ancient personal database) and the RapidFile installation itself was long gone.
With a hex editor and some Python scripting, I managed to retrieve most (but probably not all) of the information. If the format hadn't been so simple internally, it would have been gone forever. Even if there is a theoretical chance that someone has the original hardware and software (or a DOS emulator), noone will bother unless the data is really vital.
Only ever really used on Amstrad machines.
And the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3, the one with the built-in 3" disk drive. Although actually, I guess it may have been Amstrad making them by the time that model was released.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Yes, they're still buying CDs, but they're all being ripped mp3.
So if people keep buying CDs after they buy a new computer, how will they keep ripping them to Fraunhofer format after CDDA support is no longer standard? Or do you assume that people will start buying music exclusively in .drm format? As long as demand for CDDA discs continues, demand for CDDA compatibility as a standard feature will continue, and this usually comes with CD-ROM compatibility at no extra cost. In addition, one major difference between dropping CD and dropping floppy is that CD-ROM has the same form factor and can fit in the same drive mechanism as DVD-ROM, HD-DVD-ROM, and BD-ROM, unlike floppy that needs a separate drive.
I've not had a floppy drive in my home PC in about 3 years, and I've not missed it.
What about when you have had to make a boot disc for another PC in your household or in a relative's household, manufactured before booting from a USB stick became a standard feature? The CD writing software shipped with my CD-ROM drive (Roxio 4) could make a boot disc conformant to the "El Torito" standard only if a floppy drive was present on the computer and if a bootable floppy disk was present in the drive. Has this changed on newer versions of Roxio and Nero bundled with CD and DVD burners? And given that DVD uses UDF and not ISO 9660, is there even a widely used standard for DVD-ROM/-R/+R discs that are bootable on x86 PCs (not counting Xbox)?
Obviousman says:
Well, you could get a used Win95 or Win98 box and copy your data to a hard disk....
Here in New Zealand we are required by Inland Revenue to keep financial records for 7 years.
.wks spreadsheets created by MS-Works for DOS for a small business run by my father.
.wks files will be useless - unless I can recover them with the strings command.
I have a few 6~7 year old
During the 1990s we moved from MSDos to OS/2 to Linux, and all the while we kept using MS-Works for DOS (dosemu on linux).
We also have some 4~6 year old Star Office files (.sdc format) and most recently we are using OpenOffice (.sxc format).
I suppose I could still install dosemu and MS-Works (I have the original disks lying around somewhere - if they're still readable).
OpenOffice still reads the older StarOffice formats.
But if my MS-Works disks become unreadable then my
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
.exe
. . .is the Real Audio format.
If you're not in the business of distributing content, then your boss may not be impressed. But as an example of the dangers of closed source lock-in, it's hard to beat Real audio.
For a decade they've sold content distributors expensive encoding packages. They provided the only existing client to customers, and they made a big show of claiming that by using a closed, proprietary format it would make it harder for people to archive programs.
Content producers bought up their products in mass and encoded millions of hours of audio in their format.
Then without warning, Real decided to make all of their new players incompatible with their old codecs. All the time and money that went into digitizing content is now down the drain. Those who chose the real audio format to distribute their library, and believed they were singing on for a one time fee now find themselves with media that none of their customers can access and a choice between paying a huge maintenance fee to Real to continually re-encode their audio every time the folks at Real decide they want some extra revenue, or the time and expense of switching to a brand new format and re-encoding everything from source files.
Yes, I know that it's possible to install older versions of the real audio player and convince them to not interfere with eachother. And yes, I know that there are now some alternatives to play Real content, such as mplayer. But neither helps the average computer user or the companies that are trying to communicate with them.
A few minutes trying to play random samples from albums at amazon.com with the latest real player will convince you that a lot of companies got burned trusting Real.
I almost lost all my data upgrading to Mac OS X Tiger.
.Mac, I backed up all my data files.
.Mac Backup program would not let me restore the data files.
.Mac - to get working copies of Backup that would run under OS X - Tiger.
.Mac again, not to get pinched for another $100 down the line just to restore data.
Using Apple OS X and the Backup Program I had from
Just to be on the safe side, I used an external hard drive to make a second direct copy of all the data files.
After upgrading to OS X Tiger - The old
When I contacted Apple, they insisted I subscribe, Again, to
Basically holding my data hostage until I paid up another $100.00
Well, I did not pay Apple another $100 for my own data that I backed-up with software I had already purchased.
I used the external hard drive copies of the data and everything was restored.
I couldn't see buying