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Examples of Obsolete File Formats?

Posted by Cliff on from the w/-humans-it's-memory-w/-machines-it's-data-files dept.

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?"

5 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. I've had some wierd ones by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Funny
    The wierdest I had to decypher essentially comprised of a bunch of hierarchical blocks using headers that constituted a description word and some properties, enclosed in less than and greater than signs.

    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.

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  2. Re:simple by DJCater · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah, spelling and grammer...

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  3. Well duh... by DJCater · · Score: 3, Funny

    XML! Open-source! Standards-compliant! Rag-doll physics! (Oh wait, wrong buzzword-bank...)

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  4. Obsolete files from Kazaa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I keep double clicking on these ".mpg.avi.jpg.Donkey Bukkake Porn.wmv.exe" files and nothing happens!

    Maybe I should start using Windows?

  5. I have a lot of GeoWrite documents... by Richard+Steiner · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...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.

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