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?"

Comments

Necessary.

[FireFlie]

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.

example

[Hes Nikke]

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!

Re:example

[brwski]

Well, Apple ][ AppleWorks can, if I remember correctly --- and if you can get your hands on early versions of ClarisWorks, there is little problem importing Apple ][ AppleWorks files. Then there is the late, great word proc, AppleWriter. At least it used in-line codes to make things work. Made moving to LaTeX pretty easy.

DARPA requirements to solve this

[dbrossard]

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.....

Re:EBCDIC and dead voters

[Ratbert42]

The data on the reels was stored in a fixed-width EBCDIC format. Talk about a dead format!

The physical media might be near death, but I work on modern C++ code that reads and writes fixed block EBCDIC files.

What about the backup media formats?

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

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".

Easy, MS Word when used for math

[marat]

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.

Print using an OCR font, save in Rich Text Format.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

QPW

[dtfinch]

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).

Vivo video files.

[Chonine]

Back in ~97 a freind and I compressed all of our stupid home movies from web cams into vivo format. It was designed for streaming, but made very small files that we would xfer over modem to eachother.

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.

Re:QPW is not closed

[TeXMaster]

Corel is not really in the "don't have a look at our file format" field, at all.

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.

Re:I happen to have a computer museum at my dispos

[91degrees]

Looks like one of these

Unusual things. Harder case than a 3.25" disk, and slightly rectangular. Only ever really used on Amstrad machines.