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.

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.....

I've had some wierd ones

[squiggleslash]

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.

I happen to have a computer museum at my disposal

[gdav]

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.

Well duh...

[DJCater]

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

reStructured Plaintext

[FFFish]

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.

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.

There's "open" and then there's *open*!

[fm6]

When people say "open format", they usually refer to documenting the details of the format. (Or, as with XML, using a format that's self-documenting.) Now, that does save a lot of work, but it doesn't address a much harder problem. Namely: OK, you've got the data, now how do you use it?

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.