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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?"
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.