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Data Written With "Superman Memory Crystal" Could Last Billions of Years (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Researchers have demonstrated a method of femtosecond laser writing in self-assembled crystaline nanostructures that can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degree Celsius and last indefinitely at room temperature. The storage method enables up to 360TB of capacity on a single disc. Data is written to a file comprised of three layers of nano-structured dots separated by five micrometres. The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D digital data by femtosecond laser writing. Major documents from human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton's Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race. Coined as the 'Superman memory crystal', as the glass memory has been compared to the "memory crystals" used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz.
Goddamn, I don't think I've seen so many buzzwords in a single summary in my life!
Timothy beat you to it.
Major documents from human history, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), ..., Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race.
So long as they called the directory: Documents we humans chose to ignore.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
We have achieved the inevitable in data storage, not by creating a media that will outlive its physical readers, but by creating a media whose content will outlive its human readers.
From TFA: Researchers at the University of Southampton have discovered a way to store data in five dimensions on nanostructure glass...
No, they certainly did not.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
> as digital copies that could survive the human race
(That's actually really cool.) Ok, let's assume that we've put the entirety of human knowledge on crystals that could survive us as a race. It seems like we should put it somewhere ... what would the term be ... astronomically safe? Maybe in solar orbit out past Jupiter? In the Oort cloud? On Pluto? The problem seems to be, the more remote we put it, the harder it will be for some other civilization to find.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It wouldn't be home without next-day reposts. Tomorrow they'll be telling us about this awesome new archival glass data storage concept that operates in FIVE DINENSIONS!
O_O
Nothing posted to
We don't need to store data indefinitely, we just need to keep Slashdot up. Any lost information will be duplicated here eventually.
I would think this would be wonderful for companies offering long term storage for rarely accessed data even if it is write once media.
May lower the cost of services like Backblaze B2 and Amazon Glacier.
Otherwise I expect the equipment to be well out of anyone's price range for a while.
Should give Panasonic's Blu-ray storage a run for its money though.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Also....this is a DUPE http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Wait until someone patents this storage method in a "with computers" patent and then /. will have to stop dupes.
Unless something I'm not thinking of forbids this, I'd imagine that having the ability to produce durable structures small enough to be useful for bulk data storage would also allow you to build larger structures that are visible to the naked eye or under various levels of magnification, at the expense of data density.
This doesn't solve the rather nasty tech-writer challenge of trying to compose an instruction manual for a reader-of-the-language-in-use-2000-years-from-now; but it would allow you to provide multiple 'stages' of readable data with various trade-offs between storage capacity and intelligibility. Text large enough to be obvious and readable with the naked eye would be inefficient; but hard to miss. Text large enough to require modest magnification to actually read; but look patterned enough to be worth investigating to the naked eye could easily crunch several paragraphs into a reasonably modest space(microfilm/microfiche scale, say). Text invisible to the naked eye; but readable without any fancy polarization tricks and just an optical microscope could be denser still; and finally the technique described could be used for bulk data storage.
Doesn't solve the language barrier; but it would allow you to do some amount of self-documenting of the format, starting with a visible 'README', and proceeding down through one or more layers of less densely packed data describing how to interpret the more densely packed layer beneath, and finally the data area.(which we would presumably encrypt and tie to a DRM system that was nuked to ashes millenia ago; because what's a good technological advance without some self defeating stupidity?)
It's great that we can store data that will last for eons. Guess what: So did a lot of cultures that left us mountains of written text. Too bad nobody has the ability to read it anymore.
Storing data forever means nothing if the future recipients of that data cannot access it. And we're not even talking about some stone tablets that are at least easily readable if you know the language. You first of all have to find out THAT what you hold in your hands is actually data. Imagine I'm not familiar with our way of encoding data, what would I see in the disc the man holds in the picture in TFA? An image. And some other image above it. And I think in the middle there's some scratched square.
That's basically all there is to the "uninitiated".
No, folks. If you want to store data "forever", you first and foremost have to make sure that whoever digs it up also knows without a doubt that this IS data. Next you have to provide a way for him to decipher it. And THEN we can talk about the significance of producing data storage that can last until the end of the universe.
We already have had data storage that can outlive our civilization.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fil...
From the look of it. it seems you can imprint visible text on it and pictures.
So you may make a rosetta stone of instructions on how to make a reader in as many languages you can think of. As well as pictures. I am not so much worried about a billion years but 10,000 years is a good run, where memory of our society would normally be close to gone. Finding such material on how to make a reader and to make one and get all our crazy data would be an major archaeological find. Perhaps after seeing it, they will realize that we share many of the same problems that our future has, while they may chuckle at some of the issues that we have now, which are so obviously wrong and stupid, but no one at our time realizes it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's considered cheating; but you can also ensure that the backups always outlast the users by 'retiring' any user whose backup media are starting to show signs of flakiness. The side benefit is the steep reduction in the number of people asking you to pull something from backups for them.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
/. you must read /., all of it.
Hmmmm
There should be a rule, if you post to
5D? What are the other two dimensions?
Flexibility and Grape.
#DeleteChrome
The blank media tax will be prohibitive.
I cleaned all that crap out years and years ago. Why? Because all of them were flaky, slow, and were much improved upon by later technology. Now you have a tech that can store 360TB in a single small package that will never go bad? Just imagine! Get the entire filmography for everything you want to own and never have to buy a replacement because of media deteriorating in 1 form or another, nor your kids, or kids kids, and so on. Hmm, I'll bet the *AAs won't allow any content on those.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I keep hoping for journalism. Foolish, I know. From TFA:
...similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.
That's quality, that is.
It continues:
The technology was first demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kilobit digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D.
Thanks for that. Anybody who has been paying attention knew this wasn't just a dupe, but a two year old dupe. (We won't ask why we're talking about the size of a text file in kilobits.) Except, is it? Why are we talking about it again? Did the write speed go up? Did the theoretical longevity improve? Did the mome raths outgrabe? TFA doesn't say.
It gets worse. The effing press release doesn't say. And it is in fact the idiot source of the quote in the previous summary that managed to be mangled unicode:
...virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190 degrees C )
The University of Southampton press office believes room temperature is 190 degrees C. A fine educational institution, no doubt. (And slashdot refuses to even display ASCII 248, let alone the unicode degree symbol.)
The whole things look like a botched effort on the part of the university to drum up some funding, especially since the press release ends with:
The team are now looking for industry partners to further develop and commercialise this ground-breaking new technology.
Yeah, no kidding...
Best of all, at the current write throughput (not mentioned in this idiot press release), it would take approximately 1200 years to fill a single disc to capacity.
360TB on a 500 square millimeter glass disk in three layers comes out to a center-to-center distance of 0.7nm between dots in a layer. That's six times the diameter of a silicon atom. They are absolutely not writing that into glass with a laser. The press is eating this up, and they wonder why they can't sell subscriptions anymore.
Stone case with hyroglyphics? Also, how about archiving content created by the "plebs", instead of just the usual big league players? Archiologists learn a great deal from the posessions and even waste from the "common" person of the era they are trying to learn about.
will it survive being smashed by a hammer?
Technically if you wrote the data to the crystal properly with redundant writes you should be able to.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just a silly thought. But if you put this into a current PC as it's main storage medium how long would it last before it was full assuming it could never delete anything written, so every single write is to a new block. You definitely wouldn't want it to swap to it but I'm kinda thinking along the lines of building up stacks of notebooks. Never accidentally delete anything ever again. Of course all your porn that got cached to disk would be there as well.
Unless there's a catastrophe of some kind that turns our civilization into the ancient Egypt of the future, I'm pretty sure that civilization a billion years in the future will know it's data. They'll probably be able to read it (what WON'T they be able to do?). They just won't care about it.
Nanostructured Glass Could Provide Highly Durable, Deeply Dense Data Storage
I know, I know, people have already commented that it's a dupe. But if we can have dupe stories all the time, why not dupe comments as well? :)
Will anyone recognize it as different than a chunk of salt? Is the knowledge of the universe being wasted on dinner tables every day? Should we be reading every truckload coming out of the salt mine just in case?
I was thinking along the following lines ...
big x's mark about 20 or 30 spots on the moon.
you can see it with a real powerful telescope
that would have been invented around 1900
this is a frame of reference to technology to spot it
we know that they have to develop a huge roman candle to get to the moon
so we have to form some sort of lock that 1950's humans could open
when they get to the X
Now we have to design a language, What would 1950's human read ...
it's got to be binary or math or chemical symbols ( Water would be one of
them, using 3 orbs connected properly with size difference I am guessing )
so we get them in, find the door language, and basically a lot of instruction
books in large writing ( 5 point ) going smaller
we have given them everything, from the IC design to today, but they have to
design more powerful microscopes and stuff every time to see deeper and learn more
it's a huge instruction book set with lot's of redundancy
if you see me, smile and say hello.
So dump archive.org into it.
There's a lot of discussion about some of these problems in the various agencies tasked with documenting nuclear waste sites. Perhaps most famously, the WIPP:
Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Excerpts here)
It's a great read. One of the most critical determinations by the interdisciplinary team was that the most detailed information wasn't necessarily the most important or useful. You need multiple layers of messaging, when trying to convey something to people 10000 years from now who probably don't speak the same language. The most basic being: "There is a message here"
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
ROFL... thank you
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Save part of the thing to print microscopic human-readable instructions a la Voyager 1.
So everything gets read out by Marlon Brando?
Scientists looked at the structure of quartz and determined that pretty much ALL of the Earth's quartz comes from the bodies dead sea sponges. If we can work that out by looking at the structure of quartz, then our ancestors will work this out from the structure.
However you don't need to read the content for the artifact to be informative to an archeologist. Geometric symbols smeared onto cave walls with coloured dirt have lasted at least 40Kyrs. Some of them are up to half a kilometer underground in places that are difficult to reach even with modern equipment. We have no idea what the symbols mean but they tell us a lot about the mental and physical abilities of our ancestors.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
what if they get wet?
They fired you because some jackass 20 years ago, who wasn't you, used a noname backup program you couldn't even figure out?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Also, how about archiving content created by the "plebs"
Store the slashdot archives on it!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago. Never mind the problem of getting them off of the media. It's how do you read the format of the file. Sure simple things like text and GIF files are okay. But what about spreadsheets and word processing files? Anything from a database? Now imagine 100 years into the future and try to interpret a Word or RAW file.
Now that is out-of-the-box thinking! And it should simplify disaster recovery as well!
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I would agree that that's the best option. They select for people who run away screaming and thereby show their intelligence. :P
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
> in a billion years
I was wondering where all those fucking elf fey languages c'ame 'fro'm.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Right, but I'm thinking the folks of a billion years from now might have a few more technological skills than we do. :)
We covered this in 2012 and 2013.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
tl;dr, this media in TFA may be high density... but it really needs a standard filesystem, so that years to centuries from now, the data can be recovered. The only format I know which this can be done is old fashioned tar... but even with that, there are blocksize issues, and there are also compression items as well (gzip, bzip2, xz, etc.) Something like a PDF/A standard... but for filesystems and data.
If only we had a Universal Disk Format
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
My cat pictures will last longer than ever before!
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
actually, what you are asking is trivial and done regularly. dbase III goes into Microsoft Access, for example. my 1980s compac discs play file too
Yeah, awesome 5D digital data - that's gotta be good stuff.
Wasn't this called microfische in the 1970s?
Voyager encoded binary on an optical disc, this is just making wild claims about how much longer a crystal based structure might last - for all they know, when Planet X returns (once every 70,000 years) it could totally mangle their fine scale crystal structures.
Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago.
Okay here is the source code for the Multic operating system published in 1970's over 40 years ago.
http://web.mit.edu/multics-his...
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
If data hasn't been accessed for over 100 years, is it really of any value, anyway? If nobody cares to hot-swap in new "limited lifetime" backup media into the RAID array as elements fail, then the value of data in the array is pretty suspect. Sure, it's cool to think you're writing indelible graffiti on the sidewalks of the universe for all who come after you to ponder, but of all the yottabytes of crap that we're generating today, how much of that will anybody really care enough about in the year 3015 to bother to scan it?
Well that's what the box was for damit!
Some people just want everything...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Hell no! It has only been 500 years and Americans cant speak proper English like I does.
Orientation and intensity.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Doesn't solve the language barrier...
What makes you think that there's going to be one in only 2000 years? I can think of at least seven languages off the top of my head that are at least that old and are still in use today, and I'd expect most of those to last at least another 2000 years. English, of course, isn't that old yet, but unless there's a worse breakdown of society than the Dark Ages, I'd expect that it'd still be in use, even if it's not the main international language any more.
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We have data "files" from thousands of years ago in unknown languages, and while only specialists are in a position to even attempt to decipher it, there are experts passionately trying their best, and the world will be excited if (when) they succeed.
Who would still know how to... read this?
If it's designed to be deciphered easily, it won't be too hard. Include a child's picture book, progressively more difficult textbooks, dictionaries, a recent version of Wikipedia, etc.
Even if it's turns out it's not as easy as it sounds, as long as the medium has longevity, future archaeologists can spend decades or centuries on it if they have to.
My wife is into going to estate sales. There's even a phone app that she looks at that shows where they are with pictures of what's in the sale. So last Saturday we found an estate sale that was in the neighborhood and we went. In the dusty basement there was some old computer accessories and I saw this little blue thing with a data cable attached and I said I bet this is a Zip drive. Sure enough. My first thought was I don't think you can buy the data cartridges for it any more. My second thought was I wonder if anyone under 30 knows what a Zip drive is. The folks running the sale had already had a trash dumpster out front of the house.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
the King James Bible among the other great works of human creativity. I wouldn't want aliens or just more advanced humans who find this stuff 100k years from now to think that we were superstitious idiots.
Like I said some things will work. I have diagrams that I made 22 years ago on a Mac while I was on a university work term that I can't open. I got away from the Mac for a long time and now I don't even know if anything can read the files. I have an old bunch of WordPerfect files that would probably only be able to be read in a copy of of WordPerfect but I'm not buying one since I know that they aren't that important to me. I can use some command line tools to get a basic look at the contents to make sure. I know my last year project is one of those files.
But how would someone coming across an archive of files know which ones were important if they could only open a portion of them? For example what would you do if I gave you a data file from Ingres that I had stored from the mid 1990s?
what about the disposal problem?
Hammer.
.
In my workplace we do that all the time. Sometimes even stuff from the early 1980s. The "secret" is to use files with published standard formats instead of obfiscated Microsoft crap.
Radical? No kids, the oil industry that is as conservative as it gets does it.
360kb, takes me back to, oh, 1976?
Oh, 360TB.
Sorry.
"Cats like plain crisps"
I don't know how much of a barrier there will be, I just wanted to be careful to emphasize that my post only covered the problem of dealing with legacy storage media, not linguistic issues.
My wild guess is that (barring some cataclysm that makes prediction basically futile) whether or not they'll call the most English-like thing spoken in 4016 'English' or not will depend more on political continuity than on its exact properties(nation states love to have a pet language, so even minor regional differences can be dressed up into 'languages' and even serious barriers to mutual intelligibility can be handwaved as 'dialects' depending on where the borders are); but given the turnover of English vocabulary, a layman might well find something written in today's English familiar but not all that readable. It would be a surprise if you couldn't find a suitable specialist, though, much as it's not a huge challenge to find a classicist today.
The dense storage mechanism proposed in the paper is significantly different, since it depends on manipulating birefringence; but the proposed 'just write some directions into the storage disk' part of the plan would be more or less identical, just on a sturdier medium.
Man, I kind of miss microfilm. Clunky; but you still run across items available on microfische and not in digital formats from time to time.
" this media in TFA may be high density... but it really needs a standard filesystem, so that years to centuries from now, the data can be recovered."
Bidimensional centimetric storage.
The kind you can find in papyruses, babylonian tables or the Rosetta Stone. Anything else is not guaranteed to be recovered.
Some of the languages I was thinking about change faster than others. At least two of them are at least 3000 years old, and their early literature is still easily understood by modern speakers. (Specifically, Greek and Hebrew.) My guess is that today's English will be at least as understandable as Middle English is now, possibly as readable as Shakespeare.
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I'm not a linguist but aren't those languages no longer the same? They're similar, as far as I understand it, but they're not really the same and the reason that we're able to understand them as well as we are is because we've got works that show them as they evolve. I stress that I am not an expert but that was how I understood it. They might be technically that old but the old version is very different from what is in use today.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Word dawg. I don't be trippin' yo. You feel me?
I suppose, it probably does seem a bit odd but I'm sort of fluent in Ebonics. In fact, there are quite a few dialects. One of these days, I'll have to see if there are some formal studies and some literature about the dialects of American English in use. Not too many years ago, I actually had to translate for a female traveling companion - and we were just in Louisiana.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
To some extent they've changed, but not as much in some cases as you'd think. Latin, as an example, has hardly changed at all. Classical Greek and biblical Hebrew are about as similar to the modern versions as Elizabethan English is to what we use today. As far as the others go, I don't know enough to say.
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I'd start with a hex editor and find out if I could figure out the file type. That might actually be just enough to read it but, if not, I might be able to go from there and see what I find. I'd try reading it in plain text too, that often has an indicator as to the file type. Some things have the equivalent to a magic bit, even if not expressly for the same reason.
It should't be *too* bad, really. It's already being given to me so it's not like I have to worry about figuring out the file system, byte size, track(s), sectors, or things like that. Yeah, I'd probably be able to figure a little out and then work from there. No guarantees of course, as I'm assuming you picked a file type that you know would be difficult. However, I'd give it a good ol' College Try. (Silly expression, really. Trying hard is not necessarily a collegiate trait.)
Err... Did you have a specific file in mind? 'Cause it just might be possible and probably not too difficult seeing as you've already got the file retrieved from the storage mechanism. One of the hardest parts is figuring out old storage formats. Some of those are kind of odd, proprietary, and entirely undocumented - at least in public. If it's just a plain file that you created, the data might be easy enough to pull out of it. It probably won't be pretty but it *might* be recoverable.
Hell, I'm not even an expert in the field. I'm sure there's even better ways to go about it. Worst case scenario - I'd find the appropriate old computer with the appropriate software and recover it that way. I might have to write something to convert it to a new file format and then some sort of shim to export the data into that new format but that's possibly doable.
I'm pretty sure you can find lots of people here who are not only good at it but have done similar things. I've seen comments where people have recounted similar tales.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Latin is the only one I'm familiar with and it's unfair to say that it hasn't changed but I guess it's true. It hasn't really changed but we've bastardized the hell out of to make new words. It's also a dead language, no longer used to communicate. Some ritual use of it is still seen but nobody writes in it, nobody speaks it, and nobody is doing anything to maintain it as a language in and of itself. However, we're happy as hell to bastardize it and make words up with what might have been justifiable Latin back in the day.
So, using that language, I'm still not sure. I think if someone from ancient Rome were here today - they'd probably be a bit confused at some of the ways we use Latin. I suppose we might understand them.
Oddly, I took Latin for four years and I can actually sorta, kinda, maybe read Italian and it was a great help when I started learning Spanish. (I'm sort of fluent in Spanish, not quite but damned close. Sometimes I have to guess a word but it's usually close enough and the gist is there.) But, just having learned Latin means that I can actually read (and I can confirm that I do not speak it) Italian well enough to get the gist of it. I often don't even use a machine translation if I come across it. There's some variations to Spanish and I can generally read those well enough, even if I'm not certain and wouldn't try to speak them. I can kind of get some Portuguese but not nearly as much as I can with Italian.
At any rate, I'm not a linguist so I'll defer. It does seem that Latin's changed but a more accurate statement would be how we use it has changed. I think the point I was getting at was that they're probably (and I do not know) really not the same languages that they were 1000 years ago. They might not even be the same languages they were 500, 250, or even 100 years ago. Living languages evolve and dead languages aren't really in "use" so much. 'Tis not a big deal or anything, just not entirely clear - at least not in my head.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
the king james fucking bible bullshit? really? ffs ....we should put a stop to this irrational bullshit being propagated....damn religious virus..../ rant
Let's just hope nobody drops it on the floor and breaks it.
(Or install shag-pile carpets in the server room, just in case...)
No sig today...
Try reading some data files created 20 or 30 years ago. Never mind the problem of getting them off of the media. It's how do you read the format of the file. Sure simple things like text and GIF files are okay. But what about spreadsheets and word processing files? Anything from a database? Now imagine 100 years into the future and try to interpret a Word or RAW file.
The trick is not to use deliberately obfuscated file formats (or software that generates them).
I'm pretty sure people in the future will be able to decipher ASCII / XML / Markdown / etc
No sig today...
I'm sure they'll still be using ASCII + UTF8.
(What possible reason could there be to stop using that?)
No sig today...
Grimm's Fairy Tales would have been a better choice.
Latin is the only one I'm familiar with and it's unfair to say that it hasn't changed but I guess it's true.
I'm not Catholic, but I have friends that are. My understanding is that in their seminaries there are theology classes taught in Latin because there are technical terms used that have no accurate equivalent in any other language. And, I've heard of priests communicating in Latin simply because it was the only language they both knew. Does that make it a living language? Well, I'm not a linguist either, so I can't say, but it's still in use for something other than the liturgy so it's not quite dead yet.
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If you could find the reader/editor software, you could use that. Even if the architecture had been completely forgotten, it could be reverse engineered. Of course, data files could give far fewer clues, especially if compressed, & if executables are compressed there might be too little code to follow for reverse engineering.
I reverse engineered (almost all of) a proprietary instruction set given just a single piece of code (the system ROM, 48 KB) & the ability to play with the system (with no low-level programming capability until I found an exploit from examining the code). If you did not have the system around, it would be harder, but things like Microsoft Word also have much more code.
That too but the comment was about "data files". Published standards were the go until Gates and others used secrecy to lock customers in.
Can I get a smoke of that, cobber? That's some good gear you're smoking.
Where the absolute fuck did you get that particular piece of complete bullshit from?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
how old the wordperfect version? there are import filters going back to 5.1 (released 1989) for microsoft office
Ingres is open source, GPL licensed. I'd use cvs export feature of older version and import assistant of new
really most the common old file formats for dbase, foxpro, wordperfect, ms works, lotus, etc. have imports into modern tools. LibreOffice for example does dbase and wordperfect
Plenty of room in the tape safe, thanks to the innovations in backup efficiency.