If they were well known or named formats it would not be a problem. Simon's example is excellent. There is a sea of dead and extinct formats from the late 70s through the early 90's. I use the word format loosely, as some of these systems were one offs for people like libraries, school systems, and mid to large size companies. Perhaps you are lucky in that seismic data can be read 50 years later, but this is not the norm.
How many of your digital files from the 80s or 90s can still be read? My dad has a box of floppies for his Apple IIc, that has databases and word processing files. How easy is it for him to get that data on to his modern PC? I have personally used utilities like strings to get data out of old formats (assuming that I was lucky enough to have data in a format that used good ol ASCII) for files I created myself and I am only 35. Most of my early university papers are mostly unreadable in modern word processors. Ironically, the ones I did in TeX/Latex would still be readable if I had kept them. On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 6:00 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> Obsolete formats? Please advise which. > > It happens to everyone in the end... even NASA had issues reading magnetic > tapes containing digitised high resolution images from the Lunar Orbiter. > > That is until some determined engineers got obsessed with the project: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Project > > Simon > > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying > _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
