Interesting. I know this sour feeling in my mouth because of the fact I used Word Perfect. It was good enough for me. I can't even understand why I would want to look at word!
At least I am able to import the files but its a pain. Eventually I need to get Dos running and all the old DOS stuff because as horrible as DOS was at least it worked and had Linux been available back then I would not have the problems today! Now the thing is in the seismic world we can read those old tapes because we have electrical engineers who can handle the hardware interfaces and we have software engineers who can piddle bits. So we can read the media and we can read the data too... but some of those old formats will make a programmer want to cry! If we have this problem with recovering for instance what you have sitting around gathering dust then perhaps we should look for an OSS project of some sort to recover our work. I'll suggest that its going to get much worse before it gets better as people find the digital media and formats they used to record the pictures of their babies for instance are obsolete. Even now there is opportunity to keep old equipment running. For instance I happen to know where there is an old mill which weights probably over a ton and its a perfectly useful machine... that needs new brains and this means we need some serious electrical engineering backup. But for reading old media like an apple? One would think someone would have an apple with a fdd reader which can somehow be networked even if via a serial or parallel interface. Calgary is a fairly big city. On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 06:51:02PM -0700, Gustin Johnson wrote: > 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 _______________________________________________ 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
