How funny was it when people were stressing out about Y2K and one of the few languages I had used was Fortran which had been used to programme devices without a thought for what to do about the turn of the century. Apparently, there weren't many programmers around who still knew Fortran. . .
-Technopeasant On 24 February 2011 18:51, Gustin Johnson <[email protected]> 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 >
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