We must "be of an age". The IBM 360 was all we had- with card decks, no less- other than the Wang calculator that was chained to a table in the hallway. I had to take lots of math- but it wasn't my major. The mathies would talk COBOL and SNOBAL at meals . . . So at 45 when I needed to re-learn how to use computers, since I didn't know how they were programmed, I didn't trust some of the things they were doing. Had to get over that, go with it and get on with the work.
Ellen On 24 February 2011 20:26, Ellen Mably <[email protected]> wrote: > 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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