On Friday, 23 December 2011 at 05:18:30 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Not that easy, because will you really have the right platform 30 years from now?
Enthusiasts have created portable open-source software emulators for many old platforms. Hell, you can boot Linux[1] (and UNIX V6 on a PDP-11, for the other side of the spectrum[2]) in your web browser these days!
I would say that today's hardware architectures (and those from the past two decades) have acquired enough mass that they'll be accessible for the foreseeable future (our lifespans), mainly thanks to open-source emulators. The main problem is with copyrighted software: you can't buy a new copy of Windows 95, but you can't download it legally either.
Of course, storage media is a different matter.
One of the reasons I switched from Outlook Express to Thunderbird for email was the latter stored the messages in plaintext, while the former in some secret encrypted/compressed format. What are the odds you'll be able to get OE to run 30 years from now?
Indeed, proprietary file formats are the bane of archival. It doesn't seem to stop other software from importing data from them, though. Didn't Thunderbird have a feature to import data from Outlook Express?
Even using open-source software that stores data in simple formats may not be very futureproof. Future versions of Thunderbird may convert the data to another format, without even notifying the user (after all, the great majority of users don't care about such things). Remaining on an old version is risky due to discovered security vulnerabilities.
My oldest file I still have is from 1977. The floppy data all sit in a tiny corner of my hard disk.
Wow :) [1]: http://bellard.org/jslinux/ [2]: http://pdp11.aiju.de/
