On 12/22/2011 9:53 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
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.
That's why I mentioned Outlook Express.
I used to use a wave editor. My disk crashed, and I reformatted and reinstalled
Windows. I installed the wave editor, but had lost the password to unlock it.
The company that made it had gone bust.
I eventually did find the password, but I was s.o.l. with its data files
without it.
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?
Yup. Would you know that 30 years from now?
