On Jan 20, 8:51 am, John Carmonne <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jan 20, 2011, at 6:48 AM, Bruce Johnson wrote:
>
> > That's nothing. I have MS Word docs from 20 years ago that MS Word 2011 
> > does not open.
>
> > File formats change ... just be glad you're not NASA and have to decipher 
> > 45 year old data tapes starting by reconstructing the tape mechanism BEFORE 
> > trying to decipher the data!

> Hmm, sounds like Binary, been there;-)  I'm a CNC programmer. Still have 5.25 
> floppy's from my IIe.

Not too hard to deal with, but the NASA tapes likely encode characters
using EBCDIC instead of ASCII.  Unless there was something even more
obscure that predated EBCDIC.   When I was at NASA in the 80s, and
needed to read data on tapes, it was in EBCDIC because up to that
point, NASA was an IBM house as far as computers went.

-- 
You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for 
those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs.
The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette 
guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list

Reply via email to