John L.,
wrote about the poor longevity of digital media and formats:
>>
If you wrote something in WordStar Word Perfect ten years ago, how would you
access it now? If you did some financial studies or pro forma balance sheets
in Lotus 1-2-3 to go with it, how would you access it now? Do you even have
a disk drive that can read the disks on which it was stored (if it was 5.25
inch
mini-floppys, you're sunk).
<<
Although I agree with John's post these particular examples are a bit weak.
Although the PC has lots to be critical of, longevity of files and programs
is actually one of it's stronger points relative to almost anything else. It
is a real challenge to read an Apple II disk from 1982 about the time when
the IBM PC first came out, or worse try to read Unix files of twenty years
ago, pretty tough for the reasons John gave. In comparison, on the PC, Excel
will usually import Lotus files. Wordstar and Wordperfect files import to
Word. You can even run old PC dos programs from 20years ago under a still
currently available version of Windows. In fact, with some effort you can
still buy Dos and make a partition for it on your disk. Compare this to
Solaris where major executable programs often do not run from one release of
the OS to the next and older versions are no longer supported. This is much
less true for Windows and even when it is true, you can always install a
seperate partiton for the old OS. Despite John's assertion, I have a 5 1/4
drive on my new PC and recently read my old 5 1/4 disks onto a CD. I even
converted some Wordstar files from almost 20 years ago. However, with the
ever increasing software complexity and featurism, the 20year longevity of
Wordstar files is probably an anomaly. If it were the norm, you would only
need 4 conversions in an average lifetime.
Regards,
Tim Hughes
Not meaning to start a holy war over Windoz vs Unix!
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