on 6/28/02 3:34 AM, HI100@xxxxxxx at HI100@xxxxxxx wrote:
> 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!
>
Well if there's to be an OS jihad started, the Mac needs to be included.
Although Apple is now trying to get everyone migrated over to OS-X until now
the backward compatability of Mac files was quite good. While the individual
programs may have faded, the Mac OS has been kept backward compatable pretty
well. Even now, the OS-X supports a 'classic' adaptation to run the
older-generation programs. Still, finding ways to read an old Apple-DOS
Apple II disk would be difficult now.
As with anything digital, keeping up means converting prior generations as
the 'next new thing' comes along...
--
Jim Brokaw
OM-1's, -2's, -4's, (no -3's yet) and no OM-oney...
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