Errrm. Bad example. I have some honours theses (my own and my wife's), stuck on 5.25 inch Apple II floppies, written using an obscure and now-dead Apple II word processor. They are still in digital form, but effectively inaccessible to me right now. So, some work written in 1985-1986 can't still be used in 2007.egbert wrote:The same sort of thing applies with other art forms - writers who have their manuscripts in digital form can keep moving them forward to their latest word-processing or publishing tools. Work that you wrote in 1982 can still be used in 2007 and there is no indication that this will not go on for ever, provided you archive to new media now and again.
64 bit Zebra
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- KVRian
- 500 posts since 13 May, 2003 from Mostly in NSW Central Tablelands, Australia
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- KVRAF
- 4265 posts since 21 Oct, 2001 from my bolthole in the south pacific
I mentioned that you have to update the media from time to time. The only dead media at this stage are cassette data tapes, old pre ATA hard drives and floppies. If you saved your files as ASCII text before leaving the program behind and move your files along from floppies to CDs or even 3.5" floppies you are safe. On PC old DOS wordprocessors can still be run. Old Atari and Amiga files can also be moved to modern PCs. Backward compatibility and Mac are not concepts that sit to well together.