[NTLUG:Discuss] CD Turning 25

[Steve Baker]

Robert Citek wrote:
> On 08/17/2007 02:29 PM, Dennis Rice wrote:
>> As advances are made, it is more difficult to look back.
> 
> Not at the data level.  I recently moved all my personal archives of the
> past 15+ years to two 100 GB USB drives (same information duplicated on
> both drives) for under $100. That included floppies, Zips, CDs, and some
> smaller IDE drives.  What's harder is not the media, but the software to
> read those proprietary file formats.  Text no problem.  But anyone got
> WordPerfect?

That's definitely the snag - so read them into OpenOffice (which
can still read WordPerfect) and write them out in something modern.
They probably won't retain 100% of their fancy formatting - but the
raw text will still be there and be legible.  If you don't care too
much about layout - write them out as vanilla ASCII - it's going to
be a VERY long time until that will become unreadable!  In fact, since
disk space it cheap - write them out in ASCII *and* something modern.