>>I always chuckle when I hear people quote media life of 100 years or even 10 years. Just try and piece together the system that will have the right OS, the right application and the right hardware to read your disk.
If you really are archiving data it needs to be in an environment where you roll the data to new media or format as required.
Do you think that Word '11 will be backwards compatible to Word 97?? <<
Frank -
Great post. You are absolutely correct. I remember reading, in the 80's, that NASA had old data tapes from way back in the 60's and 70's, which they could not read! They had no idea how the data was formatted.
I think we can pretty much assume that whatever operating system we will be using 100 years from now, it will bear little resemblance to what we have now. And certainly a thing like a CD, with it's paltry 650 megabytes of data, will seem like an amusing antique, at best.
You also bring up an interesting point about product names. Now that Microsoft has led the industry away from using meaningful version numbers*, are they just going to keep using years in the names? Or will Word 2000 give way to SuperWord? Will that be followed by UltraMegaWord? When will Microsoft release The Last Word?
Word up.
- Allen
* Example: The very first version of Windows NT was version 3.1. (The idea was to match the version number of the then-current Windows desktop OS. We were told that this was so Windows and Windows NT could be upgraded in lock-step from that point on.) That was followed by 3.5, which was basically a set of bug fixes to 3.1, not a full version upgrade. Then there was 4.0. Thus, the new version we are all waiting for, which was to be called Windows NT 5.0, is really only the third version of Windows NT. Yet I have seen an article in the computer trade press which referred to it as a fifth generation product. |
