several contributors wrote:

The trouble with 2&3 is that over time it often ceases to be worth
picking it apart, or finding compatible hardware to install the OS to
install the app to read the data. One of the many beauties of plain
text is that's just never an issue.

Good lord. You really dont know much about computers, do you?

What OS do you need to read your blessed ASCII then?

_Any_ OS, thats the point. ASCII is the one thing that pretty much
every computer today understands.



Why on earth do you need an OS or the orginal app to read the data?
- snip -

Take an example: .mmm format used in win3.1. Do you think that will be
supported in 50 years time? I expect writers will have long since quit
bothering to support it, just as today's OSes have quit bothering to
support formats from early computers. By then the only OSes/apps that
will be able to handle .mmm will only be compatible with what will
then be extremely historic hardware, such as 1990s PCs. Add the fact
that the skill set to set up win3.1/98 will have long gone, and it'll
be a mountain to climb just to view your data.

I've already been thru this cycle with a format I used in the 90s,
which nothing else supported in 2000, and the original hardware
finally died. Data recovery was successful but time consuming.


One of the many beauties of plain text is that's just never an issue.

snip

Any machine can display ascii, its a semi-worldwide massively cross
platform standard. ASCII is a good option for archival for this
reason.



I think NT's point (and mine in part) is access to "suitable hardware".
Getting the data onto a modern system is often easy in comparison to
interpreting it - and sometimes the least painful* way is to find an
example of the original hardware/software combination and use it to
extract the data onto a modern platform in such a way that it is easy to
interpret.

sometimes today its the only _practical_ way. Now fast forward 50
years


Agreed. I think NT was trying to say that it's a lot easier for people
(after the fact) to understand data that's been stored in a
primarily human-readable format than it is for data stored in a primarily
machine-readable one.

That too. I can smugly count on my huge ASCII library being readable
for life. People that save in messier formats can't. Computers will
probably change out of recognition over the next 50 years.



Of course to get at the data at that level, you may need to access
individual files. To access individual files, you may need to understand
the filesystem. To understand the filesystem, you may need to understand
how the filesystem is stored on the media as a raw sequence of bits.
(And even then you may need to know how the raw sequence of bits
translates to variations on the media - e.g. flux transitions for
floppies and hard discs). Picking all that apart when presented with some
kind of 'alien' media can be challenging (albeit fun) - which is why it's
sometimes far easier just to access things using the original equipment!


Indeed. I suspect that may have ceased to be a problem though, in that
I/we can now store all our data on a HDD or two (plus backups), and
move it from one machine to the next over a lifetime. Thus the
obsolete media issue should no longer arise. (that dreaded word
'should')


OTOH most linux computers today, given a floppy drive can read any
floppy disk that the drive will read.

Guess I'm stumped with those 8" 400k discs then.


Whether its ascii, DXF or JPEG
merely determinejs what softwaree you use to print it out or put in
onscreen.

in several cases none exists, and that just over a 20 year period.
Imagine another 50 years.



Its NT's strange notion that a text file is somehow different from a DXF
file that bothers me.

ASCII is the one standard that virtually every computer reads. Add to
that that plain text will continue to be needed indefinitely, and
there's no reason to move to a new standard, and you've got a very
long term format.


But ASCII is not a promarily human readable form!
That's the whole point.

Its not at all.


Yes, I think we're having two discussions here - one about published
standards v proprietary, and one about the ease of interpreting the data
when no kind of formal specification (open or otherwise) is available.

That might be true for professional archivists, but for most of us
we're never going to write software in 30 years time to enable display
of the then historic .jpg format. Either software is available to use
on existing machines of the time or it isn't. When software that will
run on computers of the time is not available, the data is usually as
good as lost.


NT