On Apr 24, 2:12*pm, David Nebenzahl wrote:
On 4/24/2011 4:34 AM aemeijers spake thus:

I don't recall the specifics offhand, but there are indeed efforts to
come up with a universal standard for modern fancy documents, one that
doesn't care what media it is stored on. National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) is driving that train, IIRC, and I'm sure Library
of Congress has a seat at the table.

How in the world could the format of a document have *anything* to do
with the medium it's stored on?

The only possible case I can think of would be an old database or other
indexed document stored using ISAM or some other obsolete storage method
on an IBM mainframe.

I've worked in the media conversion business, so I know something
whereof I speak.

There are (more or less) universal standards available today. Let's look
at them:

o ASCII: the simplest form of text storage possible. Hasn't changed much
since Day One. Even 7-bit ASCII documents could easily be read by most
computer systems in use today.

o PDF: a de facto standard. Few computers in use today that can't read
this format. (Of course, it suffers from some defects, owing to its
semi-proprietary status as a creation of Adobe, but despite this it
pretty much lives up to its claim of being a "portable document format".)

o RTF: although too closely associated with Microsoft Word, this is in
fact a very widely-accepted and understood document format. Certainly
any working copy of Word (or Open Office) will accept a RTF doc.

Older data is less of an issue, since ASCII and such are well
documented and accepted. The pile is so huge that standards for the
meta-data for each chunk of data, are just as important as the data
set itself. Imagine having 100 unlabeled CDs, and trying to find
something on them. Now imagine a data pile the size of a million CDs,
without an index.

There is certainly a humungous pile of document formats, most of them
moldering on the dustheap of history. I used to work for a company that
specialized in oddball data format conversion software, and just off the
top of my head, there is:

o Wang (word processing systems)
o DEC (proprietary formats)
o Lanier (word processing)
o EBCDIC
o Halo CUT (graphic images)
o GEM (old Ventura Publisher)
o PICT
o Word Perfect (still in use, I guess, at least by lawyers)
o WordStar
o Lotus 1-2-3

(I mixed in some graphic formats there just for fun)

Of course, for really important stuff, no electronic media yet beats
hardcopy, printed or etched on something that won't turn to dust in 20
years, and stored in a controlled environment.

Yes. The value of printed documentation is highly underrated.

Helpful post, thanks.

Should "printed documentation" of value be on acid-free paper?
Inquiring minds...

HB
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