Proprietary Formats

I come from a family that keeps things. My grandparents had a barn with an attic that had more stuff in it than the barn should have been able to hold. Trunks and chairs and lamps and lights and picture frames and come-alongs and piles of books and papers gathered dust for years in that attic. It was my favorite place in the world. When I was finally old enough to be allowed to go up there alone, I knew that I had arrived.

So I like to keep things, too. Ask my wife. Look in our garage.

One of the things I keep is the things I write. Do you keep the things you write? Do they keep the things they write at the place you work? I'll bet I know what format those files are in.

So just what program are you going to use to read all those wonderful things you wrote when you sit down twenty years from now to read those old, dusty twenty year old files?

Companies and governments are in for a rude surprise when they discover twenty years from now that they can no more read their archived data than they'd be able to play an 8-track tape on their MP3 players (which of course won't be around then, either).

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