Old Letters...

[nowalmart]

First things first, I suppose - both the ophthalmologist and the neurologist have given me the all-clear. I have to avoid any exertion for the next couple of weeks, along with avoiding any blows to the head for about the same amount of time. Other than that, though, I am pretty good to go

Comments

[bigpeteb]

Some show I was watching on the History Channel made a similar comment on modern communication. They said that with people who lived decades or centuries ago, it's easy to know them, because so much correspondence is saved. Today most daily correspondence gets lots, because it's on the phone, or on some online medium with no records saved.

[nowalmart]

I had considered adding in a paragraph that talked about that fact. It is one of the reasons that I log all of my my online chats and save all of my email. I am not sure who would ever want to go through the thousands of pages of my correspondence, but I am arrogant enough to think it is possible.

[nowalmart]

This does bring up an interesting question, especially in regards to the recent discussions that have been going on around the Internet, regarding archival formats.

Currently the very old AppleWorks files are in straight .txt format. I have no doubts that I will be able to open those decades from now (provided the physical media they are kept on stays readable).

The WordPerfect/Mac v2.1 files are still in their original format. I have done some work converting them to .rtf. I could also convert them to OpenDocument format (.odt), but that spec still seems pretty young to put my confidence in.

Currently OpenOffice opens WordPerfect/Mac v2.1 files, but of course I cannot assume that will always be the case.

[bigpeteb]

That's a very interesting question. Theoretically, any open spec should be readable forever, but in practice that's not really the case.

That issue, by the way, is why I never recommend that someone shoot in RAW mode on a digital camera. Aside from the massive inconvenience of having to "develop" the RAWs by hand, for very little increase in quality, the formats are also all proprietary, and have no lasting power. The JPEG spec isn't going to be forgotten any time soon.