[lbo-talk] Technological Change in Media

[Jordan Hayes]

I read an article with an archivist back in the 90s who basically said 
that there's a big hole in their ability to recover and continue to make 
available to researchers material between about 1965 and "about 4 years 
ago" (which I presume is a sliding scale, thus 2008 today).  They can 
deal with stuff that's 5000 years old, including conversion between 
variations of languages, but as soon as digital formats started gaining 
some traction, they were fighting a losing battle.

Anyone have some old Word Perfect files they can no longer read?  You're 
not alone!  :-)

On the other hand, using plain old ASCII text, I have my sent email 
going back to 1979 in a readily usable form despite having changed 
systems several times in the last 30 years.

Hey, even the lbo-talk archives go back to 1998 ...

/jordan