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Researcher Warns of "Digital Dark Age"
Posted by
Soulskill
on Tue Oct 28, 2008 06:10 PM
from the evaporating-digital-culture dept.
from the evaporating-digital-culture dept.
alphadogg writes "A assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is sounding a warning that companies, the government and researchers need to come up with a plan for preserving our increasingly digitized data in light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks). Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there exists about 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos. Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says. 'If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture,' McDonough said. Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"
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I say (Score:5, Funny)
And who needs to store pictures and movies on their computers anyway? In fact, I think the world would be a better place without them!
Now if you excuse me, I'm going back to watching Iron Man on my wrist watch.
Re:I say (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'm not immune of course, there's a lot of shitty software out there and it's easy to trivialise the value of Custers Revenge [wikipedia.org] or Giana Sisters [wikipedia.org] but remember that historically archivists want to know about tasteless/racist video games or tributes/Mario-ripoffs just like they want to know about 1980s comedy shows and magazines.
This article is saying that libraries and archivists had a blind-spot when it came to software. It took them decades to realise that people expressed themselves artistically in this medium. Archivists didn't know that they should preserve it like we do other media.
I know how easy it is to mock these efforts (Eg, the tag "!nothingofvaluewaslost") but please consider supporting and justifying this digital culture as part of a wider effort to justify software expression.
It's easy to pick out dumb software but closing
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Re:I say (Score:5, Informative)
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20th Century culture lost (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm more concerned about losing the culture from the 20th century.
Everyone born after 1975 hates the RIAA, doesn't pay any attention to whatever they say, and file-shares gigabytes without a thought to the music industry definition of 'piracy'. This is as it should be. It means that the music and movies of the (for now) young people is safe because it is widely circulated outside the control of those who have deluded themselves into believing that they own it.
It's all the stuff from the first 2/3rds of the 20th century that will disappear. Because the people who like it are in their 50's, 60's, and 70's now and don't have the technical skills to copy and distribute it. Plus they actually trust the corporations will preserve it. I mean all the books, music recordings, television shows, movies, and plays from the first half of the 20th century. The stuff that is under 'infinite copyright' and will never be in public domain because the corporations will simply pay off the politicians to endless extend the copyright period, as they do now.
As soon as all this stuff stops selling (and who nowdays is paying money for the book that was #3 on the New York Times BestSeller list of Oct 28, 1936?), and can't be legally copied because it can't enter public domain, then the corporations will just destroy it. Pulp the books; convert the film stock to ethanol to power their SUVs; dump the magazines in the oceans or in nuclear waste sites to absorb neutrons. When that happens, all this culture will be gone and historians 200 years from now will have little idea about how civilized people actually thought and acted in the critical early years of the modern technological age.
You can talk to the old people about the need to preserve their culture by making 'illegal' copies of the books, magazines, and movies that were important to them, but they are just simply and completely clueless about the extent that their culture will die as they do.
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Re:I say (Score:5, Funny)
um..do you have a link to that watch?
And more importantly, a song:
sung to the spiderman tune.
"Iron Man, Iron Man
Does whatever an iron can
Presses pants really fine
Keeps those pleats right in line
Look out! Here comes the Iron Man" - Marvel
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Marketing and Management already know! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Marketing and Management already know! (Score:5, Funny)
In the cloud? Oh my god! What happens when it rains?! The farmers will have all our data! We'll have to sue the farmers for their harvest, since their crops will contain all the data and applications!
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Re:Marketing and Management already know! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure the story tellers of old laughed in the same was as the cave painter said, "Ug draw this story on wall."
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Except you can explain what a painting is, no one can clearly define what the cloud is. Mostly becasue it's a marketing term looking for a technical design it can adhere to.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I hacked into Carmen SanDiego and changed the character names to those of the staff of a school I was working at. // went into a time capsule around 1988. In 2013 it will be opened up.
The 5-1/2" floppy, formatted for an Apple
It'll be stuffed, just like the rest of the contents.
Information outlives technology (Score:5, Insightful)
- Tim Bray
Re:Information outlives technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Been using Excel, MS Word since 1990 and Quicken since 1992.
I can still open all my work from my thesis, and can search credit card purchases from 20 years ago.
No problem here.
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Re:Information outlives technology (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Information outlives technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Change it around. Everyone who's been using the same word processor for the last ten years raise your hands. Every hand probably goes up. For the ones that don't go up, ask can your current word processor read files written by your word processor ten years go? The rest go up.
I've got a few archive CDs from over ten years ago. Every file on them is readable today. Even if I'd be a little inconvenienced to dig up a copy of Corel Draw, there are lots of modern drawing and layout programs that can read the files.
Parent
Subtly different from all similar warnings (Score:3, Insightful)
The cultural loss isn't something that should be overlooked, some can bemoan it but the value of culture is that it exists, and that different ones existed in the past. Culture changes from moment to moment but without some action the real meat of the early 21st century will be lost forever. That is the big thing here, and that is justification for working for truly readable digital archival methods. There is a project of making minisuce indentations, but that requires a lot of technology to see much less decode. Continuous duplication, by transfer of all old data across all mediums as they rise and fall, by printing content and storing it in climate regulated warehouses, etc. We relish seeing things from thousands of years ago. This is humanity, that is our legacy. We need to leave a legacy for our grandchildren.
Migrate, migrate, migrate... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only motivation for a company to invent new ways to preserve data long term is to provide it as a service so they can profit from it. Other than that, a companies main goals are deleting everything it legally can. Anything that no longer exists can't result in a lawsuit.
Everything that is preserved is a potential liability. For items requiring indefinite retention because they are critical to the business... They will be stored, redundant, and backed up appropriately. As the systems that provide those qualities age, they will be replaced in regular maintenance and upgrade schedules as economics and timing come together in the right proportions. In that way, reliability and long-term survivability are maintained - nothing stays on ancient systems that are unmaintainable forever. When systems go out of support, everybody has already been looking to the next solution to migrate to.
So what's wrong with this approach? Its essentially what all "big" companies are currently doing. I don't believe in this proprietary format FUD either - if the proprietary format is no longer supported, you migrate. Potential of future cost to migrate is the only concern, not survivability.
Migration is todays solution to long term storage and I see no reason it should be ignored. Like security, data retention is an ongoing objective that requires maintenance - its not some end-state. Dreaming of a solution that will just last forever seems archaic, no?
Doubtful... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the text in most word processing documents are easily available to be parsed out even without the specs. The formatting would be lost, as would any embedded objects or images.
Open formats would improve it, but I would be more concerned about encrypted documents and media loss than not being able to recover data (text/images/video/music/etc) from available files. There are a lot of clever people that can do amazing things with deciphering proprietary formats.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I dare say that if I gave an English-speaking computer geek who had never heard of EBCDIC a long document encoded as EBCDIC, and told him (truthfully) that it consisted mostly of English text, he'd have most o
Professional Write (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazing as it sounds, I still have very VERY old data that goes as far back as 7th grade when I started using computers. I know of no converter for Professional Write that will convert Professional Write documents into ODF, or even MS Word 97/2000/2003.
The only hope I have is that I can use strings to extract the text elements of the data.
Books? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article -
âoeIf we canâ(TM)t keep todayâ(TM)s information alive for future generations,â McDonough said, âoewe will lose a lot of our culture.â
Hardly.
Apparently none of our culture is stored in books anymore?
Sure if every piece of data was wiped out the world would lose a lot of information... but a lot of valuable and useful information is still put on paper. I don't think that is our biggest cause for concern.
However I do agree that the world really needs to agree on more open / non-proprietary ways of storing data. Sure, I can open a .wav of Blackadder talking about 'sticking a Christmas tree' somewhere from 1992, but I have a bit of trouble opening .ra (real audio) video files from a few years ago.
And working in government everywhere I go the electronics file storage is just a discordant mess. Anything important we have to print and store hardcopies because our electronic systems are just unreliable.
On file formats and the future (Score:4, Insightful)
Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says
The way I see it there are two approaches to the problem. The Quixotic fight consisting in changing the world and forcing in a dictatorship of openness regarding file formats, which doesn't solve the problem for the past 50 years of computer history.
Or let a few hundred people around the world worry about file format parsing or, in the worst case, even emulators to do whatever old computers did. In a hundred years from now, you'll have very complete emulators for our modern PCs. Considered that a 1994 PC is quite comparable to a 2008 PC (and presumably a 2015 PC) from an emulation point of view, you know that's a given, and even then, in case there was no such emulator, you know you could find a good such emulator for machines from the 2040s, which themselves would be well emulated by machines from the 2070s, and so on.. that's what we already do. There's hardly any program you used 20 or 30 years ago that you couldn't use today.
The more things change... (Score:4, Insightful)
People are starting to take note (Score:3, Interesting)
Government agencies and archivists are starting to wake up to the fact that this is an issue -- I think the Office 2007 file format change was a big factor that is getting it on the radar.
Minnesota, California, Massachusetts and New York definitely have people studying the issue. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers when it comes to these things.
In my opinion -- which is not necessarily the opinion of my employer -- one of the major problems is that there are far too many records being preserved.
If you looked at the archives of a government or corporate office 30 years ago, only official memorandums, some meeting minutes and policies were retained. Today, technology like email has improved communication somewhat, but has also encouraged sloppy office practices so that it is nearly impossible to figure out what is useful and what isn't.
To compound matters, the courts are now mandating document retention and email archiving which encourages the retention of even the most banal communication.
IMO, the period 1990-2020 will be a black hole in history.
The article mixes up 2 problems... (Score:5, Interesting)
The author specifically mentions WordPerfect files. Bad example! The default file format in Wordperfect X4 (released in April, 2008) is the same as what was used in WordPerfect 6--which came out in 1993 (DOS and Windows). While I can't speak for OpenOffice or Google Docs, MS-Word can read those files (and WordPerfect 5.x files) with a simple File/Open. Excel opens Lotus 1-2-3 files as well. So, Word can open popular formats in use since 1988 (WP 5.0) and Excel can open some formats in use since 1983 (1-2-3 r1a). You can also buy programs like FileMerlin [file-convert.com] to convert old documents.
Frankly, when it comes to file formats, conversion apps will exist for a LONG time. For DOS apps, you could even go so far as to create a v/m or use Dosbox, load up your obsolete word processor (I miss "Leading Edge Word Processor"!) and copy/paste the text into Word or Notepad...
Image files, sounds, & videos are no exception... GIF has been around since 1987, JPEG has been around since the early '90s (opening those on a 10Mhz 8088 was slow!), and MPEG/WMV/AVI/Quicktime videos are easily openable...
Finally, the more people that are affected by obsolete files, the more interest there is in some way to convert the data... But don't forget that a LOT of the data is junk--do you really care about your 7th grade paper you wrote on Hong Kong in 1989?
Re:The article mixes up 2 problems... (Score:5, Interesting)
About mine? No... but how about the next Einstein's 7th grade paper, or the next Picasso's?
Parent
Simple: shorter copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Make copyright last 5 years. Then everything worthwhile will be backed up by someone who cares about it.
The problem is real to museum conservators. (Score:4, Interesting)
As for Wordperfect and floppy disks: yep. That's a problem in our home. We are having to migrate WP files now and then. It is not sufficient to have old computers that run the programs. I had WP on my computer (but didn't use it.) A series of glitches when upgrading to SP3 had as a side effect the corruption of WP on my computer. Whatever the problem was, I could not even re-install it. We are now down to one computer that can read it.
I, when I worked in IT, migrated library data. Getting it into any sort of readable text form was a trial. We have even been sent old Macintosh computers in the hope that we could get stuff off them. Usually we could, but it wasn't been done economically, and I cursed the Education system that had highly paid administrators who did not even dimly consider that a data storage system had a finite lifetime. Not even 20 years after my father retired on under half their salary.
The core solution is as the original article says - for all government software, mandate that data export to a widely used open standard be available within the package at no extra charge. I do not know of any impediment to this worth considering. Where there are privacy issues, it is simply exported encrypted and funds are established that allow a few facilities to decrypt and migrate the data. If you cannot sell to government, including any educators, then you are marginal. OK, so some games will be unavailable to future generations. That is inevitable. But then that will be a reason to collect and maintain the hardware if you are a hobbyist.
As for large corporations, it may be sufficient that the auditors require that data be accessible for forensic and liquidation purposes. That is, not readily, but if need be in extreme circumstance.
In short, the immediate solution is an administrative one. Software and hardware is the relatively easy bit.
My own prize example of a dead data format - the Windows
false analogies (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those fairly bogus, highly overblown stories that keeps cropping up every so often. A similar one is the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers in the US, which has never existed, and is always supposed to be coming Real Soon Now; in fact, the data to support this claim are always either nonexistent or wrong. (E.g., they compare Indian college graduates with US college graduates, but the Indian degree they're comparing with a U.S. bachelor's is more equivalent to an AA degree in the U.S.)
First off, the concern about incompatibility of physical media was valid 30 years ago, but it's a false analogy to try to apply it to today's situation. Thirty years ago, I had data on a mixture of 8-inch floppies and 9-track tapes. I can't read an 8-inch floppy anymore, and although 9-track tapes still exist, most 9-tracks from that era are no longer readable due to physical deterioration of the media. But that was all in an era when hard disks were expensive, and the internet didn't exist. Today, I have all my data on hard disks of various computers, and I use file synchronization software to keep them all in sync. If one of my hard disks dies, I replace it, and I haven't lost any of my data. (I also have backups on optical media, but I basically never need those.)
There's also the concern about formats. People tend to bring up, for example, the image of rooms full of physically deteriorating 9-track tapes with data from old NASA space probe missions. The formats are often not documented. The thing is, most of our data isn't at all analogous to the raw data from Mariner or Voyager or Viking. Those were unique historical events, and the only way to get more data like the data they collected is by sending another space probe. (People also tend to vastly overestimate the value of scientific raw data. It's extremely uncommon for raw data to be of interest decades later.)
Most of the world's data isn't in some obscure NASA format, it's stored in formats that are used by tons of people, and are extremely well documented. Sorry, but I just don't believe that the knowledge of how to decode Adobe Acrobat format is going to be lost to future generations. Ditto for html, jpeg, and mp3.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nowadays you can emulate old computers with excellent performance. For instance, my first home computer was a TRS-80. I can still run my old TRS-80 games on my linux box, using an emulator. Sure, emulation isn't perfect, and some information may be lost. But the claimed threat of data loss is vastly overblown.
The biggest threat to the preservation of information isn't technological change, it's copyright. The most likely reason that I wouldn't be able to get back an old piece of digital data is that the people who tried to preserve it and put it on the web got sued by the people who own the copyright -- the same people who let it go out of print. The economic incentives are to hold on to your copyrights (because that doesn't cost you any money) and send out DMCA notices to anyone who puts it on the net (because that doesn't cost you any money either), all in the hope that your content will be worth eleven cents fifty years from now. This is exactly what we see happening, for instance, with ROMs for old video games, which you can play in MAME, except that you have to find an illegal source for the data, because the owners of the copyrights aren't willing to sell you a copy.
He's needs tenure (Score:3, Funny)
Look, he's an Assistant Professor, not an Associate Professor. He just got his PhD a coupola years ago and somehow he managed to land a job. He needs to publish something, anything. He needs tenure. So he's saying the library (OK: 'Data' if you will) is on fire and we need a government rule to protect it. The librarians are going to nod wisely and agree with him (I'm a librarian and I've seen way too many wisely nodding librarians in my time.) It's all a bit of a smoke and mirrors thing and he'll be able to milk this for a few more articles to put on his c.v. He's whoring for points just like on /.
Meh?
"Dark Age"? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Dark Age" is kind of an exaggeration. Presumably it's a reference to the period right after the Fall of Rome (475 AD) when most classical literature was lost because existing information technology (hand-transcription of documents) got too expensive for what passed for an economic system. This time around, if we lose much more, it's because we have a lot more to lose. But how much of it matters? If my USB drive dies and takes the last surviving copy of Debeee Does Dingos or the collected bloggings of Joey Joey, it's not that big a deal. But anything that really matters (the complete works of Shakespeare, the Beatles, the user's manual for Ultima IV) is going to be saved in multiple places in multiple formats, and it just not going to get lost.
I think the big problem is the exact opposite of what TFA warns about: too much preservation of stuff that isn't worth preserving and doesn't really represent our culture. Future generations wading through the digital crap we leave behind — blog rants, porn, advertising, spam, internet rumors, Star Trek flame wars and fan fiction — will be hard put to sift out our serious accomplishments.
Classical Greek civilization is probably the most influential in all of human history. And yet you can buy a single CD containing every single surviving work from the entire civilization! It's quality, not quantity, that defines a cultural heritage
On a personal note... (Score:4, Interesting)
More importantly, DRM and rent vs buy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Anal (Score:5, Informative)
There have been instances when the metallurgy of times past was remarkably superior in some respects to later arts. Think of Damascus steel or Chinese bell-casting. Though the general trend of technology is constant progress forward, in certain cases the ancients were able to teach us a thing or two.
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Re:Anal (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Archive... (Score:5, Insightful)
OPEN file formats and OPEN hardware, well documented.
Even if no program exists anymore to read your data, as long as you have the specs you can rebuild it. And I mean hard- AND software. If you know how to build it, you can build it provided you have the means. And I'm pretty confident that our future cousins will be able to build a current computer with their future technology, as long as they know WHAT they should build.
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Re:Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the UK's beer companies used to help sell their cans by having pictures of models on the side. At the time, it was just an beer can with a picture of a model, but now these pictures capture the fashions of the era, that would be hard for any designer to reproduce without having reference pictures ( 1980's [flickr.com].
Now these beer cans are actually collectors items.
They won't care either (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:They won't care either (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:They won't care either (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I don't think garbage is the problem. I don't think there is a problem as it's being presented to us. Lots of printed media is destroyed also. Just the other day I found pieces of a five hundred page story I wrote a long time ago, then lost the disk. I'm not going to type it in again, so I just discarded it. It's not the first time in history and won't be the last. Very little of what is written is ever published. Most of it is discarded by our relatives after we die.
I think the real issue is that some people feel a need to collect everything that's ever created, like digital horders. If a tax return is old enough to be on floppy, then you don't need it anymore and any critical information from it probably exists somewhere else.
Content with real value self-perpetuates and remains and while some value is lost through attrition, such as websites going down, the consequences are often miniscule in comparison to the concept of archiving everything permanently.
Maybe we do lose those digital pictures on the floppy (and the box of floppies it was stored in) but if it was critical, we'd do something about it. We might print it out, but we lose albums too. They get wet, mouldy and burned, and we lose those memories too.
Too often it's not that important to us to keep until we want it later and can't find it.
Like most things horded, the value lies in keeping good care of what is most important to us, and often we find that what we want to keep is just a reflection of what matters the most.
To quote an interesting book entry I once read: Perspective. Use it or lose it.
That goes for hording digital stuff too.
GrpA.
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Re:They won't care either (Score:5, Insightful)
What you say is essentially correct, I'm just pointing out that this has always happened, regardless of the transition to digital.
How many pages of Leonardo DaVinci were used over the centuries to start fires or even wipe asses? How many inventions, concepts and ideas were lost forever? How many musical pieces were lost to antiquity simply because they weren't as popular during the era and slowly became removed from history, piece by piece?
What knowledge became undiscovered when the library of Alexandria was lost?
Losses of information are perpetually occuring. Digital stuff is less likely to be lost because it's so easy to copy, so anything needed for long periods tends to be perpetuated by infinite copying.
Archives are nice (Thankyou Wayback Machine) when you want to find something now lost, but I don't think blaming media is the cause.
Think, as you've put it, that it's gone because someone decided to get rid of it... Did they make the right choice? Maybe not, but it was theirs to make.
I think a bigger issue is DRM... I went to watch some old movie clips I had on an archive the other day while browsing it... They all failed - I didn't have the correct codecs. So I tried to download/find them. Nope. They were gone.
So the clip, which I wanted to view was lost... All I have to know what it was is "funnyvideoclip.avi"
But they were only of value to me so what's the big deal?
Maybe if it was my wedding video, I'd be more annoyed, but then, how many wedding videos, pictures, photo's and even paintings have been lost throughout history?
Just because the loss affected me, it doesn't mean there's a dark age. I'm saying knowledge is always being lost, due to obscurity, damage, natural disasters, political viewpoints and many other factors.
So let's say we lose all copies of programs for the Commodore 64... Is it a dark age? Or is the knowledge we've kept of the machine quite sufficient for contemporary times.
If anything, I think even more retention is made of digital material than non-digital... Just try finding a service manual for a 40 year old obscure car. Not very likely, but if there is a copy anywhere, I'd almost put money on it being digital !
GrpA.
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I'm just helping the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Garbage isn't the problem.. the problem is that we have millions of copies of the same data. Think of the 50gb of video games you may have installed.. 10 million people have the same games as you. Music? Unless you performed it yourself or it's sub-underground, chances are millions of people each have multiple copies of it. The anime you've torrented has 10,000 downloads. .
No, see.. actually I'm just keeping a back up for the RIAA in case they lose their copy. PLus I keep it all transcoded to the next generation formats at no charge. And on top of that it's forward deployed for easy re-distribution without bottlenecking their servers. I even paythe lectric bill on the disks and internet connection. So copies are a good thing.
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Re:They won't care either (Score:4, Insightful)
Garbage isn't the problem.. the problem is that we have millions of copies of the same data. Think of the 50gb of video games you may have installed.. 10 million people have the same games as you. Music? Unless you performed it yourself or it's sub-underground, chances are millions of people each have multiple copies of it. The anime you've torrented has 10,000 downloads.
As for images on the internet.. well, every repost is a repost repost.
That not a problem , that's called redundancy. If everyone has a copy , and you lose yours , you can get it back easily this way.
It's one of the things that make the internet the powerfull force it is today : it's nearly impossible to completely destroy data.
And trust me , that's a good thing.
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Re:They won't care either (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem lies in keeping the unimportant stuff. Nobody cares about your myspace, but if an archaeologist came across a 3000 year old obscenity on a bathroom wall, it would be the find of a lifetime.
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Re:They won't care either (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe we should bury a time capsule, to be opened in 1000 years. In that time capsule, a strange black object, with a wheel and a screen. And from that object, when powered on, comes a voice from the past: Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down...
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Re:not to worry.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Historically, things that have been very uninteresting at the time, have been hugely valuable to researchers later on. We may not care about the countless people talking "crap" on bebo right now, but in a few hundred years it might be a different story. When people can easily analyse all those posts for meaningful psychological profiles that aren't currently understood never mind modelled and easily detected, all of that could tell a lot about our society. Even rubbish tips from thousands of years ago are hugely valuable to paleontologists.
This goes more so, for important government records, etc. Peter Quinn did a great job of explaining that, with his Sovereignty talk.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently at work we ran into a problem where a "knowledge management" package died. The company had gone belly up and there is no converter. We are printing and re-typing in thousands of pages because there is just no other way.
I collect antiquarian books. Funny that a collection of plays printed up in Latin in 1542 only require the learning of a language, yet a knowledge base less then 10 years old is unreadable...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They're not printing this on paper, right?
Can't you print into a PDF and convert it to a TIFF with ImageMagick and give the OCR thingy that file?
Would go a lot faster, too...
The Big Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
this means you have to bypass access keys or encryption
This is going to be a big problem. I have CAD files, code manuals and other engineering data that cannot be accessed with anything other than the proprietary CAD apps or browsing software. Some of these apps have been 'orphaned', in that the applicable versions are no longer supported by the vendors. Activation keys are locked to a particular machine, so trading in that Windows 98 machine for a nice new XP system is out of the question.
I make sure that none of my contracts oblige me to maintain electronic