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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 3503442" data-attributes="member: 151">That's an apples-to-oranges comparison.  BryonD was talking about the storage media, not the format of the data files.  The issue in the popular mechanics article is discussing maintaining format compatibility when transitioning to newer versions of the operating software, such as the Nimitz discovering that CAD files appear differently under a newer version of AutoCAD or whatever app they were using.  That's an entirely different problem...especially as, in that case, the files are perfectly usable, but the formatting or representation in the software has changed.By and large this is less of a problem unless you move across platforms or to software from a different publisher.  For example, most of the major graphic formats in use today were all created between 1985-1992.  The vaunted PDF was introduced in 1993, but took years to  gain critical mass in usage, mostly due to the web.  I have text files that I've converted, periodically, so that I have text in some files that is now over 20 years old.  The same applies for print, of course...I have stuff I printed out from 25 years ago in some boxes, too.I've worked with a major government contractor on conversion projects and I've worked with a large Fortune 500 company on migrating from three separate mail systems to Microsoft Exchange.  In the case of the latter, the company had thousands of documents in DEC VaxMail that were mission-critical to their FDA drug filings and could no be lost or risk losing 12 years of filing work towards the release of a new drug into the market.  Smart companies tackle these problems before they have no choice in the matter.All that said, the current state of online documents is such that PDFs are now open-sourced.  One doesn't have to use Adobe's product to read them...and in a world where I can download 25 year old games to play on a PC, I find it hard to believe that it's going to be that big of a problem.</blockquote>

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