3 ms·

In the long term of tens of years, MAYBE that helps. My guess is that ODF, for instance, will be harder to find readers for 50 years from now than DOCX will. I

In the long term of tens of years, MAYBE that helps. My guess is that ODF, for instance, will be harder to find readers for 50 years from now than DOCX will. In the long terms of tens of thousands of years, the chances anyone will be able to read any of them in any way are vanishingly low. Even if the media are intact (which is an incredibly low probability) and even if hardware were developed to read the media, all that's going to come off the media are ones and zeroes that represent a document format wrapped around an encoding that represents a dead language. OK, maybe plain text ASCII could be decoded by cryptographers highly familiar with Ancient English. You might look up the Long Now project and how they're thinking about communicating 10,000 years into the future.

ekianjo 9y ago
> In the long terms of tens of thousands of years, the chances anyone will be able to read any of them in any way are vanishingly low. Even if the media are intact (which is an incredibly low probability) and even if hardware were developed to read the media, all that's going to come off the media are ones and zeroes that represent a document format wrapped around an encoding that represents a dead language. Sorry, but if there is any kind of document specification left, it should be trivial for whoever is left then (as long as they can grasp our 21th century plain language) to recreate a reader for an old format. With proprietary documents, that is just never going to be possible.