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This is a strange complaint because PageMaker etc are document editors which produce paper documents - or PDFs in the worst case. There's no benefit to archivi

This is a strange complaint because PageMaker etc are document editors which produce paper documents - or PDFs in the worst case. There's no benefit to archiving the source files and demanding they be opened on new hardware because the historical interest is in the content. And the content hasn't been edited for decades and won't need to be edited in the future. If you really need the content you can pull it out of a PDF or scan it from paper. And if you really need to preserve it you can scan or screen shot the source files - which takes work, but so does setting up old software on new machines. (Probably at least as much considering how hard it is to emulate an identical operating environment with all fonts, deprecated image formats, and so on.) So this makes as much sense as complaining that MacOS or Windows don't support the ancient professional magazine typesetting systems that used to run on minicomputers. The files for those are doubtless backed up somewhere - probably on mag tape, possibly in landfill - but they're culturally irrelevant because the output has either been scanned and put on the web or simply forgotten because it's of no cultural value. The bigger question is why there's a cultural fixation with preserving every last element of the past. It makes sense for content of record such as newspapers and certain magazines, but it's hard to understand why a crossword puzzle magazine for seniors from 1982 or a zine that only ever had twenty five readers needs to be preserved. And what's going to happen 25 years from now? Are we going to have the entire archives of YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, IG, and Twitter to sift through? Would we want to, even if we could?

pdimitar 6y ago
I think the main value of preserving such material is sociological -- a lot of interesting conclusions could be drawn by having such a historical record. It gives future generations insights of what did the current society do wrong and what did it do well. I don't mean the entirety of all social networks, of course... they follow roughly the same pattern so no use keeping 50 zettabytes of that; like 10-20 terabytes would be quite enough. But the general point stands. If we want to evolve as a civilization, we should try and extract lessons from our past.

pdimitar 6y ago

I think the main value of preserving such material is sociological -- a lot of interesting conclusions could be drawn by having such a historical record. It gives future generations insights of what did the current society do wrong and what did it do well. I don't mean the entirety of all social networks, of course... they follow roughly the same pattern so no use keeping 50 zettabytes of that; like 10-20 terabytes would be quite enough. But the general point stands. If we want to evolve as a civilization, we should try and extract lessons from our past.