> Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you

> Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted. A stopped clock is right twice a day, so it's all the more impressive that Kurzweil is always wrong. In 2001, the dominant OSes was Windows NT (still around), Apple was experimenting with BSD (experiment succeeded), and Linux was moving up fast (yup). The file formats were ASCII (still there), DOC 97 (still read by modern Microsoft), and PDF. Unicode support was still spotty, but it doesn't really matter because you can easily convert any known format from that time with iconv. Why was Kurzweil so wrong? For the same reason he always is: simple minded extrapolation. Yes, if you took computer formats from before the 90s, they changed rapidly and quickly became unreadable. But that stopped happening as standards became solidified and (importantly) as billions of consumers started using the standards. There was a time when you could buy a computer with a strange byte size or that used EBCDIC instead of ASCII. But once there are a billion users for something, it's going to be supported effectively forever. The 8 bit byte and ASCII format are never going to be revisited until our civilization has collapsed because they are good enough. Why do we use the Roman alphabet instead of something better, like Hangul? Because the advantages of Hangul are not enough to override centuries of inertia.