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> Try opening a realplayer video file today and you know what I mean. I keep seeing this idea pop up from time to time and I just don't get it. Even if the for

> Try opening a realplayer video file today and you know what I mean. I keep seeing this idea pop up from time to time and I just don't get it. Even if the format is somehow still undocumented despite once being popular, the original players/viewers for it must still exist. Due to the popularity, sure enough there will be enough copies of that software around forever, including on places like archive.org. From there, you have options: - Run the original software on hardware from that time - Run the corresponding OS in an emulator and run the software on it - Reverse engineer the software, document the format, and build a player/viewer for those files for your modern In the particular case of RealPlayer videos though, I'm sure I could play one on my M1 Mac in IINA or VLC with no trouble.

michaelt 4y ago
To give quality examples for this sort of thing can be difficult - because things that are obscure enough to be nigh-unreadable won't be recognisable to most readers. After all, if I said "try opening a Generations Family Tree .cht file and you'll know what I mean" - would you know what I mean? Perhaps the most famous example is the BBC Domesday Project [1] which paid homage to a 900-year-old book in the form of... a LaserDisc. The data isn't entirely lost - but only thanks to the effort of computer history museums. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
- grishka 4y ago
  > After all, if I said "try opening a Generations Family Tree .cht file and you'll know what I mean" - would you know what I mean? No, I've never heard about neither this program nor its file format. Strangely I can't even find a copy I could download — but there's its manual on archive.org and several sites that could sell me a CD... But even if the program that made the file is lost, you could try reverse engineering the format by collecting as many files as you could find. It's harder, but it's still worth giving a shot. But then again, how popular was that program? > the BBC Domesday Project [1] which paid homage to a 900-year-old book in the form of... a LaserDisc. I read the wiki article and it's wild how it depended on one particular computer and disc reader model. I didn't even know there was a standard for encoding digital data onto LaserDiscs (granted, I've never seen a LaserDisc in person to begin with). But my point is that your examples are all from the early days of widespread computing. You can't just extrapolate it like that. There weren't established standard formats for things back then. Also a lot more software was proprietary AND platform-specific. Today, even if a file format is "unknown", poke at it with a hex editor or the `file` utility and there's a high probability that it's actually something standard like a zip archive or an sqlite database. It's not like we'll ever lose the knowledge of how to read and display a JPEG image from a DVD, unless our entire civilization somehow suffers a collapse so severe we go back to stone age.

michaelt 4y ago

To give quality examples for this sort of thing can be difficult - because things that are obscure enough to be nigh-unreadable won't be recognisable to most readers. After all, if I said "try opening a Generations Family Tree .cht file and you'll know what I mean" - would you know what I mean? Perhaps the most famous example is the BBC Domesday Project [1] which paid homage to a 900-year-old book in the form of... a LaserDisc. The data isn't entirely lost - but only thanks to the effort of computer history museums. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

grishka 4y ago
> After all, if I said "try opening a Generations Family Tree .cht file and you'll know what I mean" - would you know what I mean? No, I've never heard about neither this program nor its file format. Strangely I can't even find a copy I could download — but there's its manual on archive.org and several sites that could sell me a CD... But even if the program that made the file is lost, you could try reverse engineering the format by collecting as many files as you could find. It's harder, but it's still worth giving a shot. But then again, how popular was that program? > the BBC Domesday Project [1] which paid homage to a 900-year-old book in the form of... a LaserDisc. I read the wiki article and it's wild how it depended on one particular computer and disc reader model. I didn't even know there was a standard for encoding digital data onto LaserDiscs (granted, I've never seen a LaserDisc in person to begin with). But my point is that your examples are all from the early days of widespread computing. You can't just extrapolate it like that. There weren't established standard formats for things back then. Also a lot more software was proprietary AND platform-specific. Today, even if a file format is "unknown", poke at it with a hex editor or the `file` utility and there's a high probability that it's actually something standard like a zip archive or an sqlite database. It's not like we'll ever lose the knowledge of how to read and display a JPEG image from a DVD, unless our entire civilization somehow suffers a collapse so severe we go back to stone age.