this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
385 points (96.8% liked)

Technology

60073 readers
2807 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Think about some of the formats we had in the 70’s and 80’s and how often people actually have that hardware and software in working order now.

Well yea, but it's a matter of funding and business/government desire. 99% of the time the only people who care about accessing things that old are hobbyists and enthusiasts.

If something critical to a fortune 500 company or government was stored on it and they needed it they would have the means to contract out a specialty one off device just to read it (Or contract out to a very pricey data recovery shop)

And software is software, we can still run 70s and 80s software through a myriad of virtualization technologies fairly easily and cheaply.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

You want to make some money? Start manufacturing microfiche readers. There was a brief time in the 20th century where microfilm and microfiche was all the rage for archiving and even publishing technical documents, and now there's a lot of data people need for various reasons and no device to retrieve it on because they all got put in a room in the back of a library and got kicked in when someone backed into the room carrying a heavy box.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

old family videos? old government data?

its not just for hobby.