wait wait, someone is going to Tea Party a house???

Plus if your house was tp’d, it usually meant you were popular.

You know I’m gonna toilet-paper your tree later, right?

For­give me for not being a geezer.

You kids get off my lawn!

Forgive me for not being a geezer.

Right now, the older formats are pretty easy to decipher.  “strings — [filename]” and you get the text.  The formatting information is lost, of course, but you get the basic information.

Newer formats, like the later Microsoft ones, with their weird and largely undocumented internal structure, proprietary compression scheme — those are going to be difficult.  Luckily, not much of lasting importance is written in those formats.

Remember: save anything important as PDF or some other publicly documented format!

Two hun­dred years from now, after the file for­mats have changed a few dozen times, will there still be con­vert­ers that can han­dle things that haven’t been looked at in a century?

For the more popular formats, absolutely. There will be a market for it. For example, MP3, JPG, DOC, etc. are so popular they will necessarily have a market. WordStar, though? AmiPro? Not so much.

The ones at school were ancient and worse, with their ridicu­lous 5″ (lit­er­ally) floppy disks and green and black CRT dis­plays.

Um…yeah…I remember when those were new. I remember eight–inch floppies. And PDP-11s with core memory. And the days before Windows 1.0. You’re a pup.

And my phone is more powerful than the desktop computer I had a decade ago. More memory, more storage, a faster connection to the Internet, and a screen with the same resolution (albeit at a much smaller form factor). It’s mind-blowing at times to consider.

My govt. office job early 90s was memorable for replacing the Intel 386sx processor chip pc’s w/486sx chip pc’s. And of course moving from a b/w monitor to color.