Papyrus may just outlive our new storage media

By Peter Vogel

Recently a reader of this column wrote me with a problem relating to an old document file.

My reader, John Ng, needed access to a file he hadn't opened in years. I'll let him fill in the details.

"I have an old WordPerfect file that I need to open. I am currently using Microsoft Office 2007 with Vista and no longer have a computer with WordPerfect installed. Normally this would not be a problem, as Microsoft Word has the ability to convert WordPerfect files, but my file is password protected and Microsoft cannot open WordPerfect password protected files.

"I am wondering if you have access to a computer with WordPerfect installed so that I can use it to remove the password. It is kind of urgent. Is there any chance the school may have an old computer with WordPerfect installed?"

Unfortunately I no longer had a machine running WordPerfect, an application that at one time was synonymous with word processing. It was developed at Brigham Young University in 1980. In recent years the program's ownership has rested with Corel (www.corel.com), at one time the biggest software company in Canada.

I posted a note to my staff colleagues concerning Mr. Ng's plight and was quickly able to identify a WordPerfect user who could be of assistance, although by that point my reader had thought of another solution.

"I surfed over to the WordPerfect web site and they are offering a 30-day trial version of WordPerfect for download. I installed the trial version and was able to open my file even though it was created 15 years ago in 1994. I re-saved the file without the password and then used Word 2007 to open the file. Word 2007 successfully converted the file and I was able to save it as a Word document."

His case raises an interesting issue. His file was 15 years old and hadn't been accessed in that time. How viable will our own documents, photos, and storage media (disks, USBs, CDs, DVDs) be years from now? We know that physical media (paper, papyrus, and the like) have been readable after two millennia. It's highly doubtful that CDs will perform similarly.

As Mr. Ng noted, his experience highlights the risk of archived data becoming obsolete. Not only will the kind of media one has used for backup go out of fashion, but the hardware to read the media and the software that created the data file may both become obsolete.

In a previous column I described a student's unfortunate experience with a USB flash drive that simply stopped functioning. As luck would have it it was at a crucial time, just as she was completing a lengthy project.

My first experience with a word processor goes back to 1976, when I worked with the Wilbur system at Simon Fraser University. My first word processing on a personal computer was on a Commodore CBM system that I still have in its original boxes.

I have files stored on cassette tapes, large- and small-format floppy disks, various hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs, DVDs, and on old computer systems. One of these days I'll have to retrieve my original BCC column from the still-viable IBM PS/1 running Windows 3.1!

Favourite application of the week

Muziic Player, created by secondary school student David Nelson and his father. Muziic plugs into the vast YouTube pool of music and music videos. Download it www.muziic.com and you'll have your first playlist up and running in minutes.

My only quibble, and it has nothing to do with the Muziic app itself, is that so much YouTube music material is of poor, next to unusable quality. That aside, I've been using Muziic since the day it was released in early March.

Contest winner

The winner of our Norton 360 All in One security package contest is Peter Da Silva of St. Jude's Parish in Vancouver.

Up for grabs this time for BCC subscribers is a copy of Laptops for Seniors, part of the excellent "in easy steps" series of books from the U.K. Send me an e-mail with the subject "Laptops Book" by Friday, April 24, at 3 p.m. to be eligible to win.

Suggestions and comments about this column may be sent to peterv@portal.ca. For additional information: http://twitter.com/petervogel.