This story brings back some memories from a few years ago. When we first got a digital camera I wondered about how long these formats would be readable. Today I see so many different card formats for cameras it’s silly. Then I think back to floppy disks and hard disks and all the different formats used for them. I recall my time when I worked at a large telecomm and had to write device drivers to read 8″ floppy disks. Then, we “upgraded” to 5.25″ disks. Obviously, you can’t read the 8″ disks in the 5.25″ drives, so we had to have a bunch of systems lying about with both types of drives. And, the 5.25″ disks didn’t store as much as the 8″ disks. Joy. Yes most of us used floppy disks for backup. I’m sure if I look around the house I’ll find 8″, 5.25″ and 3.5″ floppy disks. Problem is, do I have a drive for any of those? What about all those old tape formats? DAT? Exabyte? 9 track? If I had any of those I’d not have any kind of device to read them. Oh, and ZIP disks. Man. It’s just sad to think about
