Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/08/17
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:25 PM 8/16/97 -0400, Dan Cardish wrote: >Do you think that 200 years from now people will have technology that can >read your CDs? Can you read an 8 inch floppy that was made maybe 10 years >ago? Or even a 5 1/4 floppy? People making this argument tend to forget that CD's and 8 inch floppies are very different, because very, very few 8 inch floppies were made. Even so, one can still find businesses that will recover data from 8 inch floppies for a price. 5 1/4 inch floppies were tremendously more rare than CD's, but I have a working 5 1/4 inch drive and so do lots of other people. As for CD's, barring some sort of catastrophe, I fully expect them to be readable 200 years from now. Billions of CDs have been made. It's likely that people will still be interested in things recorded on them in 200 years and will be willing to pay to read them. Therefore, barring some catastrophe, a means of reading them will still exist. In any case, Michael only needs to be able to read his CD's until the next form of archival storage comes along -- by then he'll probably be able to transfer hundreds of them to a single device.