The Digital Dark Age, via Randy.

I don’t know why I’m surprised by this, or even if I am — I’ve got a one-act play I wrote in college that I can’t read, and tons of files from back in that era that are only really printable out of notepad, if I’m lucky (something that makes the annoying format of the Project Gutenberg files make sense).

Standardize on something super widespread like HTML or .RTF

I've got .RTFs from 1990 that still open in AppleWorks and Word XP.

As for images, on the Mac there is Graphic Convertor which will open tons of things, from Nokia cell phone to SGI to old Apple Icon from system 1.0-6.0.

For moving text to incompatablity, I point to Microsoft and it's moving the file format of .DOC year after year after year.

Yes, I was going to mention those file formats. Short of straight text file, pure html is essentially a .txt with some extra tags in it that can be either interpreted or stripped out. Ditto RTF, which may be ugly but could be read by a notepad.

All my web stuff with the exception of the blogs is in pretty normal html (and my archives versions are straight html with no css, which is much more volitile) -- all my stories are written in RoughDraft, which saves stuff as rtf.

Kind of makes me wonder if the pyramids (just as an example) are actually some kind of data warehouse that we've lost the technology to read. Imagine if our technology was forgotten. In 500 years who would know that a round silver disk has music encoded on it?

Ooh. I like that.