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I sympathize with your skepticism but I think 1968 is so quantitatively and qualitatively different that it's not a very helpful comparison. In 1968 nobody had personal computers, they were not a thing. ASCII is still really new, "files" aren't really a thing yet, the Multics system is under development and nobody has yet made the pun "Unix" let alone named an operating system. What formats are you thinking of that weren't text formats but are now "obsolete or completely unsupported" ? The Joint Technical Committee (home of JPEG, MPEG, and so on) isn't even an _idea_ yet, many of the people who'll form this committee are undergraduates or still in school. Machines aren't storing pictures, they're barely storing meaningful text, it's mostly numbers, big calculations. If we ask about 40 years ago instead, things are hugely different. By this point Unix exists, ADVENT exists, ASCII has "won". There is no Internet, no X Window System yet, and there still isn't a Joint Technical Committee but already the documents, software and systems are familiar because we're still using them. At home there is Pong, and in pinball arcades the new Space Invaders, both are nicely emulated today. |
It's sort of like automobiles in 1968 advertising how they are made with care and detail so they'll last, and made to be easy to work on so you can expect them to actually have people (or yourself) that know how to fix them decades later. People could easily come out and say most of what made a car in 1918 was very different to then, all the way down to the tires themselves. Industries that have had multiple decades of general use mature quite a bit, and people don't like to throw away stuff that works (or that they're fond of). We'll still have computers capable of running a von neumann architecture in 50 years, whether through hardware or software, and that's assuming we can't just port/compile to newer systems if they aren't as extreme of departures.
I still occasionally play computer games written in the 1980's, generally through dosbox or something similar. I think the most likely reason we have to lose access to running this software is if we lose access to running all software, in which case nobody will really care (not that I think that's remotely likely, just that it's the most likely scenario where that holds).