[brians]

“all the binary formats of the 1990s can be opened today”

Oh, sweet summer child. Scribe/mss. Koalapad. A bunch of Apple 2GS, Apple 3, and Lisa formats. Lotus Improv.

The points about semantics and authenticity are wonderful, but I think the presumption that all formats can be opened is mistaken exactly because those that can’t be opened become effectively invisible and lost.

[selfhoster11]

Emulation can bring them back in a limited fashion. Though obviously un-marrying them from the original system environment and making them accessible outside of the VM can be a challenge.

[photojosh]

This just gave me the completely random idea... (as someone whose parents used to have tons of ClarisWorks docs)... build OCR into the emulator. :)

[mark-r]

Survivorship bias it's called.