But he seems to have written this before virtual machines became widespread.
I think the concern is becoming increasingly irrelevant now, because if I really need to access a file I created in Word 4.0 for the Mac back in 1990, it's not too hard to fire up System 6 with that version of Word and read my file. In fact it's much easier now than it was in 2005 when he was writing. Sure it might take half an hour to get it all working, but that's really not too bad.
Most of this is probably technically illegal and will sometimes even have to rely on cracked versions, but also nobody cares and. All the OS's and programs are still around and easy to find on the internet.
Not to mention that while file formats changed all the time early on, these days they're remarkably long-lived -- used for decades, not years.
The outdated hardware concern was more of a concern (as the original post illustrates), but so much of everything important we create today is in the cloud. It's ultimately being saved in redundant copies on something like S3 or Dropbox or Drive or similar, that are kept up to date. As older hardware dies, the bits are moved to newer hardware without the user even knowing.
So the problem Kurzweil talked about has basically become less of an issue as time has marched on, not more. Which is kind of nice!
>I think the concern is becoming increasingly irrelevant now, because if I really need to access a file I created in Word 4.0 for the Mac back in 1990, it's not too hard to fire up System 6 with that version of Word and read my file. In fact it's much easier now than it was in 2005 when he was writing. Sure it might take half an hour to get it all working, but that's really not too bad.
> I think the concern is becoming increasingly irrelevant
I fear we may be on top of that point. With the "cloudification" where more and more software is run on servers one doesn't control there is no way to run that software in a VM as you don't have access to the software anymore. And even getting the pure data for a custom backup becomes harder and harder.
I think the concern is becoming increasingly irrelevant now, because if I really need to access a file I created in Word 4.0 for the Mac back in 1990, it's not too hard to fire up System 6 with that version of Word and read my file. In fact it's much easier now than it was in 2005 when he was writing. Sure it might take half an hour to get it all working, but that's really not too bad.
Most of this is probably technically illegal and will sometimes even have to rely on cracked versions, but also nobody cares and. All the OS's and programs are still around and easy to find on the internet.
Not to mention that while file formats changed all the time early on, these days they're remarkably long-lived -- used for decades, not years.
The outdated hardware concern was more of a concern (as the original post illustrates), but so much of everything important we create today is in the cloud. It's ultimately being saved in redundant copies on something like S3 or Dropbox or Drive or similar, that are kept up to date. As older hardware dies, the bits are moved to newer hardware without the user even knowing.
So the problem Kurzweil talked about has basically become less of an issue as time has marched on, not more. Which is kind of nice!