

Tech nightmares that keep Turing Award winners up at night - hemapani
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2976873/software/tech-nightmares-that-keep-turing-award-winners-up-at-night.html

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btown
The existence of emulators is a big mitigator in software disappearing. As
long as each generation of computers can emulate the architecture of the
previous generation, there's a chain that can read any file format. Heck, my
web browser can emulate Kid Pix and read its file format:
[https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/](https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/). And
speed isn't an issue since parallelizing file conversion on billions of files
is trivial in the cloud.

Now, _data_ integrity being dependent on the continued existence of a single
corporate entity is another issue altogether. But as long as your bytes are
backed up personally on the latest generation of physical media, the bytes of
the software you use to access them are backed up personally, you have a
specification of the hardware architecture needed to run that software, and
you have a chain of emulators that reach back to that architecture, then
you're fine.

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jewbear48
I have to point out that most image formats are actually rather simple. I very
much doubt a competent engineer could not reverse engineer the formats in a
week.

