“…A few months ago, I saw a page by a lab workstation with an
archaic, 8” floppy disk taped to it, and the message “Always
transfer your files; Formats change, and you never know when you
won’t be able to read them anymore.” I think most of us, at one
time or another, have had to deal with compatibility problems in
physical media. More often, though, incompatible data file formats
present the big headaches.”
“Most Linux software has some very substantial built-in
safeguards to guard against this sort of software obsolescence.
Many programs use text files to store data, and even those using
complex formats (like gnumeric and SciGraphica ) use XML, which
itself is text. Although in some cases it may be inconvenient to
parse through text formats to get data into a newer version of a
given application, common editors like vi and emacs both support
regular expressions to simplify large-scale data taming. Of course,
combining the power of stream editors like sed and awk with simple
shell scripts can also help make short work of large data
tasks.”
“From a system perspective, Linux has several advantages over
most commercial systems to ward off obsolescence. The Linux kernel
maintains the full range of filesystem types (minix, msdos, vfat,
hfs, ntfs, ext2, iso9660, reiserfs and ext3 – I’m sure I’ve missed
some!) so data and other files stored previously on more mature
filesystems are easily read by modern Linux workstations. I’m aware
of many labs that use rather old DOS-based programs for some
analyses as either nothing more recent currently exists for other
platforms, or the equivalents are not yet known. In these cases, it
is possible to use an emulator (like plex86) to run these
applications.”