I tried to open a Pages document from 2005 yesterday. This error message popped up.


So the most recent version of Pages won“t open a file from 2005. Oh, Lordy.

Thankfully, I didn’t need the document - what I was looking for was elsewhere, and I do have the older version of Pages. But be warned - stuff that you think is permanent may not be.

This is old news

Indeed. Way back in the early 1990s, I read an article about a company in the USA which was retaining as many different devices to read and write data because as companies moved technology in, old data would be lost. Having gone from audio cassette to 5.25" floppies and then to 3.5" floppies, it was a sensible precaution. When you think of the storage devices on the market in the 1980s, some which are really, really obscure (phloopy/floopy drives, anyone?), you have to move your data along if you need it.

In this case, this is a piece of software that is refusing to open a file from a previous version, which is just really odd. Most of the time in this situation, we would expect the data to be converted to the new format.

Indeed. I've got some (very) old backups from my first Mac sitting on 640 Mb 3.5" MO discs. Still got the mac and the drive (and associated SCSII cable) but I have no idea if it still works.

Microsoft Office does this to an extent as well. Project will refuse to open anything prior to 2007 and Word, I think, will refuse to open anything before 1998 or 1995.

It'd be nice if the file contents at least were human readable in some form so even if you couldn't get the file back you could get the raw data/text out of it with a text editor and some work but old Office files are so horrible they're practically encrypted.

Could you not virtualise? Virtualbox or Parallels?

More a question of the application software being pretty hard to find I suspect. I may have an old iWork DVD somewhere but I wonder if the licencing server is even still switched on. Mind you, running in trial mode might be enough to get the file exported as something usable.

You will all laugh at me then. 2006 iMac running its best Lion and Pages version 2
To be fair to the computer, it does ok, just web pages with too many adverts get annoying and bypassed.
The inevitable will come of course but until then...

I've been having a tidy out of some of my things left at the parents place.
I've found a set of Hypercard floppies and some other obsolete software - I've tried putting them on eBay in the past, but there's a part of me that doesn't want to bin them just in case someone needs them one day.
Then again, all media has a shelf life. I wonder if it would be worth getting a USB drive and attempting to take disc images of them.

Instead of throwing them away, I wonder if the computer museum in Cambridge would want them - especially if you have the boxes and documentation.