[Air-l] failed media - computer orphans

[Denise N. Rall]

Dear Air'ers -

The NY Times did a story on computer orphans, it was
decades ago (maybe in 1988-89). So what I recall is
highly sus (Australian for suspect).

I think the computer orphans were people who had
systems that still ran, but no one else could receive
or send those files. A computer orphan usually owned a
CP/M computer or an Amiga, although we did have the
most unfortunate PCjr around for awhile . . . .

Failed media reminds me a bit of a chemist at
UW-Madison who brought me a file written in
Volkswriter Scientific. And of course, an ASCII-export
will export the text but make garbage of the
scientific notation . . . . and no one had a copy of
the software that was still running. He had
acidentally re-formatted the last working copy of the
software on disk and then his hard disk crashed. I
vaguely remember we turned it into postscript and
printed it from PageMaker? Ahh the good old days.

Cheers, Denise








=====
Denise N. Rall, PhD student, School of Env. Science, Southern Cross Uni,  
Marker for Protected/Natural Area Management, BIO00244
Lismore, NSW, 2480 Australia Phone +61-2-6624-8627 Fax +61-2-6624-8637 Office (Thursdays) (02) 6620 3577 Mob 0438 233 344
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html

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