As Time Goes By

My first computer was a TI-99, a gift from my engineering grandfather.  Data was stored on a magnetic cassette tape.  Through the years I’ve owned or worked on computers with a range of external data storage methods – various sized floppy disks, Bernoulli drives, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and various forms of flash drives.  As external data storage evolves, it orphans previous technologies, which also orphans the data you may have stored on them.

But orphaning as technology progresses can be software-based as well as hardware-based.  So it is that you might have such an old version of a file that current applications don’t recognize it and can’t open it.  Fortunately, there are sometimes work-arounds that can help you get back that prized, ancient file, like this one for MS-Word files.