sanity check - are my documents readable now?

I have worked with the same company since 1982.

I have office documents on my hard drive that have been around since 1985 from software as early as Lotus Symphony and 123, emails that I have preserved since I first had an mail account in 1995, our full system documentation that dates from around 1989 when I converted it over a 3 month period from Wang word processor format.

But just how many are actually readable?

The more active documents get migrated through office application updates and through use, reuse, duplication, updates and by a natural requirement to be widely read on different formats.

But seeing this site covering Document Freedom Day 2010 made me think a bit deeper.

Sure I might never read some of the system documentation ever again, as it has become second nature to me but I have vowed to retire some day so one of my clones will have to wade through this jungle of document flavours with a machete. Why? Because I am not only tasked with maintaining domain knowledge at work but with family history at home. Try explaining how, in 20 years time, that those digital memories of that special wedding day or baby's first steps can only be read by flying over to Russia and running on some archaic 1990s hardware in a museum maintained by some aging, Jolt addicted geek retiree.

So we preserve documents files but how often does a business think to maintain some means to read them. Software vendors go out of their way to define their own proprietary formats that do nothing to solve this problem. Haven't they heard of backwards compatibility!!! Imagine the trouble this would cause the *NIX community in the management of operating systems upgrades. PC users are too gullible about this, fixated on new features without full realisation of the impact on their heritage file formats.

Hang on, I think I have the 5 1/4" Word 1.0 install disks somewhere ....