martinship - 9:04 am on Jul 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

Import something from Visicalc or WordStar anyone?

Yes! Specifically, WordStar for Dos 3.3. It was a mess, and the hours spent cleaning and reformatting the automatic conversation results were costly. Just getting the physical media (5.25 disks) read was one hassle, then finding that modern programs couldn't convert, I ended up running a series of conversions to get to Rich Text Format. So, yes, this problem is real. If you've got a bunch of information of any value still in formats more than 10 years old, there's an exponential price-of-recovery vs. time-since-creation graph to consider. I'd say were well past the shallow end of the curve for documents over 20 years old (1987). Using the original tools to recover documents of this age is probably a near-impossible challenge and recovery will take reverse-engineering.

Of course, some document formats don't have this challenge, and it's always nice to be able to quickly read an ancient Postscript or PDF file (Adobe's Reader still has support for very early versions of PDF).