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http://www.nielses.dk/blog/2006/my-debut-as-a-wikipedian-digital-dark-age

One example is that a word processor document saved in the WordStar format popular in the 1980s cannot be read by software typically installed on modern PCs.

That's not a good example: [1] You have to get much more obscure than WordStar for this to be a problem, yet.

The current LZH example is pretty weak too.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.68.16.40 (talk) 12:10, 1 May 2009 (UTC)[reply] 

Actually, I would be more worried about broken files, which happen to be accepted by the software that created them, but don't really conform to the relevant spec. Formats that are really an executable language, like PostScript, are a particular problem: when they are broken, it can be very difficult to get any useful information out. --DavidHopwood 00:58, 2 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed the LZH example of Digital Dark Age; IZArc is popular among users, has been awarded several times and can read and create LZH files. --RekishiEJ (talk) 20:56, 17 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like a perfect example of this would be the Apollo 11 missing tapes. Everyone has seen the video feed of the first manned landing on the moon, but not everyone realizes that a high quality version of that video used to exist. See: Apollo 11 missing tapes The tapes were lost because conversion would have been expensive, so it was left to the future to convert them. In the interim though, the tapes were lost (and presumed to have been reused). Azoreg (talk) 19:39, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi -- the link for "Forgotten in the attic" goes to a Doctor Who page without explanation, and without that phrase "Forgotten in the attic" . Can someone fix that reference? Perhaps the reference is subtle, too subtle, by showing that a TV show Doctor Who has episodes that are "Forgotten in the attic", but that phrase is not used on the hyperlinked page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Peter10003 (talk • contribs) 15:09, 13 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Today, you can more easily run Vic 20 programs and play 80's NES & Atari games than you could in the day. Emulation of simple early processor is easy because of the hardware is simple to simulate electronically. Today's Emulators are plentiful, and they're free. In practice, to load a WordStar doc, you can simply download an 8086 emulator and install an open-source copy of DOS. Then you can run the original software in it's original form. I'd be more concerned about Microsoft getting carried away with the complexity of software they make now.

Also of concern is closed-source software, which when it's income-generating phase is over, is left forever unmaintained and broken. Furthermore the sole company that harbors copyrighted source code will eventually be out of business). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.138.64.113 (talk) 01:35, 10 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Katz offers help for the Web-challenged" Hudis, Mark. Mediaweek6. 33 (Aug 19, 1996): 25.

"...the digital Dark Age could very well give way to the Gilded Age."

Amy Rudersdorf

This whole concept seems a bit far-fetched, especially since the best examples cited here show no loss of information. Each example ends with a caveat such as "...the images were eventually extracted," "the system was emulated in 2002... This allows the information on the discs to be accessed on modern computers." "... it took the capacity of a distributed computing project to break the mechanically generated code..."

Even in cases of cryptography, where some of the greatest minds of an era set about making it as difficult as possible to decrypt a message, we are decrypting them today. It's specious to suggest that cryptologists decades from now will be stumped by some proprietary file formats. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.207.178.155 (talk) 19:40, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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I think SGML should be mentioned in this article, because that was original purpose for SGML. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language As a document markup language, SGML was originally designed to enable the sharing of machine-readable large-project documents in government, law, and industry. Many such documents must remain readable for several decades—a long time in the information technology field. Bruceraf (talk) 22:27, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]