[Info-vax] Kermit on Itanium VMS

[Dennis Boone]

 > After all these years I have a little difficulty imagining why anyone 
 > would want to but given sufficient incentives it's possible to do it.

Imagining it isn't so hard.

One of the key things mickeysoft fails to understand is that _some_
people do occasionally need to use old data.  We had a textbook written
25 years ago using MacWord 1.0 that we needed to read.  None of the
Mac or Windows Words we could find would touch it.  (IIRC, even the
version of MacWord which followed 1.0 wouldn't.)  None of the word
processor format converters we could find would touch it.  We ended up
using Word 1.0 to extract the text, and were fortunate that a student
around the office happened to have a very old Mac with that very old
software installed.

Archivists these days are trying to figure out how to prevent the
last 40 years of data and documents from vanishing down the ratholes
of history.  They're faced with choices like doing one-shot conversions
to flat text, hoping like hell that newer versions will read older
documents, running old software on the ever decreasing collection of
old hardware, or running it in emulation.  Like any other endeavour,
the working solution seems to be a hybrid.

De