<x-charset iso-8859-1>John, In general, I concur with what you have said; but as usual, I do have some reservations. Just as the 5 1/4 drives have all but disappeared from the new and used marketplace - except maybe hamfests and the like, similar things have taken place with respect to tape drives and SyQuest drives among others. There has been a rumor circulating in my neck of the woods that eventually the 3.5 drives will also disappear and be replaced with Zip or 120 floppy drives (which are backward compatible currently). To be sure if one wants to expend the time, energy, and money, one can probably find some of this older obsolete hardware and retrieve a file; but most people (I am speaking of ordinary individuals and not professional computer types or those on research grants, corporate or large company establishments, or academic or governmental institutions) frequently and typically do not have the time, energy, patients, or funds available to do the search or even in some cases acquire the hardware. So what you say may in principle and in fact be true, it is not an effortless accomplishment if it can indeed be accomplished. I also agree with you statement concerning the common file formats. While this is not to say that they never will change or cannot become obsolete, I think that the occurrence will take place at a much slower place than many of the other changes in the computer world. My only major point would be to suggest in the context of the whole discussion, your attention is directed to only one side of the equation when it comes to the distribution of images - namely the buyers side of the equation. They typically are buying prints not files; they want and expect some degree of longevity, and they do not want to have to keep going back to the seller to buy or get them to print up new replacement prints from the original or duplicate files. From their point of view the life span of the digital file is not relevant or significant. But you are not addressing this and I realize that. I am not criticizing you for not addressing it but merely pointing out the area which is being ignored in the concern over the life span of files in this general discussion under this header. -----Original Message----- From: owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com [mailto:owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com]On Behalf Of John Matturri Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2000 12:11 PM To: epson-inkjet@leben.com Subject: Re: Our responsibilty with Inkjet Printing On the future accessibility of media / formats. Maybe too much is being made of past experience with now-unreadable computer tapes and formats. By the present there may be enough of a critical mass that efforts will be made to keep old data accessible. I can't read my 51/4" disks on my current computer, but I'm pretty sure I could find one to hook up if I needed a file on one (actually, I've been pretty good at migrations). In the future it seems likely that there will be some form of service bureau to recover data, as long as it hasn't been totally corrupted in a physical sense. There are also very few file formats that I can't read, going back to the the early 80s and, for example, early versions of dos-Wordstar. Recently, I needed to recover some files in propietary Grandview (a much missed outline processor that has never been matched) format and in a short time located a conversion program. That said, you obviously should migrate to relatively recent media and stick to relatively common formats. It seems unlikely that .tif, .pdf, and .jpg files will become totally unreadable given the great amount of information stored in them. I suspect that, at the very least, conversion utilities will be available for these for a long time to come, barring the effects of war, extended depression, etc. John M. - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions. - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions. </x-charset>