When my mom said she wanted a new computer years ago I quizzically asked, Why? Is there something else you’d like yours to do? No she said, but she wanted to rearrange her office and wanted something that took up less space. Oh! Okay. Well I happened to have an older, to me anyways, laptop that she could use which would work. It was a Toshiba as I recall and worked well, but I’d since upgraded.
One time my mom’s typing and computer skills far exceeded mine. These were the days when Lotus 1-2-3, QuattroPro, WordPerfect, and Novel were the heavyweights in the business computing world. She ran all of these, substituting Quicken 3.0 for Novel, on her home PC-XT. These apps met her needs for computing. Her computer lived nicely under the custom vinyl cover for it. The heavy throw of the power switch, with its reassuring ‘clunk’ let you know the machine was on, or off. Her printer always worked and, except for someone breaking into the house, her data was safe. She religiously backed up data to floppy-disk and kept multiples of those.
By this time the only application she really used anymore was Quicken. She was religious about reconciling her bank statements and printing out her own reconciled versions filed neatly away. God bless her. So I loaded the newest version of Quicken on the laptop for her. This would have been something like Quicken Basic circa the early 2000’s. I tucked the system neatly into the hutch where she had allocated space and showed her how to login. She looked at me with appreciation and then, extended her hand and gave me her most recent Quicken 3.0 backup on a 5 1/4” floppy-disk.
Uh-oh.
Till I saw Tron:Ares I had not seen a pop culture reference to the 5 1/4” floppy disk, or a PC-XT in ages. Now I suspect there will be some cult Tron fan driven acquisition of legacy computer technology - but I digress. When my mom handed me her back-up disk I did not have a system left that had a 5 1/4” drive in it, but did still have 3.5”. So, I had to downgrade? my system to include another drive. Thankfully, there were still some kicking around and I had my own system(s) to work with. I built the intermediary system copied the file from the 5 1/4” disk to a 3.5” drive, backing it up also onto an external ZIP drive (yes, another antiquated format today) as well as my hard-drive. Bingo. Now the data file existed in multiple places besides the 15+ year old computer and a ‘floppy’ disk.
Armed now with a ‘rigid’ floppy disk containing the *.QDF file I sat at her soon to be new to her computer. File > Import > Destination <CLICK>.
What happened next still brings me a delightful bit of glee to this day. It worked!! Her checking account register on the new machine populated with all her data. I am pretty sure that no one at Quicken ever /actually/ tested such an upgrade process, but clearly someone thought about it. Obviously the new program added new features, new data-fields, and types. Somewhere, or somehow, they either maintained their data schema, not changing it over all those years or decided to incorporate into all their products an import procedure with enough rule based matching criteria to ensure backwards compatibility.
I doubt there are many occasions to tell a story like this in the soon-to-be future as physical copies atrophy, business models evolve and no one actually ‘owns’ their software (and often times even their data), and anything that could/would be deployed would simply require being online. Rat-Race as a Service seems to be the current trend in SW development. Gone are the days of ownership for professionally developed and tested programs that were unmetered, untethered, and off-grid. Even if you think you have these softwares, companies like Microsoft aggressively work to EOL your investment with ‘system updates’ that enable phone home and change licensing models without clearly warning you. For example converting Onenote into read-only mode as it is ‘unsupportable’.
Or, perhaps as digital data continues to proliferate it’ll just as likely be that there is no underlying program, schema, or software beyond the “Ai”. Your output will be dynamically generated in whatever format you require based on accepted industry standards from the murky depths of some data pond, lake, sea, or ocean.