Legacy systems, technology gap entropy

Moving seemingly faster than C or the speed of light the IT sector is perceived grow at an almost exponential rate creating built in obsolesce.

Recently the data labs team were contacted by the local BBC radio station who had been contacted by Ross in bloom flower festival, the organisers had lost a piece of work which was 6 months in the making.
The paper was created in the now defunct Canon Star writer format and as the machine was now no longer operable the floppy disk containing the work could not be accessed via a personal computer system and as the star writer was 15 years old they could not find any service supplier with that particular type of technology, this was a classic technology gap, that is to say that the original equipment no loner functioned, could not be serviced or replaced leaving the data or media ’stranded’ with no ordinary means of being edited and printed.
Upon diagnosis the 1.44MB floppy drive contained the file in question in word star format our engineers were able to manually via a hex editor restructure the contents and formatting and then convert it to a more usable and up to data Word format, the client was very happy as it contained over 5000 words with many hours of research.

Tape systems are now entering this phase of technology gap entropy, that is to say that over time not only will the media degrade due to basic physics but that the system themselves very quickly get left behind in favor of newer system such as disk to disk backup which is now growing in popularity.

A basic audit on a yearly basis can diminish the chances of this type of data loss occurring by evaluating the total IT infrastructure of your organisation you can identify what may be seriously redundant kit with no secondary service or equipment available to replace failing hardware, this would be the time to replace the equipment, but what about the data? Conversion services are available to all formats, operating systems, and custom hard ware and software, for instance converting Mac to PC and vica versa, PC to Unix and application conversion from such systems as loco script, word star, word perfect etc to newer more manageable data sets.

For this particular case the client was extremely happy that the data could be converted and has now invested in a more modern computer set up, there are though countless others such as authors who utilize this perfectly adequate system which is fit for their purpose but their lies the danger so make that audit part of your plans in the near future.