ENSURING THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANTS
Rodger Whitlock (Sun, 26 Jan 2014 15:31:43 PST)

On 26 Jan 2014, at 11:24, Jane McGary wrote:

Judith Martin, writing as Miss Manners, made that very remark vis a vis
electronic address books. Hard drives can and do fail, and backups can turn
sour too, but paper is almost forever.

When I was working, someone latched onto the meme "paperless office" so we were
filing diskettes instead of paper documents. Today, you have to make special
arrangements to have a diskette drive in a computer, so those diskettes are
effectively unreadable. There's the further problem of file formats changing or
going obsolete, a vice to which MS software seems particularly prone. Just try
reading an old Lotus 1-2-3 Release 5 file today!

So, dear bulbophiles, do print out your irreplaceable data and file it where
you can find it after your house burns down.

--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Z. 7-8, cool Mediterranean climate