Some programs are better than others at this. The current WordPerfect can still read early ‘80s Wordstar. Even a brand new machine can boot into DOS, and run old copies of Multimate . For the really hard up, there are conversion services. We’ve been through this before . . . punch cards, DEC tape, paper tape anybody? How about 9 track? The really important stuff has been moved onto optical disc already. You can find old CPM , Atari and Commodore stuff on FTP servers anywhere. The old Unix stuff never even went away.
Currently, we have a newly mature industry. Yeah, we have trubles reading old compugraphics diskettes, and forget those 160MB tape cartridges! However, PDF, HTML and XML are industry wide standards. PDF in particular, is not going anywhere for a long, LONG time (for one thing US Gov issues docs in that format, and the readers are free).
Are zip drives now dead? I still have backups stored on zip disks. I would presume the external drives can still be found and installed on a port?
F