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Re:Ask HN: Do you think we’ll be able to play a VHS in 2119? by greenyoda on Sunday May 19, 2019 @04:26PM (#19955305)
I'm guessing that none of these formats will be readable in 100 years. 9-track magnetic tape (remember those big tape drives on mainframes, starting in 1964? [1]) is already virtually impossible to read, and that's after it was out of use for only a couple of decades. And that was an industry standard medium with lots of important stuff on it, like data from NASA missions, old business software and backups, etc. Somehow it all got converted to other media. So I don't think any of today's media standards will survive anywhere close to 100 years, especially not consumer-grade stuff like CDs, DVDs, VHS and USBs. (Think of how hard it became to read a floppy disk just a few years after PC manufacturers stopped shipping machines that had floppy drives.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape

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