19 May
2005
19 May
'05
4:17 p.m.
My point at the beginning of the thread was that I
don't think
archive programs should be damned simply because they run on a
certain platform. That's extremely narrow thinking. (I'm not
accusing you of that at all, just commenting on the thread responses
in general.)
I would certainly claim an 'archive program' should be damned if it isn't
'open' -- that is to say if there is not an adequate sprcification of the
archive format to allow an extractor to be written for any platform
(subject to limitations on disk space, memory, etc).
However popular a machine is now, there will come a time when there are
none still running (and I suspect this will be true of modern PCs long
before it's true of things like PDP11s, but I digress). I feel it's very
unlikely that our archive of boot disks will survive and no copies of a
now-common archive program specification will remain, though.
-tony