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Vintage Computer Festival wrote: This is my point. The quipu was apparently their equivalent of our spreadsheet. They were easy for them to use, and easily understood. They aren't even "compressed", "tarred", or "zipped", but still lost. Once many could "write"/read them, and they were meant for long term archival use (at least many seem to have been archived). As easy as it was for them, and as important as they thought these documents were, we are unable to read them. They thought it was good for long term storage, but we haven't a clue as to how to read them. What is so different about computer archives, no matter how simple it seems to us, that ours wouldn't suffer the same fate. Same point. The Egyptians thought it was good enough, and easy enough, for use as a long term archive (see all the obelisks they made). We still lost the understanding of how to understand them. How much simpler can you get than "cartoons" carved in stone? Yet we still lost the ability to read them for a thousand+ years. Will there be a Rosetta stone to help future people to understand a long lost CP/M archive? I don't care how "simple" you think a storage format is, it won't help it in the long run. The archive should be for our own use, not some theoretical idiot 2000 years from now trying to boot a Kaypro. He's probably going to have a whole different set of problems with an archive than we could conceive; like locating the "any" key.