How Will Historians of the Future Run MS Word 97? How Can We Save It for Them?

Just as early filmmakers couldn’t have predicted the level of ongoing interest in their work more than 100 years later, who can say what future generations will find important to know and preserve about the early history of software? While the notion that someone might go diving into some long outmoded version of Word might seem improbable, knowledge of the human past turns up in all kinds of unexpected places. Historians of the analog world have long known this: Writing, after all, began as a form of accounting—would the Sumerian scribes who incised cuneiform into wet clay have thought their peculiar angular scratchings would have been of interest to a future age? –Matt Kirschenbaum (Slate Magazine).