The Lazy Person's Guide to controlling technologies: document formats—an open and shut case

CHIPS, April-June, 2006 by Dale J. Long

Welcome to the continuing saga of how technology controls our lives. This installment of the Lazy Person's Guide will address digital documents: what they are, how they function and what leverage they exert in our work environment. We will examine text, tags and the march of formats from basic text to desktop publishing capabilities that put the modern equivalent of a printing press on everyone's desktop. But first, as is often our custom, we start with a visit with Zippy.

Zipped Archives

We received our annual invitation to Casa Zippy for their New Year's Day Football Finger Food Fiesta. The party was not for Zippy and me, but for our wives. Zippy and I will watch football as an excuse to tweak a surround sound system to recreate stadium crowd noise.

Our wives, however, are die-hard football fans: Zippette is a Pittsburg Steelers fan and my wife is a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan. Since those two teams were playing each other on New Year's Day, there was no way Zippy and I were going to come near them during the game. Even Zippy's twins, now three-years-old, know to make themselves scarce on Sunday afternoons when the "Moms" are watching football on television.

Zippy, the children and I found ourselves in the safest room in the house: the basement. Zippy's basement is not your average hole in the ground. Most basements range from cement floors and cinder blocks to a finished space with carpet. Zippy's basement resembles nothing less than the North American Aerospace Defense Command's operation center in Cheyenne Mountain, with enough electronics hardware to run a large multinational corporation.

There is a room in Zippy's basement that should be in the Smithsonian Institution. It contains a working version of almost every personal computer (PC) and operating system (OS) produced since the original Apple I back in 1976. Some people play with model trains in their basements; Zippy plays with old computers. Despite being the computer equivalent of a guy who cuts a hole in the floorboard of his sports utility vehicle so he can drive it onto a frozen lake and use it as an ice fishing shanty, Zippy has managed to keep all his relics operational.

Zippy has been keeping digital records as a matter of obsession for more than 25 years. He has financial records in VisiCalc in Apple and PC formats, and both old Mac and new Windows versions of Excel. He has a huge collection of old UseNet files, original short fiction and research papers in AppleWorks, WordStar, WordPerfect (WP), Microsoft Word (four versions), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), and WriteNow. His favorites are game programs and saved games on Commodores, Amigas and Apple IIs. If there is a "nerdvanna" in the afterlife, it probably looks just like Zippy's basement.

However, Zippy's collection illustrates one of the major issues in computing: proprietary applications and formats. The reason he has these old computers is to maintain the use of information and applications despite changes in technology over the last 30 years. Old applications and formats never die; they just become obsolete.

As more people and organizations migrate to newer systems and software, the pressure increases on the holdouts to join them. We are given the choice of replacing or upgrading to keep up with the technological Joneses or risk ending up stuck in a computing backwater unable to share or receive documents with the rest of the world. To understand why formats matter, let's take a brief look at how they work.

Tagging Text

In the beginning, there was American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), and ASCII was all anyone had in the early days of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). First codified in 1963 by the American National Standards Institute, ASCII was derived from telegraphic codes and first entered commercial use as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell Data Services. Originally, it only had uppercase letters and a few odd substitutions for some special characters.

ASCII was upgraded in 1967 to include lowercase letters and enhanced control codes like ACKnowledge, ESCape and DELete. Other than upper- and lowercase lettering, ASCII did not allow for anything in the way of formatting. Early teleprinters worked much like typewriters. ASCII mirrored whatever the printer could produce based on typewriter-style output.

The ASCII text format enabled the development of text editors, computer software capable of editing plain ASCII text. Much like the keypunch machines they eventually replaced, the first editors worked on one line at a time because mainframes of that era generally did not have display screens, just line-feed printers that printed plain text on paper.

The revolution began in earnest when computer monitors became less expensive and more common, facilitating the development of full screen editors that let users see and work on pages of text instead of individual lines. One of these early editors was "vi," which is still a standard application on Unix and Linux systems today. Other well-known text editors include EMACS (Editor MACroS), Microsoft Notepad and SimpleText. Inevitably, computer users wanted more complex text output from computers.