We're already becoming obsolete...

I've always had this nagging fear that the increasing move to digitize everything will leave future generations without any historical trace of the past.  Historians can look at old printed texts.  Archeologists can peruse the hieroglyphic carvings of ancient ruins.  Even paleontologists have fossils to piece together to get some glimpse of prehistoric Earth.  But we're increasingly putting our trust and memories into somewhat less permanent forms of storage.  Music downloading services like iTunes are making any physical music format obsolete.  Film has become the territory of hobbyists while most of the world has already converted to digital photographs.  Less and less of the printed word is actually printed anymore, and I spend more time reading the newspaper online than I do the real thing these days.

My fear was always driven by this nagging feeling that my floppy disk, CD-ROM, or hard drive would fail at any given moment, permanently erasing any trace of my existence.  Strangely, I don't even have a floppy disk drive to even access anything I stored in this format.  CD-ROMs are probably going in that direction, too, as we become more reliant on remote storage and flash memory, both of which seem even more vulnerable to spontaneous failure.  It seems that hard drive failure is the least of my worries, though.  The real danger is not being able to access my stored files simply because the program it was stored under is obsolete.  This is not a hypothetical situation--it's already happening. From The New York Times:

Office 2003 Service Pack 3, which was made available in September, blocks a lengthy list of word-processing file formats, including Word 6.0 and Word 97 for Windows, and Word 2004 for Macintosh. It also blocks older versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Lotus Notes, Corel Quattro spreadsheet, and Corel Draw graphics package.

Not that I want to, but I guess that means I can't even pull up that old economics essay I wrote in my junior year of college.  Not only do I not have a floppy drive to retrieve it, I won't even be able to open the file now.  Generations down the road may look upon this era of Microsoft and Google dominance as the people that erased history.