One of the things that rarely gets brought up is the obsolescence of old technology formats and how it will begin to block us from perfectly preserved and intact data simply because a device to "read" the data no longer exists.

Take the humble floppy drive for example. Most modern PCs and many operating systems will not recognize a 5.25 inch floppy, and quite a few don't recognize a 3.5 inch one either. Few people have the need, or don't care of course. But the fact is that if you were to run across a stack of 5.25" floppies that had an unknown work by (insert your favorite artist here), being able to pull a copy would not be a simple job.

This is beginning to happen to Optical Disks as well.

I was able to pick up a new-old-stock set of M*A*S*H DVD's that were directly produced by 20th Century Fox this week. They were delivered today in their unopened original shipping box, with the retail disk box still shrink-wrapped and all the DVDs still tightly mounted inside and perfect (zero scratches or evidence of DVD rot) Amazingly there is no Blu-Ray collection of this epic series and since Fox studios is no more (as anyone who saw Deadpool 3 might have ascertained), there many never be a new set of these produced.

Not a single one of these disks could be read error-free on any of the 3 Blu-Ray drives that I have active in my home. Indeed several of the disks weren't readable at all.
The only drive that will read them is a 10(ish) year old Pioneer Blu-Ray drive. Which I keep hanging on to because... this is not the first time this has happened before.
To repeat, these disks are fine. Indeed they are pretty much perfect. But how DVDs were manufactured 15 years ago was very much different than how they are made today, and every thing from the size/spacing of the data pits on the disk to the optimization for certain wavelength lasers has changed over the years.

It's been incremental to be sure, so the changes over say, a decade, aren't enough to piss off a modern optical drive. But more often I'm running across media from 15+ years ago that newer drives choke on. And some of these creative works are no longer available in their original form. M*A*S*H for example had an original run-time of about 26 minutes, and usually had just 3 minutes of commercials when airing on CBS. Today when an episode streams it is rarely longer than 19 minutes (in order to get 10 minutes of ads in), so most of the time you are seeing a M*A*S*H episode that has had 20% (or more) of it cut to plug into a 30 minute space. For a show of its kind, those lost scenes can make a real difference.

I'll be taking steps to make sure that I can read these DVDs again in the future, but for a lot of folks, this isn't doable.

And of course for stuff that is even less well-known, it may never get brought to a new format at all.

Makes me a bit sad... 😢