Most of the documents that I prepared on earlier word processors than the one I use today (and store on my hard drive) can most probably be deciphered, and even rendered properly, by Word. But they're on disks which my computer can't read, and finding one that can isn't the easiest task. There's nothing new about this sort of data loss. We've been aware of it at least since the 5.25 inch floppy disks (that I never used) were replaced by 3.5 inch disks.