January 28, 2000

When Software Goes Out of Fashion

To the Editor:

I enjoyed the essay by Bonnie J. Morris ("When the Pen Met the Blank Page: a Writer's Farewell to the 20th Century," Point of View, December 10). As a librarian who has considered issues of archiving in digital formats, I was struck by her students' being "appalled that [she doesn't] put [her] journal entries on disks." As she herself noted, on her campus, WordPerfect entered the realm of abandoned software, "no longer supported." How much