Please permit us to make a short digression here by relating an experience which had a lasting effect on our thinking. In 1983 a man walked into a shop and bought his first PC. The man was later to be managing director of Archivista GmbH and the PC was a Schneider CPC 464: it used a tape as storage medium. The salesperson in the retail shop who sold it said that the tape was a relatively unsafe medium but for short-term purposes it would be more than sufficient. Soon a floppy disk drive would come on the market and that would be extra safe and much faster too.
The storage capacity of 180 KBytes had great appeal but the Schneider computer was the only PC around with a 3'' disk drive. Consequently, the shop assistant was asked if it was not a problem that Schneider had a 3'' drive while all other home computers possessed either a 5.25 or a 3.5'' drive? No problem, he answered, the 3'' drive was very much on the upsurge, Amstrad was introducing it too.
The customer swallowed what the shop assistant said and bought the Schneider PC. Only much later did he realise that Schneider and Amstrad were the same and that his initial gut feeling proved right: no other 3'' drive ever appeared on the market. The man stuck to his Schneider PC faithfully but the data of those years, i.e. 1983 to 85, could not be converted later on. It was his luck that he had printouts of all the files so that he could scan and archive them later. Without this experience Archivista might never have come into existence.
What are we to learn from this cautionary tale? In contrast to the 3'' disk the tape has survived until today. And, the information could be saved because it existed as printouts. Does that mean that we have to produce printouts of all electronic files on our computer? The answer cannot be 'yes' here, also because we would not need a PublishingEdition then.