I think we (or our descendants) will be surprised by the longevity of some of the file formats in use today. I would wager that it will be possible and not too unusual for regular users to open files in formats like PDF, zip or jpeg 100 years after their inception.
I've recently had to open some installer files from the mid-90s that were in a proprietary format (I forgot the name... Inno? InstallShield?) and was surprised to see that the current go-to solution is open source.
As long as an open source (or at least open specification) exist, these files will remain being openable. ...or at least until curious minds are able to crack them!
I'm not sure whether these file formats will still be in common use, but I'm fairly sure it will be trivial to find software that can read them.
Just like it's fairly easy for us to even run software from 50 years ago thanks to emulation. As long as your software run on a platform popular enough to have a good emulator. But for PDF and zip and jpeg reading software that will definitely be the case.
Yes I do think we will still have files (whatever they will be called) at some level for some purposes.
I.e, we will still be able to store and transfer sequences of bytes conforming to some specification (file format), and we will be able to attach names to those blobs in some namespace. The concept is too general to ever lose its usefulness.
There are a few key things I have learned in the third of a century that I've been working with data: Data lives longer than apps and longer than people. We will always need units of data that have their own life cycle and are reasonably self describing and self contained (i.e meaningful without resolving external references).
100 years after their inception isn’t very far from now. There are plenty of people here who will be alive in the 2080s.
Everybody has a different idea of what long term means, but I think of it as millennia from now. The kind of time frame that the Long Now Foundation talks about.
