Slashdot Mirror
Software Archaeology
Plug1 writes "Salon (day pass needed) has an article about preserving software for historical purposes. It discusses source code archiving, and the effect the DMCA is having on attempts to catalog and analyze legacy code. It will be a shame if in the future a wealth of information is locked away because knoweldge of the underlying technology is lost."
10 print "Hello World" 20 goto 10 Those were the days....
Omnis amans amens
That the DMCA DOES NOT APPLY outside the USA. However, hardware Digital Restriction Management DOES.
I really dont want strong crypto keeping out of stuff that I OWN, or My CONTENT.
I'td be a neat experiemnt to create a Linux driver that emulates TCPA chips so that stupid software thinks you're auth'ed.
What real use other than nostalgia would this serve? And, personally, I think not too many people will care that much if obsolete software is de-constructed?
This would explain the pyramids, if in the past IP laws of ancient cultures prevented sharing of ideas.
Yes, apparently someone needed to archive a copy of the article, it's been slashdotted and my archaeology digs on google.com have been unhelpful.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
Who could ever forget the awesome software company Central Point Software? Their PC Tools and famous Copy2PC were high quality, and very useful products. Anyone that was anybody had Copy2PC, a program that could copy nearly ANY copy protected floppy disk. They even came out with a floppy controller that did the same thing.
July 30, 2003 | For Grady Booch, the nightmare goes something like this: Deep in the future, a team of archaeologists stumble onto a rare cache of 20th century art, a major assortment of works thought lost to the ravages of time. http://cm.mps.salon.com/mps/desk/nav/salonlogo.gif http://cm.mps.salon.com/mps/desk/nav/salonlogo.gif
The only problem, of course, is that they don't know it. All the images are recorded in an obsolete digital format, JPEG, and nobody knows how to unscramble the data. As a result, the hard disk containing said artwork spends its days not in a museum but as a coffee coaster in some college professor's crowded office.
"It might seem silly now, but put yourself 1,000 years in the future," says Booch, chief scientist at IBM's Rational Software subsidiary. "It's not too hard to imagine."
In an industry where one man's clever C code is another man's Linear B, Booch already knows the frustration of playing software archaeologist. As co-developer of the Universal Modeling Language (UML), a mid-1990s effort to create a common "blueprint" notation for object-oriented software programs, he's spent the last 10 years laboring to spare future programmers the same torment.
It's an uphill battle on a hill that is only growing steeper. With new programs replacing old and no major company or institution playing the central role of source-code archivist, the amount of software history currently circling the memory hole is scarily large. And even if there were a central institution, recent changes to the copyright code have made the transfer of source code from old media to new forms of storage a dicey prospect, legally. Add it all up, and you have the ideal makings for what some are already calling the "digital dark age."
"Things are going to be lost not because people don't want to save them or because the original creators don't want to save them, but because they can't save them," says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, an institution that has lobbied for a safe harbor within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to shield institutions looking to archive source code.
For Booch, the barriers to software preservation aren't so much legal as educational. Most developers have come to accept the evolvable nature of software programs. What is lacking is the ability to examine static source-code snapshots with a scholarly, comparative eye. In the interest of encouraging that skill, Booch this fall will lead a seminar on software archaeology and preservation at the newly reopened Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
"Our industry has had a major effect in changing the world," says Booch, talking over the phone from his Denver, Colo., office. "It would be great if we could preserve the artifacts and interview the architects while they're still alive."
Booch isn't alone. Now that the hysteria surrounding Y2K has faded, developers are free to worry about legacy code again. One increasingly common worry is what to do with it? For every modern offshoot of DOS/Windows, Unix and Macintosh OS evolving with the marketplace, a dozen ghost programs lurk inside yellowed engineering pads, punch-card stacks and slowly degaussing magnetic memories. Even if programmers could get their hands on these programs and find a way to preserve and update their contents, a new question emerges: How do you qualitatively analyze those contents on a historical basis?
"It's funny," says Dave Thomas, a Dallas software consultant and co-author, with Andrew Hunt, of "The Pragmatic Programmer," a 1999 book on software design methods. "Colleges spend a lot of time teaching people how to write code, but very few teach them how to read code. When you think about it, we programmers spend most of our time reading code, not writing code."
To help fill the gap, Thomas served as cohost of the 2001 Software Archaeology: Understanding Large Systems workshop, hosted by Object Oriented Programming,
Does this mean that I still have to remember DOS commands?
Linux: Helping nerds look smarter since the late 90s.
If you're going to preserve software, doesn't it make sense to preserve the hardware to run it on as well? Emulation is less than perfect.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
they can tell what kind of technology and programs we use now, and make a timeline of computer technology.
---------- IM me! I want to meet some people! Katelyn03Faber
I can hardly see DOS or the like being useful in the future, can you?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
What would be nice to add is an annoucement along the lines of, "We're sorry, but this information is not available to you due to unnecessary legislation restricting your freedom. Please write your congressman and encourage them to fight the DMCA." I would actually LIKE to see more valid uses of information restricted by the DMCA. It just adds validity to the argument that it is completely unnecessary and sweeping in its restrictions, thus giving us ammunition to fight it.
If the problem is that knoweldge of the underlying foundations of technology is being lost it is because of the concept of abstraction, of which .Net is the latest and greatest incarnation.
It really all started when some engineers decided that machine code was too hard and invented assembler. Nowadays it's not even necessary to know what a bit is or how an ALU works to make programs. Just point and click and you've got yourself a brand spanking new database app courtesy of VB.
No one ought to knock VB because it really is the best tool for what it does, but it also lowers the barrier to entry for would-be programmers. This can only lead to worse programs.
The most fundamental concept in computer science is logic, not algorithms (or worse programming languages). If a 'programmer' hasn't written a program in a low level language like C or assembler, the hiring manager should beware. Without hands-on experience with the fundamentals of computer science that person is lacking at the most basic level, regardless of whether he knows 1 language or 50 languages. He is handicapped.
It's a good thing to abstract, but it's also important to remember and study the bases of our science.
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Archive
Isn't music software for your hardware music player? Can we now archive MP3s without fear?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Within the past 3 years, I have sold DOS to Chevron and a couple of other places. There is still a market. Not large, but it is still out there.
Unless I am mistaken Salon, like most websites trying to make some money, is having financial problems.
... without their permission isn't that plagiarism?
They changed to a registration/fee based model, but allowed 1 day passes for whatever reason.
Nothing can hurt them more than being slashdotted by a bunch of people using a day pass.
someone has already copied the contents of the article into a comment which is good because it saves them bandwidth, but
This is why things like the DMCA and DRM come about - people thoughtlessly violating other people's copyrights/etc, and/or taking their services for granted.
I'm no better than anyone else, I do the same thing.
I guess my point is: either support the people who provide services you enjoy (music, video, news, web content, porn, whatever), or quit complaining when they finally start defending themselves.
no comment
10 print "Hello World"
20 beep
30 goto 10
Even years ago I was much more 1337 than yu0 !
This probably falls under the category of fair use.
If it doesn't then there is still the matter of the government (the US at least) being able to do whatever it pleases with copywrited material. In this case the government's authority to copy what it wants is a good thing.
The Library of Congress is already making archival coppies of copywrited music and it is going to continue this dispite any hypothetical protestations of the RIAA. Why, because it is deemed neccessary for the preservation of culture. It will ultimately be the governement who will have the authority to do the kinds of backup that is neccessary to preserve our programming heritage.
It is our job as citizens to open the government's eyes to the need to copy this code before the technology that will allow us to do so becomes obsolete and otherwise unusable. Like any other technology programming will continue to advance but it is important to remember simpler the roots of the technology in order to provide the kind of perspective that lets us know where we've been and where we might be going.
It's the burning of the library of Alexandria all over again. This time, on the fires of corporate profit. Just remember, as we slide into another dark age, you're the ones that used Microsoft Office!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The SWAT team is on its way. Please wait until such time as they have surrounded your location. I hope you enjoy getting assrammed in the big house.
Sincerely,
Salon.com
So, I should be saving the 200 lbs of DEC VMS manuals, Our old VAX, all the tapes, and keep our TU-85 tape drive under service contract? How much is this all worth. Do you have any idea how much it costs to keep that hardware running? If you want to keep the code, what is the point if you don't have hardware to run it on, unless you're going to develop some emulator. Don't get me wrong I think it's a horrible shame that all those hours of engineering to develop the hardware and software is finally being trashed. There are some amazingly great ideas that were used to make that stuff. But at what cost do you preserve it?
CD's degrade over time, their lifetime is estimated to be 100 years maximum. CD-R's can become unusable after a couple of days of being exposed to mountain sun, and will probably not last more than 15 years. In the meantime, the computer equipment will develop to a point where CD's are not needed any more, because there is better technology available. So it will become necessary to store the devices that were used to read them (i.e. whole computers). But these devices are partly made of stuff that decomposes over time, like rubber in bearings etc. Conserving data is not as easy as it seems. I wonder whether it'd be more efficient to print out the source codes on acid-free paper and store them like books - or perhaps microfiches - in a number of locations around the world.
where's all that Karma?
Due to things such as the WTO, and other international organizations trying to form a one world order..
Things such as the DMCA will become global. To the least common denominator..
Or at least if you want to trade with everyone else on the planet, so its a pesduo enactment.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Particularly since the expressed intention of copyright is to give protection to creaters for a limited time (and then have the work pass into public ownership), from article 1 of the U.S. Constitution:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Clearly shuch works cannot pass into public ownership as intended; which might be a good argument in fighting any copyright infringement charges in the first place!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It'll just beget a new academic field: Nerdiology.
Consider conferences on Geek Culture someday, where Prof. Bipperton Fusslebeak delivers a sad, acedmic commentary on contemporary culture:
"An Analysis of the Correlation between Increased Use of Open Source Software, and Slashdot Posts Centered Around Deviant Sexual Behaviors in the Post-.Com Era".
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
lot's of functions named foo will be preserved. What's your most common function names?
How worthless, what is next, posting a story like " well we heard something really cool, but you have to have a level 7 clearance to read about it. But it was really cool and had to do with a CPU chip."
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...isn't "shame" a soft word? I know many harsh words that descibe the DMCA situation pretty well and that is still an understatement.
"The only problem, of course, is that they don't know it. All the images are recorded in an obsolete digital format, JPEG, and nobody knows how to unscramble the data."
I'm doing my part to make sure that the porn images of the Internet don't meet this similar fate. I have recorded my voice describing each of the images in my collection, and encoded it into the open-source OGG format. Much of the recording has consisted of little more than "Mmmmmmmmmmm, yeah baby", but I think that speaks volumes.
...places like The Underdogs are so crucially important, at least on the gaming side of things. They're a truly indispensable repository of old games you can't find anywhere anymore, for Mac and PC alike.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
Yes.
I went looking for it again a couple of years ago, but it has been lost. It was written in a language which no longer exists: OPS-4. Even the original source code has disappeared. All that is left is a partial port, to another language which no longer exists (OPS-5). Here is a brief description by the author.
Looking at the source code for the partial port gives some of the feel of the game:
There are plenty of hobbyists who collect old hardware. I see them all the time posting on forsale newsgroup. The only need that I see is to be able to actually archive the software in a central location.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Ok, you say the most fundamental concept in computer science is logic. What do you want to tell me? Only because i understand xor & nand doesnt mean i can write a clean programm, not does it mean i can develope an efficient algorithm.
Imho RAS enviroments like VB HELP future software archeologists: because of abstraction, there is much less work to do. Imagine you had to understand how every programmer decided to create is own comboboxes, database-interfaces, rtf-edit windows,...
With RAS, you can skip the basics that are nor interesing and jump straight to the real effort archived by the programmer... Without wasting time for understanding the 312th reinvention of the wheel...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
A number of years ago Scientific American had a article lamenting the loss of intellectual assets with the inevitable degradation of old software, documentation, media, computers, and the like. Yet the same issue had another article on changes in the canned-goods industry (the rise of new canning technologies). While the first article bitterly mourned the loss of software-related knowledge and assets, the second article made no such mention of the corresponding loss of canning-related knowledge and assets.
Why is obsolete software technology worth preserving where obsolete manufacturing technologies are not? In a 100 years, will we really need access to the billions of JPEGs that were spewed out by digital cameras everywhere? I am not arguing for ignoring history (even though those that learn from history are also doomed to repeat it), but I am wondering about the double-standard. What realms of human knowledge and invention are worth saving, and which are not?
BTW, for the record, I still have old documents and applications from my Mac 128k and I might even have a paper tape copy of a old APL program that I wrote 25 years ago. But then I am a certified packrat.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This article reminds me of a joke one of my CS professors told us (I hope I remember it right):
The year was 2015. Joe, a programmer, was getting up in years and decided he wanted to have his body frozen after he died. He made the arrangements, and when the time came, he was frozen and placed in a government facility. Time passed, and he was forgotten.
Jump ahead a few centuries... suddenly Joe finds himself conscious again! He is on a lab table surrounded by strange looking people in uniforms. Their leader, speaking through a translator, welcomes Joe back to life.
Joe is amazed! There are so many questions he wants to ask, but first he says, "Why did you bring me back to life?"
The leader answers, "Well, the year is 9999. Y10k is coming up, and your file says you know Cobol."
I was wondering how they were going to use an aged Harrison Ford in the next Indiana movie! Obviously, he will have become a "software archeologist," and thus never have to leave his cubicle.
*snaps whip*
"Fetch me another Mountain Dew, Shorty!"
i used to have hundreds of floppies lying around. cd-r's came out so i burned all the data to cd and tossed the floppies (don't even have a floppy drive anymore). when the next really cheap medium comes out for storing data i will transfer all my data to that and toss the cd's. i can see myself doing this same procedure about once every decade. not bad at all.
This is the most valuable piece of legacy code out there!
Plaster casts of the holes in my code would reveal the horrible fates of all those who got to maintain it.
If you have the source code for something then you have no cause to fear the DMCA, since you don't need to decrypt it. And if you don't have the source code, where is the value? Is there really any value in running lotus 123 for the Apple//? Perhaps if you have an Apple//, but so what? You cannot "fly over the code" from any height (as was mentioned in the article) because you don't have any code to fly over. You have an executable, and the "structure" there is quite different than looking at source code.
If you want source code for DOS, hit freedos.org and download it. It's not Microsoft's source, but so what? It does the very same job and, in many cases, it's superior to the original. Works that have value will be replicated and emulated; works thta have no value simply have no value - where is the need (or logic) in "preserving" them?
"It will be a shame if in the future a wealth of information is locked away because knoweldge of the underlying technology is lost.""
Yes it is a shame that the underlying technology isn't being described in patents.
I think what is really being said isn't the loss of knowledge, but the fact that such knowledge can not be reused to help make new knowledge.
The article doesn't make that distinction clear.
"Clearly shuch works cannot pass into public ownership as intended; which might be a good argument in fighting any copyright infringement charges in the first place!"
This is what's known as being a day late and a dollar short.
Do you wait till the boulder is coming down on you, or do you notice that there's a rock loose, and shore it up?
I'd be more impressed by people's arguments if I knew that we fought the good fight and we were still loosing, as opposed to the collective gasp from a previously apathetic crowd, realizing that everything isn't as it was before.
Take the Doomsday Project (in the UK) as an example. An Acorm Archimedies lazerdisc full of content relating to life in the 20th century. The problem came when they wanted to get the data off .. and couldn't easily find a compatible lazerdisc reader.
Of course, the format of the data is an issue. But if you can't get the data off the media, then the format of it isn't going to matter in the slightest.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
One of my favourite bits in 'All Tomorrow's Parties' (If memory serves - it's a while since I read Gibson) is where the computer shop keeper explains that 'real bright people' building computer systems like to buy stuff from our era. ;)
He goes on to explain that they use these 'ancient' systems to understand and gain insight into current systems, adding that nothing really changes, just gets added to (and that noone really understands the full system).
I believe Gibsons insight will be proven real, and that Software Archaeology is *essential* for the future DMCA or no DMCA.
The alternative is stagnation in the evolution of computer systems. This cannot happen, although it might in America
The part/parts of the World that don't succumb to DMCA fever will become the new tech leaders (and probably a great immigration target for us lot!)
Those building community sites around Coin-ops are being told to take down service manuals and the like off their websites.
Fine if the manuals are still printed and available, however such manuals are hardly a big money spinner for the companies involved.
Didn't they used to be somebody?
or rather, it doesn't count towards kharma, so if you modded up with funny, then modded down as overrated, you lose kharma.
You could lose 10 points on a funny post.
It will be a shame if in the future a wealth of information is locked away because knoweldge of the underlying technology is lost
Isn't that the basis for just about every post-apocalypse story out there? It's scary to think that we are already seeing signs of it.
Even fictional characters think the DMCA is evil!
.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
this is an advertisment for Salon's subscription service which contains an advertisement for Rational Rose. "We will make your code more maintainable by drawing pretty boxes around function headers!"
they have a section for software where they are getting old software from the likes of Macromedia and others for preservation. havent seen any source-code listed, but its still a good service for history
the history of the world
I responded to this above once already, but because this is dear to my heart, I'll do it again. Of course Salon isn't going to care if anyone prints out a copy and tapes it to their cube wall. But if a Web site grabs the text and posts it in a place like Slashdot, that deprives us of literally thousands of readers. Many of those readers might otherwise watch and ad and grab the daypass, which is good for our financial health, and some percentage of other readers might even subscribe, which is even better for us.
Technically, it's copyright infringement, but Salon isn't going to devote resources to suing Slashdot or Slashdot readers. If we were going to go that route, we'd start with the Freerepublic assholes, who actively want us to go bankrupt and do everything they can to help us down that road. To slashdot readers, the best appeal I can make is simple.
We want to make a living at what we do, so we can keep doing it. I want to keep paying great technology writers like Rachel Chalmers and Sam Williams to do interesting stories. If we convince enough readers to watch our ads or subscribe, we'll pull off this magic trick. So basically, the way I see it, any time a Slashdot reader posts the full text of a story on Slashdot, it's a vote against our survival, which is ironic, since you wouldn't be posting the stories if you didn't think there was some merit in them, right?
Editor, Salon Business & Technology
Salon.com
Did someone say Dave Thomas?
I'd like a Big Bacon Classic, please.
Thanks and keep the change,
Consumer
If people can reverse-engineer Microsofts file formats without help, why wouldn't they be able to work out a jpeg, or and mp3?
Get your own free personal location tracker
What about CD-R's exposed to mountain dew?
"It might seem silly now but put yourself 1,000 years in the future," says Booch, chief scientist at IBM's Rational Software subsidiary. "It's not too hard to imagine."
This assumes that (a) humans will still be drinking coffee 1,000 years from now, (b) we will still have college professors and (c) they will still have need of drink coasters.
I believe that 1,000 years from now we will consume our caffeine in pill form only, be schooled by robots and will obtain our liquids from intravenous bags.
Without hands-on experience with the fundamentals of computer science that person is lacking at the most basic level
That's like saying that a journalist is lacking in his ability to write if he's not fully competent in Latin. Just because someone doesn't know how to allocate memory doesn't mean he can't code in a language that does it for him automatically.
Microsoft is already doing this. Each version of a new MS operating system and office product generally includes a pretty much unedited copy of the previous copy of all prior editions of the software. So they are preserving history.
Each new version, the software gets bigger and bigger and biggers. It is an archealogical wonder in itself. Another name for this coding style is called bloat. Linux has many of the same things going on.
This argument about the need to preserve prior formats has been around for quite awhile. The truth of the matter is that software is largely an evolutionary process. Most file formats build upon the past, so there is a tendency for software to naturally preserve its path.
Of course, for Grady Booch, who wants to be reconized as an intellectual giant a thousand years from now, the main question is if his name will invoke the same awe as say Euclid and Archimedes. He is, after all, one of the trinity of OO modeling approaches.
This is a good argument for mandatory source code deposit. To get a copyright on code, you should have to deposit a copy of the source with the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has the authority to require this, but currently they only require a printout of the first ten and last ten pages, because they didn't want to store all the paper. That should change.
Did anyone else picture Bill Gates with a leather hat and a floppy tucked under his arm running from a giant boulder when they read that title??
Maybe it's time for me to get off slashdot for awhile....
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
After all, in five years Salon.com may be gone from the web, and since neither Google nor the Internet Archive have a paid subscription, this story will be forever lost to the ages.
So kudos for reposting this valuable information to Slashdot! Without the efforts of others like you, internet surfers in generations to come might never understand the importance of, well, the efforts of others like you.
The DMCA should not keep people from finding out if they are reinventing the wheel. If I can access a subroutine from 15 years ago and make good use of it in research today, great! If I need to make a profit off of that *specific* routine, and the company, person, etc. are all gone, then guess what? it should be public domain.
stuff |
I asked the master, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
He handed me a disk.
I could not read it in my machine.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
I'm routinely surprised at how poorly rounded, even in the programming field, many coders are. So many don't know any languages other than C++, Perl, and Python. So many don't know what continuations or closures are. So many don't know what a threaded interpreter is. So many understand garbage collection on more than a polarized, superficial level. So many don't understand how a 60fps video game could be made to work on a 1 MHz home computer. So many think that a compiler is a magical thing that's impossible to implement. So many don't understand how to write software that isn't heavily object-oriented, even when it doesn't need to be. All of this information is out there, but you have to be willing to learn and have an open mind.
it seems to me a much more meaningful "vote against your survival" is the inability of your servers to deliver the article when I clicked there for it.
Yo,
... open ...?
... at birth, but an open-minded philosophy about life and humanity has preserved the best for a few millennia. ....
...?
I think maybe from what you and others said, that maybe
Birthrights of a human are free. Governments and institutions may steal freedom, happiness,
Maybe the word "OPEN" holds magic preserving the value of that which we share, prize, and use for humanity. "Open-Society", "Open-Minded", "Open-Learning", "Open-Standards", "Open-Source", "Open US & EU (okay this is hard to hyphenate)",
Weird sometimes I am
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The difficulty of future generations being able to deipher our data without a guide is high but not impossible. The best example is hieroglyphics. Until the discovery of the Rosetta stone, Egyptian hieroglyphics were impossible to read. After, it was so much easier. On the other hand, there is no Rosetta stone for Mayan glyphs. Although it has taken longer to decipher, slowly the Mayan symbols are being translated. It took 100 years longer, but it is being done.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Paper? Bah! The gold disk that went on Pioneer, that's a data archive! Still need a good place to store it, but I'll be happy to keep it safe for you...
DMCA does not apply everywhere but software patents are spreading....
Might not a bit of archeology defeat some of the more stupid (or nasty) patents?
Bits, ALUs, machine code, assembly, C, logic, algorithms? I can see you've only had experience with computers at a very high level.
Electrons. That's what computer programming is all about.
Damn young upstart whippersnappers.
This of course brings back memory that every copy of Copy II Plus (Apple II, yes Apple made computers before Macintosh) were ALSO pirated.
Funny thing was that Copy II Plus (pre-5.0 days) would copy a lot of things, EXCEPT ITSELF. That of course didn't stop anyone from copying it with other copy programs (Lock Smith, EDD... Disk Muncher anyone?) Eventually Central Point software wised up and dropped on media copy protection altogether; only took them five revisions to realise it's a rat race that will never end.
Beneath Apple DOS summed up on media protection nicely with an illustration of the software pirates and software publisher chasing each other on a marry go around.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I think the solution to this problem is a device that can shrink objects into astronomically small sizes. Think of the shrink ray from duke nukem, x10. We could then store mini computers in a special vault that would make time stand still, thus eliminating the problem of degredation, lol
And what, pray tell, would you do with this printed source code in 200 years, when all of the hardware is gone? If all the technology that used it is gone, as it most assuredly would be, you are SOL. Except you would have tons of pages of source code that nobody will understand. Unless you think people will still be using C (or whatever language) in 200 years...
On a personal note...
I recently purchased a TRS-80 off of eBay, because it was the first computer I programmed on. But I threw away all the programs I wrote several years ago when I got rid of my computer with a 5.25" floppy drive. I wish I had them still. Not because they would be of any value, but just for the sake of having them. Nobody programs in BASIC anymore, and these were created just 18 years ago. Not only that, but the entire computer they were created on can be emulated. I have thousands of times more memory in my MP3 player than was in that entire computing system. If all of these changes occurred in 18 years, imagine what things will be like in 200! The programs we have today may not be worth saving, except for historical purposes, and for geeks of the future to laugh at.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
No, it's like saying that even if a journalist is bold and persuasive and daring and insightful enough to investigate the news and uncover the truth, he is lacking in his ability to be a journalist if he has a poor command of the English language.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
So it will become necessary to store the devices that were used to read them (i.e. whole computers)
We don't have devices that ancients used for reading their stone tablets. Yet we can read them.
PMZ,
... I mean, look at TIA. However, I greatly regret the loss of PAM, you could not make any real money (just pocket-change), but getting it right a couple time would have been some great bragging rights at any friendly poker game.
This is why the USA DoD created the internet, because they knew they would need to defeat an enemy like microsoft to preserve human history and data from the techno-fascist of the 21st Century.
Well DoD expected a Draconian Nation as the enemy, but heck a draconian enemy of any sort justifies expenditures
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I just finished a system programming class at UNH where we used John von Neumann's IAS (Institute of advanced studies) computer. My professor had to make a virtual machine that ran our code. I remember him mentioning that he only found some historic manual with the commands, registers, and how memory was used. He could not find any source code for the machine. Does any one know where to find some original IAS machine code?
It's all good.
That's why I write all of my important documents in plain text or html... Then again, I'm banking on the hope that ASCII will never go away.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Given enough time, I've no doubt that a finite number of monkeys banging on a finite number of keyboards could recreate all Microsoft products.
So we can avoid having to worry about archiving them.
I was so disappointed when it was bought out by Norton. PC Tools was the best in the dos era. they started to do a bit of graphical interface and got buggy, then got bought by norton. Sad tale.
Conserving data is not as easy as it seems. I wonder whether it'd be more efficient to print out the source codes on acid-free paper and store them like books - or perhaps microfiches - in a number of locations around the world.
One modern 80GB hard disk.
80GB = 80,000,000,000 bytes = 80,000,000,000 ASCII characters.
One stanarded printed US-letter-sized page is 80 X 60 characters or 4800 characters.
80,000,000,000 characters / (4800 characters/page) = 16,666,667 pages (rounded off).
This is potentially just the data on Joe Schmoes Best Buy laptop. Now consider that the amount of data generated by humans is something like terabytes per day...
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
There is nothing to be learned from the past. Who cares what they did back then? Look at how ugly their cars were. Look how inefficient their industries were. They used to use mechanical gears to keep track of time!!!
I say let the stuff go. Heck, its probably all written in archaic languages anyways like assembler and COBOL. [shudder]
I mean, name one good piece of software today that is based on past technologies. Name one piece of software written in C, FORTRAN or Perl 4.
Yah...didn't think you could.:-)
But that's about it. It's neat to know how a Model T was built although the information has little practicle value.
There may be some educational value to some of it. Lotus was written back when software had to stay relavivly simple due to memory constaints et al which would come in handly for someone just learning how to write such a program.
I'd hate to have to look through MS Word XP to figure out how it works and make my own version.
But for the most part the concepts have been well documented and we can stop worrying about specific implementations of those concepts going away. I don't need Lotus code to learn how to make a word processor. Plenty of tutorials and other sample source exists using more current coding styles.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
All I can say is that good quality books can easily last hundreds of years. If you are worried about file compatibility or access to your work, then simply print it off on good acid free paper. Store it in a file cabinet and scan it back into your machine when you need it. Make a paper copy of the source code. Same thing for those JPGS, just make a nice color copy and laminate.
What if it's just the stuff we want to keep, like source code, and not all of Joe Schmoe's crap? Way fewer pages.
You are right that in most cases the printed source code will not really be of importance. However, as computers play an increasingly important part in everyone's life, they are also becoming a documentation of our current lifestyle. I am sure that the museums and archives of tomorrow will contain the computers and programs of today.
The problem is that, unlike books, computer programs and data like articles, letters etc. are trashed with the click of a button, often for economic reasons. At some point in the future, we might be looking back a few decades and realize that a lot of the stuff that shaped our life back then is no more accessible to us (maybe also because of Palladium).
As you mentioned, there are already some emulations for older computer systems around. If the documentation and the sources of a system are available, I believe it would at least in some cases be possible to emulate it on whatever system is around. Then, the easiest and most future-proof way to obtain a digital version of the source code would be to scan it from paper...
where's all that Karma?
What if it's just the stuff we want to keep, like source code, and not all of Joe Schmoe's crap? Way fewer pages.
Who gets to determine what is and is not historically significant? Granted, the fact that Windows installs are highly redundant is one thing, but what about programmatically-generated data files?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I had stuff stored on 5.25 disks. Then 3.5 came out and I copied it onto those disks. 5.25 phased out and it didn't affect me. CD-R comes out and now those disks are on those.
You don't need to require a standard format that never goes away. You just have to make transitions. If you still have 5.25 floppies you can still find drives. But time is running out. If you don't care enough to make transitions then it's probably not important enough to worry about losing. Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that nothing lasts forever. And very little needs to.
I'm moving my VHS tapes to digital. Then they'll eventually burned to DVD and then whatever comes next during the transition period.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
For hundreds of years, after the science of creating corrective eye lenses was invented in Venice, Italy, the process of grinding and shaping the lenses was kept a very profitable secret. People who could not afford to pay for this very expensive Intellectual Property generally just went without. Sure. You could get magnifying lenses, but not lenses that corrected for nearsightedness.
Those of you of moderate to low income (I'm talking. . . making less than 7 figures per year, to put it in perspective with pre-reniassance nobility), who require corrective eye lenses, imagine yourself unable to beg, borrow, or steal a pair of glasses for yourself. Even crude ones.
Eventually, the secret got out, and now we have a global multi-billion dollar industry.
In other words, the very concept of IP is just plain evil.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
programmatically-generated data files
.
You mean pr0n?
Mmmmmm all of the historically significant pr0n. .
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
then the drives can become unusable ;-)
where's all that Karma?
I work in data capture for a pharma company. We're required by law to keep *RAW DATA* for the patentable lifetime of a drug, which could be 40 years in some cases. Doesn't sound too bad, but our raw data needs our application to browse it. That application needs our infrastructure - which is huge - it doesn't work as a standalone. That infrastructure only works on a particular set of hardware. There isn't an easy answer. We could say we'd bodge it and export to XML, but what about those ECG graphical traces that are in a proprietary format with annotations? It's really difficult and it's very tempting to say "print the whole lot out on several trees and put it in the paper archive"...
Why not get a copy of the code, and have it
hosted in countries that the DMCA laws have
no influence in?
You won't need to store everything you have on your hard drive on paper. It would be sufficient to store the data that you produce yourself, and just the important part of it, in a couple of locations. If space is crucial, you could as well use microfilm. You don't really need to archive all the mp3's and movies-someone else is taking care of it. The same applies to large commercial software packages and OSes.
where's all that Karma?
In the interest of encouraging that skill, Booch this fall will lead a seminar on software archaeology and preservation at the newly reopened Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
I work near that Computer History Museum building. It used to a SGI building until maybe like two years ago when it closed down. My coworkers would joke about how SGI is now history...
No offense to SGI. Just a joke over a watercooler.
I am not worried about today's file formats from becoming lost to people 200 hundred years from now. In the future, when someone downloads version 32.2.0 of the kernel, they will have an option to include modules that add support to all applications for ancient file formats, really old file formats, and old file formats. Each one could take up a few hundred megabytes... but on the hardware of the future, that'll be like 640k today.
The only thing we need to do is maintain our compliance to standards! Because barring the end of the world, HTML and other standards will never die. They'll just get turned into kernel options with a default of NO.
no thanks
No, I just enjoy seeing stupid people reap the consequences of their actions.
You know, my first response to this is "tough cookies." I don't see any other popular sites using this forced-ad-viewing method.
Wrong. You see "free registration required" which lets high-quality content sites such as the New York Times and many others track your online patterns over the long-term and develop a user profile that will ultimately serve ads based on your interests.
Any entity that begins to implement anti-consumer actions in order to stay afloat are doomed to begin with (RIAA, SCO, etc.)
Anti-consumer? Technical issues aside, the FREE DAY PASS model among the most pro-consumer models since the Internet bubble burst. The advertising business and ad-supported media have been hit hard, along with the workers who have been laid off as a result. Would you prefer to go through a tedious registration process that asks for all kinds of demographic details to gain access or click a link, wait 30 seconds and then read the entire site's content at no charge to you. It is a WIN-WIN-WIN proposition for all involved. Salon gets much-needed revenue for what you presumably believe are valuable and interesting articles, the advertiser gets to expose you to its products and you get a thought-provoking feature. The extra 30 seconds for the ad is trivial compared to the time you take to read the entire article.
If you can't stay out of the red by simply providing your service with a *reasonable* amount of revenue-generating methods, then that should tell you that either:
a) You need better revenue-generating methods or
b) Your service isn't profitable
You forgot:
C) I don't value the work of others so I am unwilling to use your Day Pass system.
Your definition of ''reasonable'' seems to be that Salon's writers should work for free so that you can reap the benefits. Believe it or not, you aren't entitled to get everything at no cost. It is obvious that Salon is not profitable and this is public knowledge - it is a public company. The Day Pass system is a reasonable compromise between you accessing Salon's features at no monetary cost, and Salon being able to pay its staff and freelance writers.
Like most online entities in trouble, you assume (a) and look for alternate ways to get paid. Unfortunatly, instead of finding better "quality" services, you sacrifice your customer's resources (time, effort, patience, etc) instead. Eventually, you cross that fine line between mild-nuisance and "not worth the effort."
Like many of us who have been on the Internet for years, you would like to access information freely and at no charge. This could have been maintained if the online population stayed relatively low. But it hasn't. If not for the boom, online magazines like Salon never would have appeared. Someone has to pay the costs of the burgeoning infrastructure and remunerate the efforts of people who create the content. Most costs are transparent to the average user, but don't be fooled, someone ultimately does have to pay. It is unreasonable to expect Salon's writers to give you their work for free because you refuse to use the Day Pass.
I find your recent actions "not worth the effort" and will not be visiting your site. But hey, that's just one netizen. What harm can that do, right?
It's your right to vote with your feet but nowhere in your criticism of Salon did I find anything that said you found the content to be poor or lacking.
I'm in favor of keeping Internet content freely accessible to readers/users. People write (in part) so that others can read their articles. But ultimately people need to make a living.
Consider that.
The first comercial program I ever wrote was an apple //c spreadsheet called HabbaCalc. Habba systems is, of course, long gone. Who knows where the source code is. I don't have it.
I have a copy of the finished application on floppy, but I no longer have an apple II to run it on. In fact, I haven't booted it up in about 15 years. The floppy could be bad at this point. I just don't know. It would be a shame for me if this program vanished. It's possible that I have the only copy.
-Robo-
For Grady Booch, the nightmare goes something like this: Deep in the future, a team of archaeologists stumble onto a rare cache of 20th century art, a major assortment of works thought lost to the ravages of time. The only problem, of course, is that they don't know it. All the images are recorded in an obsolete digital format, JPEG, and nobody knows how to unscramble the data.
Great- some archaeologist will find CowboyNeal's bukkake porn collection and think it's representative of early 21st century art.Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Everything in my posts are my own opinions. I'm not trying to dictate policy to anyone. If I'm in a restaurant and receive poor service, I make my complaints known (tactfully.) If management wants to listen and attempt to improve, good for them. If they want to ignore me and go on the way things are, that's their right. But it's also my right to not patronize the establishment anymore. If more consumers would do this, I think we'd all be a lot happier with our business relationships. Poor customer service would be a thing of the past.
I applaud people posting articles from there because I don't visit the site
You don't visit the site? Then what are you doing making a comment about them -- you don't even know what they do!?!?!
You might have a bit more respect if you actually read some of their articles. Some of their ongoing story lines have been awesome and would be of great interest to much of the "slashdot" crowd. They have a great series on Clear Channel that really opened my eyes and their coverage of issues like the DMCA and DRM is great (and very much in line with what slashdotters write on a daily basis). Not only that but their coverage also (and this is rare these days) attempts to back up their claims with actual facts. Amazing, isn't it?
I for one would be very sad to see Salon go (and thus I subscribe) because I see them as a shining example of a publication that writes what it believes (and can prove) to be true rather than what it believes will make it the most money.
when i first read about the free day pass scheme on salon i thought it was a great idea
until i noticed that IT DOESNT WORK
i have yet to be able to get anything but ads out of salon.
good thing this modern world is mirrored on another site, that was all i ever went to salon for anyway.
goodbye salon, you wont be missed
I have some old AutoCAD 3 files from high school, a hopelessly optimistic design for an automatic vacuum cleaner, if I recall.
My dad still has a program he wrote on punch cards someplace.
That's the trouble, isn't it? Even if the data survives, the hardware to read it might not.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Although the issues involved in this case are slightly different, The term 'Software Archaeology' (or at least 'Programmer Archeologist') might come from Vernor Vinge's book 'A Deepness in the Sky'.
In that book, code-as-data is taken to an extreme, and the best programmers have the title "Programmer Archaeologist", since they spend little time writing new code; instead they look through old code to find something written for a similar situation. It isn't that old programmers are better-- it's that the software contains facts and information that are of value.
Whereas on Star Trek someone might look through an ancient captain's log to learn about a bizarre planet/new race/weird disease/strange technology, in Vinge's book that sort of specialized information is stored in the source code for software that was written at the time to deal with the situation.
If all record of this generation should become irrecoverable, is that really that great a loss?
I'm old enough to remember the past half-century, and except for a few footprints on the moon... nothing happened. There are always empty gaps in history like this where humankind accomplishes nothing. Nobody seems to want to believe it but this is one of them.
Not too long ago, NPR had a news item on how the Smithsonian is archiving their sound archive. Their solution: LPs. Yes, good old analog grooves on a disk with bumps on it.
Thier rational is that such a media is extremely simple to play, all you really need is a needle and some sort of soundboard. It's relatively durable if you make it out of the right material, and it is a well known, public domain technology.
While the storage available on such a device is miniscule at best, it might be worth someone's time to create a few of these disks for the audio archive that detail some long-lived and much denser data storage media (platinum substrate DVDs?) protocols and the basics of how to read them, so that if society does collapse, it would be easier to bootstrap a technology to listen to a lot more archived audio than some primitive, monaural scratches on a disk.
Once the digital format can be heard, it should be trivial to include enough info (given enough disks) to start the whole technology bootstrap thing. To tie this into the whole "lost protocols" thing, if you made this a standard archival process for formats/protocols, you could keep an authoratative master there available for posterity.
Just some thoughts.
--doug
Brian Bergeron gives a fairly decent treatment of the whole data loss issue in his book Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die . Although,
this could be a lot of hysteria over nothing. As I recall in
Asimov's Foundation's
Edge, Trevize comes across some ancient computers, and they
just fire up and start working beautifully right away after
centuries of disuse. Heheh, if only this were the case. The hard
drive on the HP I got last Christmas already crapped out.
We don't have devices that ancients used for reading their stone tablets. Yet we can read them.
Actually I think that the ancients you speak of used their eyeballs to read the mentioned stone tablets just as we use our eyeballs to read those same stone tablets.
I think that you would have to store your technical drawings as a sort of carving, maybe etched in carbon-fiber plate, ceramic, glass or crystal (less affected by corrosion or heat than metal, harder, less ductile). It might not be a bad idea to include one of the "rosetta stone" projects as well, so a future race could translate your work. This is kind of a cool idea, maybe something the patent and trade office could start doing (it's not like they're any good at evaluating patents, ha ha).
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
"This too is of course an over simplification. The parent poster was expressing his distaste for the content Salon provides, but the implication that it doesn't matter if a site gets driven out of business due to people reposting their articles if feel is wrong."
Yes, but are people ever affected by their past decisions, and do they remember enough to establish the cause and effect relationship? If Salon and it's like are driven out of business, will any of the participants ever remember their role in it's downfall?
Not a bad assumption. Here's what English looked like a thousand years ago: ...
;)
What'll it look like a thousand years from now?
!!! 3y3 h4V3 n0 1De4, LOL!
You wouldn't believe the computer history on eBay. Of course, for computing a conference proceedings from the 1970s is antique paper and a core memory plane is art.
At this point, we have more data than we know what to do with.
Get over it people. It's the owner of the data's rsponisbility to keep his shit updated. There is no inherant value in maintianing DOS or lotus 123 other than to amuse people with too much time on their hands.
I wonder if 1000 years from now, there will be a new field of "folk programming."
Zort: Dang! I can't figure this out. I'm having difficulty get the Smegular Database Matrix to parse correctly. **Shudder**
Skrog: Have you tried using C++?
Zort: C++? That's just a silly old wives tale. It hasn't been proven that C++ even works. Nobody believes in that centuries-old mumbo-jumbo anymore.
Skrog: Fine. If you don't want to try C++, I'm calling my awk-upuncturist.
If the ads pay for it, i should be given the news paper and TV for free, to 'view' their fucking ads.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The real worry I'd have is how someone will be able to get the stuff off of the media if the directory and interface standards change.
ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface) is a simple enough connection standard. Describe ATAPI in printed English and Esperanto in enough detail that a person skilled in the art of electronics could make an ATAPI device. Make a CD-ROM drive that connects via ATAPI. In printed English and Esperanto, describe how the drive was built, and include a hard copy of the Philips CD-ROM specification in both English and Esperanto.
The biggest problem from here would be how to bootstrap knowledge of the English or Esperanto language so that future people will know how to decipher the printed instructions for building reader devices. We don't know if Earth civilization will still readily understand Latin, English, French, German, Japanese, Esperanto, or any other language after 10,000 years.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Could it be that some software would be best forgotten in the name of human productivity.
Ex. Mines, Freecell, Pong... NO, NOT PONG!!!!
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
And you expect six billion people to do that every five-ten years as the "standard" format changes?
:-D
And what happens when people die? What if there are no next-of-kin?
IMHO the best thing would be to have a "spare" HDD that is just "old stuff". Every time you upgrade, copy your HDD over (like many people do anyway). When you die (or whatever) the gov'ts of the world can dump it in a multi-exabyte datastore that they keep upgrading for ever and ever.
And the data lives happily ever after. As long as you don't like privacy too much, and don't have HDD crashes!
Somehow, most of the good stuff survives.
Most lost information probably wasn't worth having anyhow. I'll stand corrected if the aliens come back and ask us why who lost their technology.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
So, by your logic, it's OK to start a war, just because someone else did first? Then how do you justify the first war? Obviously there was no precedent. It wasn't OK then. So all we've been doing since then was mimicing something that was wrong. Therefore, we're doing something wrong. By your own admission.
This is not part of my post. It's my signature. I bet you're disappointed.
The difference is that the Rosetta stone and the hieroglyphics were written and "stored" in a medium that was able to survive for millenia. The media that software is stored in barely survives for dozens, let alone thousands of years.
Regardless of whatever UN resolution you choose to quote, the fact is that Iraq does not have any WMD, which totally nullifies Shrub's argument for being there. Watch and see what happens to Tony Blair in the next election.
You ever see what war can do? Before you start calling me an asshole, have a close look. Take a trip to the Balkans or somewhere and see for yourself. It's not a fucking video game. If you think it is, you're the asshole!
While you make an excellent point, I'd really like to see this on my own t-shirt before I see it on someone else's.
(Actually, it's my subtle anti-**AA statement. My personal belief is that a copyright should not be allowed to be extended on any item once it is registered. At that point it has served it's purpose to foster creativity. I think people are sharing movies and music because they have come to realize that they are going to be screwed forever otherwise and this is the only way to reasonably fight back. So I've turned my sig into a dual-use signature in protest.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Enby in Waltham
is the apostrophe;-) b4 the computer, data storage used the same medium as data display. now they r separate, leading 2 this problem... i think xerox developed a printing technology that allowed human-readable data 2 b reliably scanned.