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."

Comments

Re:Please understand...

[TheRaven64]

Repeat after me:

TCPA hardware is not the same as DRM, and is not evil

The TCPA hardware specifies a cryptography co-processor on the mainboard. This can be used for DRM, but it can also be used for offloading things like SSL from the CPU. Emulating the hardware would be no good. Under *NIX, it would just be mounted at /dev/crypto (or something), and emulated if the hardware were not availible. It is the software which manages DRM.

archive.org

[dmnic]

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

It's a matter of survival

[Andrew Leonard]

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?

Don't just complain, DO SOMETHING

[shoppa]

I know it's far easier to complain about the situation rather than do something about it. But there are groups doing something about it:

1. The PDP-11 Unix Preservation Society
2. The PDP-10 software archive
3. SIMH Simulators for classic hardware

Re:full article text, no pass required

[JCCyC]

Hi, Mr. Leonard, and let me first thank you all at Salon for making a great general-interest site for geeks and non-geeks alike.

The Day Pass is a great idea, but some day or other I notice it plain doesn't work. Today, I tried to go to the article mentioned here, only to be redirected again and again to the same partial-content page. The Sprint ad never appears. Under Win 2000. Bot from IE and from Mozilla 1.4. I'd guess a technical problem on your (Ultramercial's?) side.

In this circumstances, I'd consider the posting of the entire article forgivable (although the poster didn't state Day Pass problems as the reason, which puts his/her motives in question). Otherwise, I agree it's a rather uncivilized behavior.

Re:full article text, no pass required

[Andrew Leonard]

I am informed that earlier today the daypass option was broken. My apologies.

Anyone else think of Vinge?

[David Leppik]

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.

Dark Ages II

[jeremycec]

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.