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

Please understand...

[Creepy Crawler]

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.

Re:Please understand...

[Lazar Dobrescu]

This is not the only problem the article addresses though. As it is now, there are already tons of old file formats for which the software needed to read it is nearly impossible(or totally impossible) to find. Documents written in those file formats could contain useful, or at the least interesting content, but we can't get to that content.

We are talking here about file formats 30 years old, or even less. Try to imagine what will happen in 200 years. Most of our history will be written to electronic media, and for people that will live in 200 years, the file format used for that media will very probably be undecipherable.

What is the solution? Some say that we need to convert all documents in a more recent file format every x years. That will really become a pain in the ass as the number of archives go higher and higher.

Another trick could be to describe in whole the file format used and attach that description to every file. That, of course, brings up the problem of what file format to use for that description... (will even plain ascii files still exist in 200 years? Maybe not, but I think it is reasonnable to expect that people will at least still have an idea of how to read them...)

Comparing this to the problem faced for dead languages gives a good idea of the repercussions... There is already countless documents written in very old ages that we cannot decipher because the language used to write it is loss. People are working all their lives trying to understand a dead language. But with computers, we're not talking about something that happened 4000 years ago, but 30 years ago... That means that in the course of your lifetime, You could see obsolete file formats 3 times!

Someone will need to find a solution for this, and preferably before the problem happens for real...

Re:Please understand...

[DiscoDave_25]

It's not just the file format that will be the problem (although MS aren't helping in that respect) but simply ensuring that the media that the file is written on can be read. Physical media degrade and the hardware to read them become obselete. An example of this was the BBCs Doomsday disk which contained a huge amount of information (for those days) on a laser disk that is today virtually unreadable. Thankfully this has been recently transferred onto DVD before ALL the readers died but just because someone can understand HOW to read a file doesn't mean they'll be able to access it in the first place.

Re:full article text, no pass required

[mozumder]

You know, it really isn't fair-use to repost an entire article from another website site.

Re:Knuth is only one foundation that won't be lost

[Kaa]

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.

Bullshit.

"Computer science is about computers in the same way astronomy is about telescopes" --Edsgar Dijkstra

Programming isn't about knowing how to twiddle bits in registers or even how to leverage strengths of a particular processor.

Programming is about dealing with complex problems which can be solved by manipulation of information. I would say the the quality a programmer needs most of all is not logic or math, but just the ability to hold and manipulate large and complicated structures inside his head. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with assembler, low-level languages, ALUs, bits, etc. etc.