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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."
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.
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."
I can hardly see DOS or the like being useful in the future, can you?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
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.
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?
...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
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.
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!)
"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.
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.
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.