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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."
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?
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Why is obsolete software technology worth preserving where obsolete manufacturing technologies are not?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.