A Digital Dark Age - Are We in Danger of Losing History?

[Crystal Eitle]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/07/30/software_archaeology/index.html' target='_blank'>http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2...logy/index.html</a><br /><br /></div>Even though I'm not a programmer, I found this <a href="http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/07/30/software_archaeology/index.html">article</a> fascinating. We're still living in the early days of computing (or at least, we're not very far from those origins), and we risk losing a lot of computing history.<br /><br />"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.' 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."<br /><br />This reminds me of the early days of film. Thousands of historically valuable films from the 1890s to the 1920s have been lost forever, simply because film pioneers didn't realize their value. The celluloid the films were stored on was melted down and recycled to make nail polish, among other things. Now we're looking at preserving the origins of another new technology, and finding there isn't yet any organized way of storing, organizing, and analyzing this important piece of history.<br /><br />(Warning - you'll have to click through an ad to read the article.)

[SandersP]

Nothing last forever you know. It's just entropy at work.

[Newsboy]

Diamonds are forever.

*rimshot* Thanks folks! I'll be in town all week, try the veal, and don't forget to tip your waiters and waitresses!

[Jimmy Dodd]

Likewise, thousands of Mathew Brady's American Civil War photographs were lost forever when the glass negatives were used to make windows because they were not seen as significant. The images captured on them slowly faded away.

[tulrich]

For historians this is actually turning out to be quite a problem. I remember hearing a story just within the last couple of years about historical researchers trying to read computer tapes from the 70s containing files on Pentagon operations in the Vietnam War. The information was all there and intact on the tapes, but they couldn't read the data because no one could find any copies of the original programs used to create the files.

[Jacob]

I agree that this is a real problem.

It's the weakness of the data used on computers - it requires tools to read. Tools that are easily lost.

[Godsongz]

I haven't written much code in years, an .asp now and then maybe, but I used to do a LOT of coding 10-15 years ago and today I have -none- of that code. Thats a lot of personal history lost.

[Jason Dunn]

Whenever new tools are introduced (in the past few decades at least), there's usually a "cross-over" period: a window of time where people are interested in moving the data over from one data source to another. The issue is being ready to make the jump when the time comes, and most people aren't - they only realize after the fact that they need that data. I'm obsessive about getting old data onto hard drives, then pushing that data along through the decades. I have word processing documents that are pushing 20 years old now...

[Bob Anderson]

This is a problem, and in my opinion a serious one.

Over the years I've used so many different technologies (starting with the Apple //e) that I haven't moved data along. Now I want to access the old stuff! OUCH!

We need to support the cause of archiving data and programs that will, whether we like it or not, reflect our history. Legislation would be a good start, to help save source code and to give software a "shelf life" of protection, but it's really up to us, the computer users and data gatherers to figure out how we want to organize and archive information, and then ask programmers to develop tools to help us acheive the result.

Speaking of old programs... does anyone know where I can get a copy of that old Lemonade Stand game for the Apple II? I really want a copy of that, since, in my "Personal History" it was the game that started me into the endless "sim" games like Utopia (Intellivision), Empire, Civilization, all the Sim Cities and on and on...

[KayMan2k]

It will become an issue for the future.. especially since there are very few (and rare) storage mechanisms for storing long term data. I think CDs onyl hold data for 100 years or so... all music will be lost in the year 3000! (Although, Fry from Futurama can play his Sir Mix-A-Lot CD :))

I have personally saved a lot of code I have written over the years (about 10 or so..) and old documents. I even have an image of my old Mac's hard drive and can boot it using a freeware emulator. :)

[Crystal Eitle]

Legislation would be a good start, to help save source code and to give software a "shelf life" of protection
Unfortunately, current legislation only makes the problem worse. DMCA restrictions are making it difficult for archivists to do their jobs.

[foldedspace]

And what about the Cathedral of Chalesm?

[othell]

I'm getting kinda confused with all of these posts here.... Is the need to store the actual "source code" of the programs... Or just the programs in their compiled and executable form? Or both?

I think both would be ideal... but just storing the actual source code would be best if we could not have an ideal situation.

[JoeMoon]

I personally wrote a full fledge commercially acceptable program about 15 years ago in MS Basic... Only to have Windows 1.0 make it obsolete. I saved the code to a 5.25" floppy and did a printout of the source code. Now, almost 15 years later... The printout is faded and I can't find a 5.25" floppy drive to insert the disk into... I guess dot matrix printers ink is only slightly better then the thermal printing on receipt printers... And who knew something better than 5.25" floppies would surface!

Joe...

[tzirbel]

I started writing programs back in the Apple II+ days and haven't quit yet. :-) and am a stickler to saving old code. Not only old code but the computers I did them on. I recently booted up my old apple IIc, inserted an old (18+ years) floppy and Wow still readable. Now if I can just leave the old code alone and not modify it..................
Much to my wife's dismay I keep 13 old computers and thousands of old 5.25s and 3.5 disks laying around. History is very important and we can't really look where we are going unless we've known where we been.

I currently a dba/dw for an insurance company and they don't get rid of ANYTHING. I'm still working with programs originally written back when I was born. (1967) Amazing, but then, again COBOL will never die. At least not while IBM still lives.

[amflores]

My grandfather has -and sometimes uses- my old apple IIc and has all the original apple diskettes including one with the lemonade game... if you´re really interested Bob, maybe we can arrange a way to send you a copy -if I can get the disk drive to work!

[GoldKey]

I used a word process called PFS: Write in HS and most of college (on one of those Tandy portables with TWO 3 1/2 inch floppys. I still have the disks, but unfortunately, no program to run them on. It would be highly entertaining to go back and read some of what I wrote then, but can't do it. My wife has it just as bad. She used one of those Brother word processors with a 3.5 floppy. Still has the disks, but not the machine and I can't find an emulator for the PC to even try and read those.

[Janak Parekh]

I used a word process called PFS: Write in HS and most of college (on one of those Tandy portables with TWO 3 1/2 inch floppys. I still have the disks, but unfortunately, no program to run them on. It would be highly entertaining to go back and read some of what I wrote then, but can't do it.
Hah! We have PFS: Write lying around somewhere, but it probably won't work on any modern machine. If you can read the disks, you can probably pull most of the prose into Word by treating it as ASCII.

While open standards aren't a panacea by any stretch, they'd be a great help here. XML-based documents, for example, at least use ASCII encoding as a default, which has remained a standard over 20+ years. We can still read HTML from the early 90s. We need a new generation of standards, and as Crystal implies, we don't need draconian DRM technologies that even now prevent us from listening to that which we purchase. That's yet another reason I'll never buy a copy-protected CD.

--janak

[Bob Anderson]

Speaking of old programs... does anyone know where I can get a copy of that old Lemonade Stand game for the Apple II? I really want a copy of that, since, in my "Personal History" it was the game that started me into the endless "sim" games like Utopia (Intellivision), Empire, Civilization, all the Sim Cities and on and on...

In case anyone was wondering the answer to this question, I did a little "research" and found the following link... http://www.classicgaming.com/vault/roms/appleiiroms.LemonadeStand33375.shtml

Now with the help of an emulator I'm enjoying the game that started it all (for me!)