From the inability of NASA and the DOD to reverse engineer their own tech from the 60s/70s, to the alleged humor that Blizzard has a bounty for anyone who can provide them with the original WoW code
Media storage is only as good as the hardware and the networks they support, time, corruption, and meat-space disruption will make it inevitable that vast amounts of data will be lost
'Internet never forgets' my ass
i mean there already is the field of computing history and archival, which often involves extracting software from old technologies. perhaps this talk on the early history of UNIX might be interesting. the whole talk is fantastic, but about 11:15 he talks about how the source for PDP-7 UNIX was recovered.
I was going to say there's already this plus there are already plenty of consulting group for legacy systems. They charge a fuckton because they're often the only ones left who know what to do. I ran into a retired professional Computer Engineer who had to be brought overseas out of retirement into top secret government facilities because he was one of only people left that could handle the repair. He had a lot to say about the consequences of "replaceable computers" and how no one wants to fix hardware anymore.
As time takes more of these engineers from us the house of cards that is computer technology will become more wobbly. The only things that will be maintained are the things that make the capitalists the most money - everything else will be forgotten.
Yeah when I went to college the professors told us that you could make an absolute killing if you learned BASIC because of old legacy systems from the 70s but it's a godawful job and nobody could pay you enough to do actually it because you're digging through 50 years of other people's spaghetti.
A couple thoughts:
- This will happen before the decade is out
- It will immediately saturate software industry job postings and make it harder for normal archaeologists to find jobs
- Software anything might not exist at the end of the century 😬
Software anything might not exist at the end of the century
:anprim-pat:
Death to America
I've heard it said that we're living through what will one day be considered a dark age precisely because, despite our thoughts contrary wise, all of our recordings and texts and pictures keep being stored in highly ephemeral storage media. Instead of like stone tablets or books, we got stuff encoded on floppies and magnetic tape or not encoded on anything physical in "the cloud."
A Canticle for Leibowitz but the monastery is devoted to burning DVDs of Shrek 3. They don't know what it means or if it really happened, only that it is history worth preserving.
The knowledge on how to decode a medium encoded within that medium itself. A system that only exists because it exists and can only continue to exist with it's continued existence.
to the future archaeologist reading my posts... you're lookin' good today champ, keep up the good work :rat-salute-2:
‘Internet never forgets’ my ass
None of that stuff was ever released on the internet
here is the first released source code of the GNU project (essentially the first opensource project that forms much of modern Linux operating systems).
...from 1987
I've had multiple jobs that consisted of figuring out what old code is doing, documenting it, and porting it to some more current system. Software archaeology is already here.
Funny you should mention this because something in this vein would be my dream job. Like working in a museum of media as an archiver or curator. And yeah it's very common for companies to just throw away stuff like code once a project is done, only for it to come around and bite them in the ass years later when fans want more of the original.
An excuse to post one of my favorite Youtube shows: Shovelware Diggers
waiting for software paleontology where theyll make phylogenetic trees of programs :sicko-luna:
That job sounds like so much fun ngl. I love old tech and I think it would be really fun to have a job of just reverse engineering stuff.
