Seeking reverse-engineers - Apple II VisiCalc

[Jules Richardson]

Chuck Guzis wrote:
> Why do I get this feeling that we're writing our history in 
> quicksand?  
> 
> Letters the young Mozart exchanged with his sister are still extant 
> to give us a unique peek into the composer's mind.  Will we have the 
> emails of a modern Mozart to similarly peruse in the future?  

Well, lots of ancient paper documents are unearthed damaged or even outright 
"erased and reused". The following's a good read if you're into that kind of 
thing:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/A_Prayer_for_Archimedes

I suspect that techniques to recover data from modern media will evolve over 
the years just as they have for paper. Sure, lots of data will be lost - but 
I'm not sure that's really so much different to paper archives; the amount of 
data from the "old days" which has outright gone must be staggering in 
relation to what has survived and is known about.

> We already have the phenomeon of mainstream media "correcting" their 
> online content leaving no trace of error behind.  No more "Dewey 
> beats Truman" headlines...

That's the real issue, I think - not the storage mechanism that's used, but 
our desire to constantly rewrite history. A few hundred years from now it'll 
be hard to know "the truth" because there'll be so many conflicting opinions
and different versions of events recorded.

cheers

Jules