Software preservation (Was: Seeking reverse-engineers - Apple II VisiCalc)

[Jules Richardson]

CSquared wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 at 09:49:34 Chuck Guzis said
> 
>> It surprised me that the micro types took so long to figure basic
>> things like SCCS and regression testing out.
> 
> I think I can partly explain that.  For one thing, though we may all be
> brilliant ;) we are not necessarily all that wise! 

Very true. I was talking to a chap recently who worked for a company who made 
fileservers back in the day (i.e. storage space, front-end with a network 
interface, and the comms protocol for interacting with the server) and who has 
a couple of their development systems available. He casually mentioned the 
existence of the hand-written notebook which formed the core of their source 
control system... :-)  It'll be a while before I get to flick through it, 
unfortunately...

> I've been quite pleased for about the past 14 years to have had the use of
> MKS and more recently VSS to provide an archive and history information on
> the file servers.  

Yes, been there myself. And for ISO9001-accredited places where you spend 10% 
of the time doing real work, and 90% of the time filling out the associated 
paperwork and conducting reviews on other peoples' stuff. That I really don't 
miss :-)

Oh, and I remember on more than one occasion both MKS ("integrity" indeed) and 
VSS completely disappearing up their own backsides and requiring a complete 
restore from backup - so source control systems aren't infallible.

My problem is that I've ended up with no end of personal backups over the 
years, and knowing which ones can be ditched and which ones might still be 
useful can be a nightmare. e.g. when I upgrade a hard disk, I'll typically 
keep the contents of the old one "just in case" - net result, 47 hard drives 
of various sizes, all containing various snapshots of data. Bah!

cheers

Jules