Seeking reverse-engineers - Apple II VisiCalc (Software and Engineering Work product destruction)

[jim s]

I was at Microdata in the lat 70's when they decide to get rid of all 
their older 16xx mini computer software.  I consisted of 30' of 6' card 
racks.  Each tray was several releases of their drivers, and they had 
essentially maintained an svn or software revision repository in cards.

I was the only one who had had any interest since starting work there 5 
years earlier.  I was luck to be given access to the cards for 2 months 
before they were recycled.  I could have taken them, but didn't have the 
room at the time to do that, so I copied all of the latest revisions to 
1/2" tape and stored it.  This remains the only record of the source of 
this that exists.

I also had the chance to get a copy of most of the other drawings and 
was able to retain those for historical purposes.

I know the attitude of the management was 100% that it was not of any 
value once customers were deemed to all be gone.  Read that Paying 
customers.  My copies did save them in a couple cases doing favors for 
some who called too late.

I have been fortunate to be given access to discards at two other 
companies as well and did my best to maintain the data, both engineering 
and software.

One company I worked for in the last 10 years discarded their "golden" 
master eproms and pal sets (to me) as hardware scrap.

If you or someone is not there in the right place at the right time, and 
the conditions exist to legally obtain the stuff does not exist, then 
things are just destroyed as Al says.

I doubt that the conditions I have encounted as described above would 
happen in these IP crazy days.
Jim

Al Kossow wrote:
> <snip>
>
> I respectfully disagree. Once a product reaches end of life, it is 
> disposed of.
>
> Unlike entertainment products, which can be resold to the next 
> generation, old
> software has been perceived as having no commercial value and is 
> discarded either
> to avoid its availability for legal discovery, when a company is sold, 
> or when they
> need the space or get tired of paying storage costs for it.
>
>
I know that simple stupidity or lack of vision also causes this and the 
question about saving the goods is usually asked with about the 
intelligence of the poor girlfriend in the current Carl's Jr. ad running 
who thinks she will get a steak dinner at Carls because of some Steak 
menu item.

"oh you mean we could have used that again?  huh"

Jim