30 Jan
2009
30 Jan
'09
1:34 p.m.
Holger Veit wrote:
I'd agree, but I've also found no end of stuff that doesn't get thrown out, or
it falls into the hands of one of the employees (usually who'll think they'll
use the media for something and then never do, burying the stuff in their
garage or attic).
That's aside from the things that get kept privately by employees with an
interest in a particular bit of code (usually for sentimental reasons more
than anything).
The problem is finding this stuff - and the task is mind-boggling for a museum
with a general interest. It's probably a bit easier if you're a private
collector with a fairly narrow interest, but even then there's a need to be in
the right place at the right time.
No, but *typical* software projects don't take up that much space. Sure, there
are still plenty of big ones out there, but for most it's not like they're
using a vast amount of available storage - and it's probably far easier to
just migrate the data as/when the storage gets upgraded than it is to actively
figure out what can be dumped and what can't.
I think
typically it just gets misplaced, not lost :-) If a company's
churning out new products once in a while then it stands to reason
that the older, obsolete stuff gets pushed to the back of a
cupboard... then buried... then moved to a different cupboard...
I have actually seen it happen that software was discarded, rather than
moved to some later forgotten place. The mechanism usually works in the
following way: The
picture's perhaps a bit brighter these days, because the storage
is so cheap now that there's less incentive to dump things from
corporate fileservers every once in a while (storing them in the
aforementioned cupboard).
Storage on corporate file servers isn't cheap. You don't put 10 1TB-USB
drives at $100 each together and then have a serious and reliable
corporate storage system, even if such USB-SANs exist. ("What is that VISICAL.ASM junk anyway -
doesn't even load at
all in Visual Studio 2008 although the name implies. Shred the junk!")
That's precisely why it survives, because nobody wants to stick their neck out
and claim it to be junk, only to find 6 months or a year later that it was of
vital importance (it's also why home computer users seem to need hundreds of
GB of space these days, but that's another discussion :-)
cheers
Jules