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

Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:07:20 -0600 From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> Subject: Re: Seeking reverse-engineers - Apple II VisiCalc To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20090129085638.05e74420 at mail.threedee.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 01:00 PM 1/28/2009, Tim McNerney wrote: No matter how many times I hear stories like this, or lived through stories like this, I still shake my head and can't understand how the source code gets lost. All these corporations, all the lawsuits, all the programmers, all the marketing money, and so often no one, NO ONE, preserves arguably the most important bits. - John In the case of Personal Software, I believe Lotus bought them to reduce competition, not to preserve VisiCalc. At the time, people seldom think about the historical significance of source documents. The Intel 4004 schematics would have been lost if it hadn't been for some Intel engineer who realized they needed to be saved. True, there are some engineers who take stuff home and store it in their basement, but in the case of the 4004, Federico Faggin couldn't hold on to any schematics when he left Intel because he was going off to found Zilog and had to protect himself legally. The problem with packrats is that, even when you are unusually organized, like Bob Frankston, you still end up with boxes that are mis-labeled. Even Hewlett Packard has thrown out some important engineering documentation. When the calculator division moved from Santa Clara to Corvalis, the threw out dumpsters full of drawings on their very first RPN calculator, the 9100. --Tim