29 Jan
2009
29 Jan
'09
8:22 a.m.
Jules Richardson schrieb:
John Foust wrote:
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:
1. The developer and curator of the software leaves the company (job
change, retirement, etc.), of course telling everyone that the work is
an important piece to be kept.
2. The media and the documentation is put into some archive locker, the
hardware - obsolete anyway - is discarded.
3. Long time, three new generations of employees later, someone finds
the locker again, regards it interesting for archival of own stuff, and
sees big old black squares and supposedly worn-out brown adhesive tape
on large reels. He has no knowledge what this has been once, does not
even know what floppies are at all, leave alone 8" ones, and for reel
tapes noone even has a reader anymore in the close environment. Some
binders read 1973, long before he was born. Surely it is not for Wintel
systems.
4. Most importantly, the whole crap occupies space in the place that is
needed.
5. So the stuff goes into the dump.
6. Usually, some months, later some former customer asks for
support...has even still the original system to restore the media.
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.
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 bet it still exists in a lot of cases, but
everybody's forgotten exactly
where, simply because it's been such a long time since they last needed to know.
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.
The main point though is called 'digital dilemma'. Data on CDs will
survive maybe 10, 20 years, so they need to be copied before, e.g. to
DVDs which give another 5/10 years, or BlueRay (which I give 2 years
until the next technology will be thrown on the customer obsoleting the
format). Data on tapes will survive as long as the corresponding tape
drives are still in use; before EOL data must be copied. Data on RAID
disks will survive as long as the base disk is available which might be
5 or 10 years.
Before retiring an old storage, data must be copied. This requires time
and effort, compared to a simple "remove *" because the #3 effect also
applies ("What is that VISICAL.ASM junk anyway - doesn't even load at
all in Visual Studio 2008 although the name implies. Shred the junk!")
--
Holger