"The main source now for old software are the people that worked on it, who kept copies outside of the company they worked for." I think thats the only way for my old code to remain in existence. I too have seen the "it must be tidy" types just throw what they dont understand away. Time I dusted off my disassemblers I used to reverse engineer for the day job. Dave Caroline

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: 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