Software Archeology 101

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
August 1st, 2003 • 12:57 am

Salon has a good article on issues that we will all face sooner or later when we realize that we need to access old software — in this case, the word software also includes document files — and no longer have the tools necessary to do it.

I once wrote an article about computer data and the fact that it is aging faster than we might think, and that we cannot trust software companies such as Microsoft to ensure long-term access to this data, a.k.a. backward compatibility. These are very real issues that are way up there with regular backups as top computing issues that are all too often ignored by regular computer users.

The Salon article goes beyond this and explores issues such as software aesthetics:

Maybe I’m horribly geeky, says Booch, but I find tremendous beauty in looking at well-written software programs. There’s an elegance, a brilliance that we’re only now developing the critical means to describe. We have literary critics. We have art critics. We don’t have any software critics, yet. We need software critics, too.

I couldn’t help but smile when reading this bit — because, while I currently do very little software development, there used to be a time when I spent days coding in Z80 and 6510 assembly language. And I am also a French literature teacher by training. So I know exactly what he’s referring to. He’s probably horribly geeky when he says this, but so is the writer of the article when quoting him, and so am I when reading the article and quoting it here. This is nothing to be ashamed of. If you’ve never coded at that level, you cannot possibly grasp the “beauty” that Booch is referring to. But it is very real. And experiencing it (either creating it or analyzing it) can be exhilarating.

Let’s hope that there are and will always be enough software archeologists out there to preserve this wealth of creativity and ingeniousness. It is very much part of who we are at the beginning of this new millennium, but profit-driven software corporations are not to be relied upon.


2 Responses to “Software Archeology 101”

  1. Pierre Igot says:

    LaTeX is an alternative for creating documents, but not for sharing them with others in editable form.

    In any case, the issues mentioned here affect everyone, including many people who, for various reasons, have never heard of tools such as LaTeX.

  2. David says:

    <quote>I once wrote an article about computer data and the fact that it is aging faster than we might think, and that we cannot trust software companies such as Microsoft to ensure long-term access to this data, a.k.a. backward compatibility.</quote>

    People wonder why I prefer to use LaTeX for my ‘word processing’ needs: the document is typed-in/stored as plain ASCII text. To print it you run a post-processor on it. Also, you can go from LaTeX to PostScript, PDF, and HTML. It (and it’s ‘parent’, TeX) have been around for about 20 years.

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