In Masters of Doom there's this story about a young John Carmack's life, around when he was ten or twelve. He made a videogame, you see, and you might be thinking 'big deal' and I want to remind you he was born in 1970, so the computer he made his videogame on was not some sort of home apple thing like you might be envisioning with a black screen and green shapes on it.
What he made was some variety of memory game, or tic tac toe or the like, I'm not sure which, because I don't own a physical copy of Masters of Doom (and I know, I know, now I think of it I should put that on a wish list) on punch cards. And he kept the punch cards in a little wooden library file card box, and he would ride on his bicycle to the library, input all the cards, play the game, then put the cards back in the box and go home.
And one day, he hit a bump on the road on his bicycle.
And the box fell open.
And all the cards fell out, scattered to the wind, completely out of order.
And he looked at what happened and he put the cards in the box and never opened it again (as the story goes).
We know the things we make won't last but we'd rather it not be obvious