I've hollered about software preservation as a "thing we need to make anything work at all". Even at the Old Job in the 90s we were already dealing with tons of that shit. I ended up at one point rewriting some DOS control software for an outdoor LED display in Perl for a client because the original software was on a failed hard drive (in a failed 286, in 1999) and was just, not available anywhere.
revue starlight megafan, queen of yuri, and cohost's foremost Alice Margatroid enjoyer. no doubles
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in reply to @sinpyro's post:
It should go even further. I think it should be legally required that as soon as software is no longer supported (whether it's a game, firmware, system tool, etc.), it should be re-licensed to be copyleft and open-sourced. That would not only be great for preserving that history, but also allow it a new future.
Need a program from the 90s that isn't supported anymore? It may take a bit of work, but with the source code available, it could be updated to work on modern systems. Want to play a retro game? You could emulate it, sure, or you could see if there's a community maintained port for your modern platform of choice.
I had no idea research labs had this issue, this is only going to make me more insufferable about this issue.
absolutely!!!
up until at least the mid 2000s, the National Weather Service forecast office in Miami would launch weather balloons with a radiosonde attached. The only receive-and-store-data frobozz available for the radiosondes they used ran on an IBM XT. The data was sneakernetted across the room on a floppy.
Yeah, most Big Microscope units in research labs (i.e. any facility called a "Microscopy Core" somewhere in a 3rd basement) are air-gapped. They require labtechs to bring fresh in-packaging flash drives to get the images off of them (a fresh one, every single time) to make sure the Windows Far-Too-Old system from touching anything on the modern internet it has no protection from.
in reply to @DecayWTF's post:
Remember when it was revealed that all of our nuclear stockpile silos in the united states were run on ancient tech from the fucking cold war because there's no budget to upgrade it so it's probably in exactly the same kinda state
The frustrating part is that "old" does not have to mean "bad". There's lots of absolutely solid, battle-tested systems that, if they can be kept working with good, up to date parts, or are amenable to bug fixes in the case of software, shouldn't need to be upgraded! TeX, the gold standard for mathematic and scientific paper typesetting, has been feature-frozen since 1989. Especially for systems like fire-control computers that really don't need new features or anything and are not likely to be exposed to "new" problems like eg being hacked over the Internet, to which they are not connected, it should not be that expensive or burdensome to keep them running and in good health except that there's effort being explicitly spent to make it hard to give them the necessary maintenance, because the whole tech industry is focused on New New New All The Time.