Reviving ancient code

[Julian C. Dunn]

phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> Back in the early 90's, I worked with ROM staff to refurbish the solar
> telescope in the McLaughlin Planetarium. (You can still see the shaft
> poking out of the roof in the south east corner of the building). When the
> planetarium was closed, the solar telescope was sold and disappeared from
> view.
>
> A week ago I received a query from the Boonshoft Museum of Dayton Ohio.
> They had purchased the hardware and it had sat around for a long, long
> time. The hard drive in the original computer was DOA, so they asked if I
> had the original computer programs. I did, in my basement archives, and
> sent them off. By my count, the Turbo Pascal code and the 68HC11 assembly
> language sat in my basement on 3.5 inch floppies, for 17 years before
> someone needed them again.
>   
Awesome story. It's too bad that we don't have the Planetarium anymore, 
and that we're supposed to be a "world-class" city -- shame.
> Anyone else have stories of having to retrieve code from a dusty archive?
> Can you beat the 17 year interval? ;).
>   
This isn't my story, but the recent presentation at USENIX about how 
some folks got the Unix Version 1 running again was quite impressive:

http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toomey/toomey.pdf

- Julian
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