I am in awe of humans ability to (1) forget the past and (2) ERASE history. Very little of the real story of things gets through a handful of generations.
I personally experience the ERASURE factor, in one job I had where when I left for a while my competitor completed eradicated ALL the software I had written for a project. When I left it was working, but it was a different architecture than he thought was right. He eventually showed himself as incompetent and was canned. A year and half later they begged me to come back and try to save their butkas. I took the mess that was his software and got it to work.
I had to do that because he had spend — weeks and weeks? — TOTALLY eradicating all my work and archives of it.
The only software left of my invention in that company was an interrupt driver for a IO device which he had no idea how to replace, and a standalone controller that was burned into EPROM, using a development system he couldn’t figure out.
We’re talking hundreds of modules, and a few 100K lines of source code. Working stuff, a lot of which had been deployed in a preliminary system in the field. He erased it there too.
He even erased all my note files and such. It was as if I had never existed in that company.
Human History is truly a fragile thing. After all HUMANS keep it, and humans DESTROY it, when it is recorded, for reasons of human emotions and insecurities.
It’s not unlike the Free Republic posting and thread history — what is left from the Clinton years? We all thought we were recording and commenting on important issues, that could be reviewed by later generations!
As far as I understand much of it, most of it is gone. Lost forever.
As Solomon’s wisest advisers wrote “This too shall pass.”
Sometimes I look at all this stuff and think back to my school days - and feel like I was completely and totally lied to.
New posters, please leave our archaeology threads alone. SunkenCiv has a well establised following.