When I worked for the government a few years ago, one of the offices I was in charge of managing for their network, security, and IT systems was the nuclear task response office, this is the office that is in charge of toxic cleanups, nuclear fallout (if such a thing ever happened), and more.
They required having tech from the past sixty years ready at a moments notice (if X fails, try Y, then Z, etc). A lot of the older digital methods are all abandonware, sitting on computers developed in 1991 because they couldn't figure out how to safely transfer or migrate them to newer hardware (or even knew they had! found a server from '95 at the back of a closet somehow still running! connected to a powerstrip from '89! I kept the powerstrip, it's so chunky.)
One of my favorite jobs was figuring out how to get this software that had virtually no documentation remaining (likely buried in the office, but I never found it), or instructions, or really anything to a modern, more resilient, system. The company went out of business in '93, and the only known developer I could track down was in a retirement home.
I did eventually shift it over to run in a container/emulator for DOS, but it was a nightmare (one I loved) that took me months of hacking things together to figure out how it all went together.
Abandonware, the source code, the documentation, the IP, all of it, should be legally required to be disclosed, released, and submitted to public and government archives after either 12 years after first release, and/or upon dissolution. Until that happens, this entire era is likely going to be referred to as the digital dark age. Where everything was once online and available, but where nearly all of it was lost.
annaxmalina
titsay
gummygunk
germansingergirl
