Comments on: Historical CDK document unearthed

By: Christoph Steinbeck

Christoph Steinbeck — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:13:02 +0000

Design Principle? What Design Principle?

By: Jörg Kurt Wegner

Jörg Kurt Wegner — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:16:39 +0000

Programming design principle looks like a classical blue *waterfall* in the middle, with some green *pragmatic*s on the left, and some red *extreme*s surrounding it.

LOL

By: baoilleach

baoilleach — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:06:26 +0000

It seems that the API of earlier versions of the CDK were severely limited by the size of available whiteboards.

By: Christoph Steinbeck

Christoph Steinbeck — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:03:06 +0000

My current approach to not loosing anything is too not use any traditional storage media but a couple of large NAS devices which are kept in sync. That works for my digital life so far (despite a couple of things which got lost due to my own stupidiy), including almost all email I ever read and received since 1989. It will clearly not work as easily for research data, large spectral files, etc.
The NAS’s are updated on a regular basis, assuming that storage capacity will grow quicker than my ability to fill it. Again, no chance for that approach in areas where machines fill the storage space

By: Dan Gezelter

Dan Gezelter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:55:07 +0000

Honestly, it wasn’t all that heroic. I found the tape within 5 minutes. After that, it was just a matter of pride and stubbornness to extract the data off of it, whether or not other people wanted it.

And you are completely correct about the fragility of modern electronic documents. These were tapes that were only 9 years old, and they were essentially unreadable without rebuilding a clunker PC. I wonder what gives some formats (i.e. CDs) longevity, while others (tape, floppy, zip disks, CF cards) are so much more ephemeral. 10 years from now, will we be scrounging around for old machines with USB ports so that we can recover data from thumb drives?

By: Rajarshi Guha

Rajarshi Guha — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:37:45 +0000

very cool!

By: Egon Willighagen

Egon Willighagen — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:46:28 +0000

Ah, cheers for the elaborate blog! This very much justified and *very* important.