dpb wrote
Rod Speed wrote
clare at snyder.on.ca wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Too_Many_Tools wrote

Most companies data isn't worth anything after only a handful of years.

Engineering data is the heart of a business.

Not data thats a handful of years old.

Management often forgets that.

Then a competitor eats them alive.

Bet you cant list any examples of that with data thats older than
a handful of years old.

I sure can.

Nope, you couldnt.

I'm sure he could,

Unlikely given that he clearly didnt.

and I can add a few more, both of own and from other references as well--

Adequately covered by the original MOST.

From own experience, it's a regulatory requirement of
NRC to keep _all_ safety-related design documentation and
calculations for 40 years of "life of the plant". That's simply
one instance of on need for longterm records-keeping.

Different matter entirely to the original point.

WORTH isnt the same thing as a legal REQUIREMENT.

There's a whole industry dedicated to preserving data for
companies from finanical to manufacturing and everything
in between. It's a major use of the excavated areas of the
salt mines in central KS as they're fantastically dry, constant
temperature, fire and vermin-free and of humongous size.

Irrelevant to whether that data is engineering data that is WORTH much.

Of course there is plenty of data that needs to be kept long term,
most obviously with birth marraige and death records etc etc etc.

For a couple of stories you might check out Jack Ganssle's columns
that he writes for Embedded System magazine -- a mostly unheard of
by very important niche of the microprocessor world. In fact, there are
far more processors used in such applications than in PCs though they
don't have the glamour of the "lastest and fastest" whatever of the day...

http://www.embedded.com/columns/bp/s...cleID=22103292

Adequately covered by the original MOST qualification.

Jack also distributes a monthly newsletter that has had as one of its
subjects recently reconstructing "legacy" systems. I myself have had
requests for modifications of some systems I had previously worked on
that I would have thought long since "dead and buried" having moved on
to other projects and even other companies, but was tracked down as the
only individual they could find that had any recollection of the actual system.

Adequately covered by the original MOST qualification.

Another reader of Jack's newsletter sent an interesting tale of his experience --

"I was brought in as a consultant for one of the downstream users of
an early video-on-demand companies, who supplied complete systems
and programming to hotels and hospitals, even providing a broadband
network infrastructure for free to sell their services.

"There was a need to add new educational programming
services for a client market, or be displaced by a competitor.

"The company had not built their code from scratch in more than 10
years. In fact, they had decided to move to cross compilation rather
than self hosting for a while, had bought a commuter and new tools,
never tried the tools, and had subsequently sold the cross host
machine for scrap.

"Our first task was to put together a development environment hosted
on a "dead" OS, including compilers, linkers, and build control files,
gather known source, and attempt to rebuild the shipping object from
known source.

"This took several months, and was a real adventure. A year and a
half down the road, job complete, ..."

He goes on to describe the system and other technical details probably
of little if any interest here, but needless to say, that little
misadventure of not preserving nor updating their ability to rebuild
their product's software undoubtedly cost that company a pretty penny
and without that effort likely could indeed have put them out of at
least that particular business.

Adequately covered by the original MOST qualification.

Undoubtedly, these few instances given here are far from the
only occurrences of such in industry. And, for every one that did
manage to recover, how many were there who were unable to?

Adequately covered by the original MOST qualification.