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Maintaining Full Copies of the Operating System and Relevant Applications

We have full copies of the ITS operating system source code (with documentation and any relevant applications) already copied onto our current systems. This resource has not helped us, and we do not see it could be any more useful to anyone in the future. The only use such information could provide would be to allow someone to engineer a system that translates the data - such as the one we eventually implemented. We believe it is important to do this now, before we lose any further knowledge about the original implementation. In addition, the cost for a human to interpret the code and documentation and develop such a system will only increase with time.

This, in essence, is the approach we have been using for some time. However, we do not want to continue using it as our sole means of preservation because it has already proven to be inadequate. Besides, this method does not solve the problem of reducing the number of formats that we need to decode in order to read all of our data.



boogles@martigny.ai.mit.edu