Microsoft's Largest Piece of Software Weighed More Than 40 Pounds

Lots of large corporations have (or at least, had) archivists.

The last time I dealt with one was as a subcontractor for Lockheed Martin. The archivists I worked with were responsible for maintaining the code and documentation for all of the satellites they had ever worked on.

If you need to see the design documents for a satellite that was built 40 years ago by a company gobbled up by LM four or five acquisitions ago, whose engineers are all gone (or dead), you shoot off an email, have about 20 managers sign off on it, and in a couple of weeks someone goes and finds the actual, real, documents that have been rolled up in a tube in a cave somewhere since the 80s and either ships them to you or emails you a scan.

I too am surprised. I've been in many conversations where some technology leader says "we have no idea how this app works, it's a black box."

There are videos that went "viral" a few months back of the Lego archives which are fun to watch. Lego has tried to archive at least one of every set they ever produced and store it in a small library in Denmark. Those videos are fun to watch people nerd out about all the history there. The video I recall watching was a car blogger who got to point out the entire history of Lego's car partnerships.

One of the companies I worked for the building I was in was many states over from the company headquarters but was also one of the biggest warehouse buildings the company owned so it had a sizeable chunk of the company's archives. A lot of key pieces were put out on display in the entry space by the main entrance as a small mini-museum of company history. For some training work a couple team members and I had a reason (I forget exactly what) to visit some of the deeper archives. The company's real history only started in the 1990s, so even the deeper archives weren't all that deep, but still an interesting dive through hardware history (in this case of credit card payment processing equipment). (The mini-museum claimed some vague connections to a few more decades of history of the credit card industry as a whole, but that was a bit of bravado and salesmanship of indirect associations more than direct history experienced by the company itself.)