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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

I regret not archiving my early code for good so much. First non trivial program (a snake game). First utility in assembly. First device driver (for a Centronics printer). That perpetual calendar in Pascal for a uni assignment, written with enormous hangover within an hour and still my only program written entirely bug-free to the date. All seemed trivial and not worthy of preservation then but in the end I have no code surviving from before late 1990s.

Take good care of your code kids!

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This is a problem only we'd to face. Kids these days use Git in some hosting hub or the other that it's a rarity that their code gets lots. Of course if these "free" services go down... it matters. Self-hosting has its uses.

yeah when GitHub is sold to PE 15 years from now, and we get emails like "you have 2 days to backup all your repos", i hope I won't feel too lazy

Luckily Software Heritage is backing up all of GitHub and more, so even the lazy ones won't lose code :)

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

It is this exact realization, while looking for some of my old code, that first got me started using git and github.

I have a lot of my old code, but I never want to look at it because it's super-cringe.

I lost the first 5-6 years of code thanks to an IBM Deathstar[1] when I was 20.

Got really depressed by it at the time, as it included most of the projects I worked on at the time. After that I got super paranoid about having backups.

I do enjoy going back and looking at the code I still have though. Being self-taught it's mostly not terribly great, but I do have fond memories of finally cracking a certain nut or figuring out some neat trick.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

That tough lesson about backups.

Many a person has had to learn it the hard way.

Left all backups at a remote storage facility. Remote storage facility called me one day and said all of your hardware and media has been lost, except for this one [insert oldest most worthless computer of the bunch]. Cue me raging, cursing out this storage facility, threatening to never communicate with them ever again. Finally accepted the fault lied within me. Up until yesterday, I only had redundant storage but no true backups. So I purchased an LTO-5 and now I have two backup sets onsite and a third offsite at my colocation facility.

In this story the remote storage facility was my mom's house shortly before the GFC. The hardware were varying PS/2 computers from 286 to 486s with hard drives of zip files of my QBASIC, TurboPascal, Delphi, and VisualBasic code. The only hardware saved was our first computer, an 8088. All because she didn't want the clutter in the house anymore. No contact, no chance to retrieve said wares.. just poof gone. Gone were the Z80 ASM files of my rendition of PunchOut for the Ti-83+. Can't reference my old writings that I saved in various TXT files on the gazillion 3.5" floppy disks I kept in an old laundry basket. 5.25" floppies of DOS installs, random games, and an ancient version of SCO Unix. Gone.

Everyone learns the hard way.

>All because she didn't want the clutter in the house anymore.

A recurrent theme in retrocomputing forums. Never trust family with old computers; they consider them worthless.

I somehow managed to save mine. Hardware is with me, and data is well replicated, with warm, cold, remote, as well as cloud copies.

It is also all encrypted, thus it has a good chance to remain private unless I decide otherwise.

The deathstar of legend.

Mine did vary quite a bit within that period, from BASIC in middle school to some funky selective availability GPS handling prod code. But it's beside the point: I'd love it as memento, no expectation really that said game of snake would end up on Steam.

Same here. I made a DOS spreadsheet program (with modeX charting! And formulas), a couple of games and a couple of viruses (aaaa TSR looked like magic)... I think they might be in some floppies in my mom's basement.

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