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Comment by brlcad | Hacker News Reader

Boggles my mind when coders don't save everything they've ever written. It's easy to be a digital pack-rat without much consequence.

That said, my first Java 1.02 programs from the 90's still compile and the old jars run surprisingly well too. Color me impressed!

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It was quite different before the internet. I'm still holding out hope of finding some of my old BASIC programs from the 80s on a 5¼-inch floppy disk in my parents' basement. But they are probably gone.

I wish I had the Logo and BASIC programs I wrote for the c64 in the early 80s. I still have the disks, so there's vague hope. Even more, I'd love the animations and images I made on the Amiga later in the decade, but that's more unlikely.

> before the internet

Even before GitHub, probably. Dropbox was a big step forward, still.

Eh, not really. Even before source control was widely used by non-professionals, there was still the habit of copying all your stuff over whenever you upgraded to a newer hard disk. I've got random stuff sitting on my hard drive that probably dates to my first PC in around 1996.

I found some of my first BASIC programs recently, written in 89/90 on an amstrad464. They're on cassette tape. I have a tape deck with line out, but I don't even know how to start trying to get data off an "audio" cassette tape these days?

The programs weren't fancy: one was for picking lotto numbers for my mam (the national lottery had recently launched in Ireland so it was a novelty.) Also I was 10.

Being a programmer and being an archivist are two different mindset and two different jobs.

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