Nah, in the event of societal collapse, pretty much all digital information storage will likely be lost forever. Even without societal collapse, a lot of digital information storage is likely lost forever. As near as I can tell, some of the software that I released into the public domain (when open source was still very much a niche thing) in the 80s has vanished completely. I’d kind of like to find my VMS¹ and CMS² software for the TeX ecosystem, if only to revisit my younger self.

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1. I did some nice integration of TeX and friends into the VMS CLI setup so that, e.g., one could access iniTeX by doing TEX/INIT or set a number of parameters via command line prompts.

2. I completed ports of some of the fringe TeX-related apps like MFT and also wrote a DVI previewer which could display a preview of TeX output for people connected to their VM/CMS system via the Kermit terminal software which supported Tektronics graphics. A developer in Germany contributed GDDM support for IBM’s graphics terminals.

I have often thought of how strange it would be to watch HD video of ancient people like the Romans, and wonder what that experience will be like for future archaeologists. Assuming any of this survives the next few thousand years.