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Comment by rmsaksida | Hacker News Reader

I find old data strangely fascinating. I actually enjoy working with legacy systems every now and then - the older the better. There's something therapeutic about carefully making sense out of old and/or poorly maintained data.

I wonder if there's a business opportunity in this area, especially for digital data. Something like a consultancy specialized in extracting legacy data and migrating it to modern databases where it could easily queried.

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I think it's not so strange -- digging through old data in archives is what historians do. If you compiled your findings into a book, you'd be writing bona fide history.

History is stupendously fascinating. What dawned on me in college is that history is much more than retelling stories that have already been told. By doing archival research, you're making it possible to tell entirely new stories, because only after events are over is the data available to to compile and synthesize what actually occurred in fine-grained detail. These stories can be unknown to the participants. It's tremendously important work.

In the sense that history attaches meaning to otherwise meaningless human events, history is nothing less than the search for meaning itself. Fascinating indeed.

In school, in science class and history class, I always felt we focused too much on "what we know", and not enough on "how we know it".

I got more of a sense of how research is done in college as opposed to high school. I think the simple fact is that there's a lot more information to teach that falls in the "what" category. The actual hands-on work of historians is not something you really study in detail unless you're a history major, I think (I wasn't). In the case of science, I think virtually all children learn about how science experiments are done and the scientific method early in their science education -- perhaps that wasn't quite what you meant. You might be right that the how doesn't get enough focus. But I think that if a student is interested enough in science to be a scientist, that person will not be deterred by missing out on that.

You might enjoy Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought series. The recurring protagonist-ish character, Pham Nuwen, decides to become a "programmer archaeologist" - the most lucrative job in the universe and also the job that's considered to maintain the fabric of civilization itself :)

I think there a strong case of prescience there. It is not unreasonable that we will have systems whose time tracks to the beginning of the computing epoch in 1970 long after we forget what 1970 was (assuming we don't kill ourselves first). Just think of all the layers above that today and add a few thousand years.

For more in this line, check out Newton's Wake, by Ken MacLeod. In that book, there are combat archeologists: people who go places where a singularity blew through, leaving all manner of post-singularity technology lying around, and they have to make sense of it to use them or steal ideas from them, only they have to do this in the midst of armed conflict over ownership of those things.

My favorite quote is about unix and time().

http://akkartik.name/post/deepness

You bet there is. There are millions (possibly billions) of dollars a year spent on maintaining outdated systems and equipment.

I have some pretty bad memories of transferring the information from a lot of columnar pads into a database.

(We kept the pads)

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