I started programming at age 11, so the legend goes, on a Ti 99/4A. I bought one of those on eBay recently, and there it is, sitting on a shelf in my office. I haven’t powered it on, and I doubt I will.   When I started I learned programming with the Beginner’s Basic book that came with it. I wrote my programs down on paper, and typed them in again when I wanted to run them. Until I got a tape drive – super awesome. Later I got an Apple ][e clone when I lived overseas in Jakarta. Then a //GS, etc.

How many data formats, how many programming languages and storage technologies has my work spanned since I started? I have long thought that finite digital data would be easily preserved. Copied. converted. emulated. But not really. It’s the quantity, it’s the media, it’s long gone apps and obscure file formats.

Work I did at Destiny – a massive amount of coding – I have in its entirety but it no longer works because I’m missing a key proprietary library that we had on the Sparc/Solaris in the 90s. I could code around that, or try to dig it up somewhere, but it’s probably not just that library. I’d surely turn up a whole host of incompatibilities between the setup we used back then and anything I could find now.

It’s all so fragile!