After 38 years in my previous company, I left with a large collection of boxes containing artefacts of all kinds, reflecting a life times scientific and engineering effort. Over a year later my garage still has a large number of these boxes, but I am systematically sorting through, and throwing away things that and I can part with and mothballing things I can't. Probably one of the most surprising outcomes from this archaeological dig has been the amount of software on floppies and CD that have been accumulated. I was sorely tempted to destroy the entire collection out of hand, on the basis that I just don't have the time to trawl through and see if there are any interesting gems hidden among the mass of detritus. But looking at this pile, I had to relent and just couldn't throw away all of this work. The first surprise was I no longer had a floppy drive with which to read most of the material and had to search out an old piece of technology to gain access. I then employed my son who systematically transferred the materials from floppy to hard drive so that we could access and sort. During this protracted exercise came shrieks of delight as he discovered that some of the software was older then he was and some of the applications that he now uses were present in their original form. For example, on one floppy disc contained Microsoft Word and Excel, and another more minor application. Power Point 1 was also found to require less than a single floppy. But along with these well know applications, there were many others such as Cricket Graph and Hyper Card that I've not seen for many years. As we got into the documents, it became increasingly difficult to open these files as we went back in time, many of the applications seem to have long gone, some were unidentifiable and an extended amount of detective work was necessary to dig down and eventually open every file.

One of the key things that I was prompted to do by this exercise, was to create a museum of software applications on all my machines, just a small space on my hard drives now contains applications consigned to history and forgotten by many of the people routinely using computers and never heard of by the vast majority. I suspect that in the not too distant future the need to open old files will be on a par with our current need to be able to read manuscripts from ancient civilizations. Buried in these files among the majority of the information, which is probably worthless, will be gems that we should keep for historical and cultural reasons. So the second phase of this exercise was to pull out documents from the past, clean them up and save them in a modern app. To say the least this turned out to be rewarding and a reminder of just how long it takes R&D to make it to the market place. Among the many gems, which I had largely forgotten, were optical fibre with intelligence where signal processing by photons instead of electrons could be contained in a length of stranded glass. Almost within a week, I received a project proposal from a company to embark on the commercialisation of such technology and to my surprise their statements were focussed on the new and novel nature of their ideas, which turned out by my record at least, to be over 15 years old!

I have long held that the speed-up of technology and the rapid change within companies has seen the accelerating death of the corporate memory. Organisations can no longer remember what was done 5 years ago, let alone 15 years ago, and as our IT accelerates the process even further this has to be some cause for concern. Perhaps we should contemplate caching all of our documents from all companies so we can search by word, topic, date, and people to ensure that human effort is not squandered at an increasing rate. After several days of effort by my son and many hours of work by myself, my 38 years past has been reduced down to a small number of interesting files, many of these may not be of any direct application in my present or future life but as an historical record they at least make interesting reading.

I can see an end point coming where every hard drive on the planet becomes Napsterised so we may make available complete works and thoughts to a much broader audience than just ourselves. I would like to make a percentage of every hard drive that I own available to the rest of humanity and I would like them to reciprocate. Whilst the Napster model for music has created tremendous legal problems, I think it has also opened the door to a new paradigm that automatically guards against the widespread loss of information in the future.