From the inability of NASA and the DOD to reverse engineer their own tech from the 60s/70s, to the alleged humor that Blizzard has a bounty for anyone who can provide them with the original WoW code
Media storage is only as good as the hardware and the networks they support, time, corruption, and meat-space disruption will make it inevitable that vast amounts of data will be lost
'Internet never forgets' my ass
i mean there already is the field of computing history and archival, which often involves extracting software from old technologies. perhaps this talk on the early history of UNIX might be interesting. the whole talk is fantastic, but about 11:15 he talks about how the source for PDP-7 UNIX was recovered.
I was going to say there's already this plus there are already plenty of consulting group for legacy systems. They charge a fuckton because they're often the only ones left who know what to do. I ran into a retired professional Computer Engineer who had to be brought overseas out of retirement into top secret government facilities because he was one of only people left that could handle the repair. He had a lot to say about the consequences of "replaceable computers" and how no one wants to fix hardware anymore.
As time takes more of these engineers from us the house of cards that is computer technology will become more wobbly. The only things that will be maintained are the things that make the capitalists the most money - everything else will be forgotten.
Yeah when I went to college the professors told us that you could make an absolute killing if you learned BASIC because of old legacy systems from the 70s but it's a godawful job and nobody could pay you enough to do actually it because you're digging through 50 years of other people's spaghetti.