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.
⸻
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.