Comment by thrownawaysz
9 hours ago
"FILE WILL BE DELETED AFTER PRINTING"
hah I've never seen that before but reminds me to roguelike games.
"permadeath coding" would be actually fun. IF compiler error THEN erase code repository or something like this
Kent Beck called this “test && commit || revert” in 2018, and credits Oddmund Strømme for the idea: <https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/test-commit-revert-870bbd7...>
Or, just buy the source for a dollar and bury it:
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
The source code (and original assets) to many video games from as late as the 90s has been lost. The publishing company often deleted it after the game shipped, thinking it just took up space. This is one reason why, for example, there hasn't been a substantive remaster of Final Fantasy VII.
Also, it sounds like you described Vigil: https://github.com/munificent/vigil
The publishing company often deleted it after the game shipped, thinking it just took up space.
Floppy disks were not cheap, expensive, easy to get, or reliable. It sucked.
Even on the U.S. east coast, I remember having to travel over an hour to get to the nearest store that sold floppy disks. Each BASF FlexyDisk cost $18 in 2026 money. So $50 if you wanted redundant long-term storage of one program.
That's why we printed everything out all the time; especially for archive storage.
…which also turned out to be a bad idea. Just in a different way.
I'd guess that any of these media is sketchy for long-term archival storage.
I've got probably 30 5.25 floppies in my house, and I have a 5.25 drive and an old motherboard that can probably recognize that drive, and I've got the cables to connect the drive to the motherboad (and power supply). I'd guess that there's maybe a 20% chance that, if I spent a week trying to mash it all together I'd be able to get some data off of some of these floppies.
On other magnetic media the chances are between "haha, no" (oh, you've got an old 8 inch 10mb Bernoulli disk?) to 5% (oh, a QIC150 tape).
On the other hand, if I found a stack of moldy greenbar printout of some data, I'd say that most of the data can likely be recovered, and likely for not a tremendous amount of money.
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A company of any size wasn't archiving stuff on freaking floppies. In the 70s and 80s most video games were developed on big iron—PDPs or VAXen, usually, and data from those was archived on paper or mag tape. If you were renting (or stealing) time on one of these, as "Micro-Soft" was in its very early days, then printing stuff out may have been more economical. But major game studios of the day had resources and means of bulk archival that didn't involving buying a bunch of floppies at Lechmere.
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