[Coco] A Coco3 on Vanity Fair's web site

[billg999 at cs.uofs.edu]

> Whoops: Improper Storage Methods Means 80 Percent of Scientific Data
> Is AWOL
> http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2013/12/whoops-improper-storage-methods-means-80-percent-of-scientific-data-is-awol

I'm pretty sure that's a picture from an old magazine advertising.

The rest of the article is about the usual Vanity Fair quality.  No
real information, no facts and totally fluff.

I am personally ware of a number of computing history data losses
and I can assure you none of them was that silly, although they
were all disasters in their own right.

Dennis Ritchie (Hopefully peopl ehere remember who that was!) donated
a lot of stuff to The Boston Computer Museum.  At some point they
decided the only PC's were computers and threw out everything they
had that was not PC related.  That included a lot of old Bell Labs
papers and things Dennins had given them.

And number two has to do with a favorite interest of mine.  The
Software Tools Virtual Operating System.  Think of a POSIX
implementation more than 30 years ago.  The final research papers
and a pile of existing implementations were turned over to USENIX
for preservation.  They held them for about three years and then
threw it all away.  Most of it has been lost.

It doesn't take Pepsi to destroy research.  idiots will always find
a way.

bill