Does Your Ten-Year-Old Code Still Run?

This article in Nature discusses scientific applications, but the techniques used to resurrect said code and get it running again are applicable to many other areas. Big business has its particular version of this challenge, keeping ancient COBOL applications working on new hardware and communicating with modern technology. And the Internet Archive is doing its part to bring old personal computer environments, and their applications, to life via the web.

Alas, I don’t have most of the code that I wrote during my software development career. And while Embarcadero (the owner of the old Borland tools and technologies that I used back then) have made available ‘antique’ versions of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ in the past, I no longer have access to the version of Delphi that I used for all my Windows-based application development.