I love the term "software archaeology" because it implies the existence of subfields such as "software experimental archaeology" (attempting to reconstruct and demonstrate how people once built software) and "software paleoethnobotany" (quantifying what botanicals were culturally significant to software and the broader historic implications to the societies that wrote it), but also the existence of the broader field "software anthropology" and its offshoot "software sociology", and
@aeva '"software experimental archaeology" (attempting to reconstruct and demonstrate how people once built software)'
Yeah... did that last year... Had to fix the bootloader for one of our legacy cameras that hadn't been touched in 10 years.
Toolchain: I found multiple pieces scattered on servers and backups of former colleagues' computers.
Sourcecode: Multiple source-tree copies + Git-conversions of the SourceSafe copies... None of which produced the exact bootloader that we used in production...
In the end I reverse engineered the toolchain and the sourcecode to the point that I got a binary identical binary (minus timestamps).