alt Hacker NewsSeems like it was never digitally stored in the first place, and the printed text was barely readable due to age. Not really a big win for paper.
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The idea that it never existed digitally is obviously untrue. Likely poor wording in the author's part. They probably meant something like, so old that a printout is all that survived (which sounds vaguely like not being digital to someone in an era so far removed from a time when programs were/could realistically be printed.)
Early versions of some things, MS Basic being one example I think, were baked into ROM. One of the best innovations that Paul Allen came up with was adding software hooks to the code so bugs that were found later could still be patched.
One has to be pretty ignorant and dismissive to claim that this is not "a big win for paper".
First of all, that comment is weirdly out of place. The quality and longevity of paper is not the topic.
Secondly, there are fragments of paper with writing as old as 2,000 years.
Thirdly, paper you look at and see the writing. With digital documents, you need the technology to read the medium and then you need to know how the information was encoded onto the medium, before you even arrive at the same level with paper, where you can start to decide the actual writing.
Paper has brought us where we are today, and given us what we know about the past. Don't be so ignorant and dismissive.
Well it had to have been on disk or tape at some point. It wasn't all typed in by hand every time they needed to build a new version.