Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the latter half of the twentieth century.
—Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Once I was contributing to a research project involving a database, a public web server, and lots of Python code. One day the hard disk of the server crashed, wiping out everything. We tried to restore the service from files that were scattered on different peoples’ computers—and failed. The project never came to life again. We would have needed a time machine to restore the previous state of the project. Ironically, when I was working on another ...
