A great article from the personal blog of Dan Bricklin, the co-author of Visicalc - the first commercial spreadsheet program. I vividly remember the excitement of learning to use the basics of Viscalc to keep my class's examination results when I was teaching. It must have been about 1981 or 1982.
Anyway, Dan writes about software being viewed as an ongoing public resource like roads, bridges, housing, utilities etc, in a world where paper records (which were often kept for hundreds of years) are now often not kept and the guaranteed future collection and recovery of data in digital form now must become the ongoing archive. Software can no longer be a short shelf-life product. Some interesting commentary of the software development process.
