It's not just computers. The movie industry has been the same, and that is an artistic field - there's little obsolescence: Afiak there's no system to preserve films.
Even essential films are lost; some burn up in fires; only some private groups have tried to save and restore the most important ones. For example, I read about one legendary American silent film thought lost forever and then was found somewhere in Spain, in a library IIRC (they had to translate the Spanish titles back to English).
It happens in music and other fields. Perhaps the artists and businesses are focused on the present, not seeing their work as historic, and move on to the next thing. What happens to old projects you work on - do you preserve them carefully or are they just kind of left in whatever state they were at the end?
Even essential films are lost; some burn up in fires; only some private groups have tried to save and restore the most important ones. For example, I read about one legendary American silent film thought lost forever and then was found somewhere in Spain, in a library IIRC (they had to translate the Spanish titles back to English).
It happens in music and other fields. Perhaps the artists and businesses are focused on the present, not seeing their work as historic, and move on to the next thing. What happens to old projects you work on - do you preserve them carefully or are they just kind of left in whatever state they were at the end?