An exercise in repeating experimental analysis using a program developed on a no longer available computing system

Abstract

Useful programs often fall into obsolescence when they are not updated with the advancing hardware and software. This presentation describes an exercise on deploying a legacy software for a latent variable analysis. Although the need to use this software arose in the context of a multidisciplinary project, including bioinformatics, the goal of this exercise is to provide a better understanding of the challenges in preserving programs developed on hardware that may no longer exist or used out-of-date or earlier versions of operations systems and compilers. Such programs may be required to maintain reproducibility of previously published experiments and used to further contribute to research.