(07-10-2016, 10:45 AM)Diane wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP,
Alas histories 'engineered' are rarely of lasting worth, something which applies here to the "history" offered in 1921 by Wilfrid himself.
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Reverse engineering does not refer to engineering (re-inventing) the history. It has nothing to do with that.
It refers to the process of uncovering something from the finished end rather than creating something new.
It's a software-industry term for taking something that is already completed (or mostly so) and unraveling how it was made (usually with a mind to re-creating it but that is a separate process and not always necessary).
If you take the phrase reverse engineering and apply it to the provenance of the VMS, it means you are working from most recent to least recent while still incorporating any and all information gathered along the way by other methods.
It is always acknowledged, when reverse engineering something, that some steps in the process are guesses, just as historians acknowledge that some of their results are guesses. It is not about re-inventing history. It is about uncovering it.