[rocket_surgeron]

Lots of large corporations have (or at least, had) archivists.

The last time I dealt with one was as a subcontractor for Lockheed Martin. The archivists I worked with were responsible for maintaining the code and documentation for all of the satellites they had ever worked on.

If you need to see the design documents for a satellite that was built 40 years ago by a company gobbled up by LM four or five acquisitions ago, whose engineers are all gone (or dead), you shoot off an email, have about 20 managers sign off on it, and in a couple of weeks someone goes and finds the actual, real, documents that have been rolled up in a tube in a cave somewhere since the 80s and either ships them to you or emails you a scan.