While reading a bit of retro work I came across this:

A little known law of life is that of irreversibility. No human or physical act or process can be reversed so that objects and states end up as they were. During the original act and in the time just after it, both object and state undergo change that is irreversible. An early known poem, Humpty-dumpty, recognises this. Once the egg is broken, that is that.

It is the same with systems. They can never be reversed. They can be changed, certainly, and sidetracked, and they can be very easily destroyed, the moment a human-machine information system comes into being, it takes on a life of its own independent of its creators. The operators just run it, while programmers merely maintain it. The process called entropy begins, a confusion that can be measured by the growing gulf between what people first knew about the system and now know about it.

Brian Rothery (1971), The Myth of the Computer, Business Books, p 43.