From tcl to awkward: analyzing old data with new tools

As more experiments move toward data preservation and open datasets, it opens the door to not only new physics questions, but attacking these new questions with new computational approaches that may not have existed when the data were recorded. In this talk, I will detail our experiences analyzing almost 20-year old data from the BaBar experiment with the latest experiment-agnostic computational tools like uproot and awkward. I will discuss the pressure points and challenges of working with older datasets and the still-necessary legacy computing infrastructure and highlight some lessons for current and future experiments.