3 ms·

It is hard to comprehend a large timescale of four thousand six hundred years. I wonder how much of our current software would last that long.

by hi41 7y ago

markdown 7y ago
None.
- arethuza 7y ago
  I don't know - I have a 'prototype' application that, rather to my horror, I have found recently is still in production about 7 years after it should have been replaced by the 'real' system. It'll probably outlast me!
epiphanitus 7y ago
I bet Pac Man will be preserved for posterity. It has that a simplicity and a timeless quality to it.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  I'd bet on tetris. I think there are more independent unlicensed implementations of tetris than any other game ever. Any particular implementation of it may wither away, but I bet if there are still programmers in a thousand years, there will probably be no shortage of tetris implementations.
walrus01 7y ago
There's a well known science fiction novel where a "programmer-archaeologist" on an interstellar fleet digs into a bunch of nested hypervisors and software nobody has touched in thousands of years, to find things still running on the unix time epoch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
- Nition 7y ago
  The best part of that was, being a space-faring civilization, the narrator muses that its starting point is probably based on the date when humans first left Earth to go to the moon!
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    My second round of amusement and feeling impressed was that, after thousands of years, the guy was off by only 1 year.
jammygit 7y ago
Jaron Lanier made an observation in one of his books about how technology concepts tend to get locked in, and predicted that MIDI has shaped digital music so much that in 1000 years we might still be stuck with its conceptual foundations. (possibly You Are Not a Gadget, but could have been another)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
asdff 7y ago
I bet most hardware wouldn't even last 100 years.

It is hard to comprehend a large timescale of four thousand six hundred years. I wonder how much of our current software would last that long.

by hi41 7y ago

It is hard to comprehend a large timescale of four thousand six hundred years. I wonder how much of our current software would last that long.

markdown 7y ago

None.

arethuza 7y ago
I don't know - I have a 'prototype' application that, rather to my horror, I have found recently is still in production about 7 years after it should have been replaced by the 'real' system. It'll probably outlast me!

epiphanitus 7y ago

I bet Pac Man will be preserved for posterity. It has that a simplicity and a timeless quality to it.

darkpuma 7y ago
I'd bet on tetris. I think there are more independent unlicensed implementations of tetris than any other game ever. Any particular implementation of it may wither away, but I bet if there are still programmers in a thousand years, there will probably be no shortage of tetris implementations.

walrus01 7y ago

There's a well known science fiction novel where a "programmer-archaeologist" on an interstellar fleet digs into a bunch of nested hypervisors and software nobody has touched in thousands of years, to find things still running on the unix time epoch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

Nition 7y ago
The best part of that was, being a space-faring civilization, the narrator muses that its starting point is probably based on the date when humans first left Earth to go to the moon!
- drdeadringer 7y ago
  My second round of amusement and feeling impressed was that, after thousands of years, the guy was off by only 1 year.

jammygit 7y ago

Jaron Lanier made an observation in one of his books about how technology concepts tend to get locked in, and predicted that MIDI has shaped digital music so much that in 1000 years we might still be stuck with its conceptual foundations. (possibly You Are Not a Gadget, but could have been another)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

asdff 7y ago

I bet most hardware wouldn't even last 100 years.