2 ms·
>It feels weird that so much old software from the 80's or even 90's and newer has to be reverse-engineered in order to be understood. The process almost seems
by TMWNN 4y ago
>It feels weird that so much old software from the 80's or even 90's and newer has to be reverse-engineered in order to be understood. The process almost seems like something an archeologist would perform on an artifact thousands of years old.
This is a plot point in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Thousands of years in the future, pretty much all software has already been written, so software archaeologists trawl through archives to find, debug, and run code (in as many emulated environments as needed).
- retrac 4y agoWonderful novel. Galactic standard time is still counted in the number of seconds since a certain epoch. (January 1st 1970 00:00 UTC as it happens, though both that calendar system, and the precise significance, if any, of the date, are lost to history by the time of the novel. The first moon landing, maybe? So few records from that time survive.)
- thrtythreeforty 4y agoQeng Ho tradition holds that the epoch is the first moon landing, but Pham looked closer (he is a programmer-at-arms, it's his job to know these things) and saw that 1970 was the epoch.