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Can you think of any modern platform that would have the longevity, stability and lack of maintenance burden of that Sharp computer over another 40 years? The
by amiga-workbench 3y ago
Can you think of any modern platform that would have the longevity, stability and lack of maintenance burden of that Sharp computer over another 40 years?
The only thing I can think of that would make their current setup more robust would be having the program burned into ROM and not on tape.
- jrockway 3y ago> Can you think of any modern platform that would have the longevity, stability and lack of maintenance burden of that Sharp computer over another 40 years? I mean, probably any UNIX program written in C? Bill Joy vi can run on modern computers. What makes this software substantially different than a text editor?
- hulitu 3y agoJust try to compile a vi from 20 years ago on a modern computer.
- jrockway 3y agoAccording to Wikipedia that was a problem ... 20 years ago. That version compiles today. It's called "Traditional vi" and the Sourceforge site where it's hosted doesn't have a valid certificate so I didn't visit it.
- zokier 3y ago20 years ago was 2003, four years after C99. First x86-64 CPUs were released 20 years ago. Compiling 20 year old C codebase should not be an issue at all if it was half-decent to begin with. Compiling pre-ANSI-C and pre-POSIX codebases might have challenges, but standardization has really gotten us lot of stability here. I'd expect conservatively written C99/POSIX code to be usable certainly for another 20 years, there is just so much inertia there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
- poplet 3y agoI wonder how old these tapes are