Comment by TMWNN
3 days ago
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.gareth...>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
I too maintain a small fleet of virtualized copies of the silent machines which now still sit on the shelf, unpowered, nevertheless .. there if they are needed.
Vernor Vinge’s works have indeed had a huge impact on the way we think about things, and his immense insight is still extraordinary with every read.