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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://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)

2 comments

> "in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it"

This is how I think about music and Spotify. Pretty much all music exists, you 'just' have to remember everything that exists and what it's called so you can find it.

Recent HN link, Red Alert 2 in your web browser. A game from 25 years ago which you can unofficially download the C++ original version from the Internet Archive to upload to the website which extracts the assets to play in a Javascript based reimplementation inside a web hypertext document browser.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853

My personal collection got so big I started forgetting what was in it lol. I had to write a program to catalog everything and present a directory tree of genre combinations with FUSE

ironically, that link 404s...

Hah, so it is! Sorry about that. <https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.gareth...>