DECnet and other dead technologies (was: Linux for "cloud computing")

[Tom Buskey]

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>  Vernor Vinge (of "technological singularity" fame), in his fiction
> novel /A Deepness In The Sky/, posited the job role of "software
> archaeologist".  Given enough time (say, 100s or 1000s of years),
> we're going to get to the point where any given problem will already
> have been solved by past software.  The job will be finding it and
> making it work.  I've already heard of people running an emulator on
> top of an emulator inside of a VM solely to keep some old application
> alive.
>

Vinge is excellent.  In another novel, "A Fire Upon the Deep" he talks about
'The net of 1000 lies' describing a Usenet type environment with varying
levels of bandwidth and cultural understanding.


  And I know there are people who believe we're already there.  :-)
>
>
Thank goodness most of us don't have to deal with non-TCP/IP networks mixed
into our ethernet.  I think the only one I deal with is Fibre Channel and it
has its own network that's usually kept separately.

Most of the Archeology I have to deal with is stand alone.  The hardest is
keeping things running because no one is willing to say "we don't need it"
when no one has used it in years.
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