alt Hacker NewsI remember a coworker having to fight with an old platform's build not working because our user/group IDs were bigger than 2^16. I can't remember which utility was causing the problem, I'd have to guess tar. This is when we learned to play the archive a VM game.
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I know a defence company that has a bunch of vaxes stored in low oxygen environments because they legally have to be able to provide software updates to firmware they’ve written for the next 20 or so years and it was written on a vax.
They had some great stories trying to get something or other running again where they had to fly one of the original designers over to hand solder a board back into action.
How we do that today is a bit of an interesting problem I don’t think they’ve convincingly solved; basically maintaining nightly builds forever — a couple 1U’s of kubernetes in deep storage ain’t gonna do it, you’re not gonna be able to solder a xeon back to life..
I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust.
I can't imagine theres much overlap between "we will need to update this firmware for the next decade." and "Let's bet the farm on the documentation being perfect, and all the downloads still available."