My good friend Daniel and I were watching a show on Discovery last night about fossils, and it prompted a discussion on what new discoveries archeologists might make in the future.
In particular, we started to think about a new profession, Software Archeologists, and how in a hundred years time they'll scour the Internet (or whatever it is by that time), and come across the remains of DOS, BeOS, OS2, Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Solaris and the like.
Perhaps they'll be named OSsils?
There may be specialist Software Archeologists that dive deeper into the origins of a particular OSsil, thriving on the intricate differences between major & minor versions, and the specifics of build numbers. The arguments at OSsil conferences will begin, where questions like "Did DOS 2.0 really have support for subdirectories?" and "Whatever happened to DELTREE?" will rage.
At universities around the world, wild eyed professors teach spotty faced students the Theory of OS, while religious zealots from the Church of Gates preach how Windows was created in just six days, until it sinned and spawned the vile offspring - aka Vista.
It does lead me to wonder if there will be any OS survivors in 2109?
Stuart
Thursday, April 30, 2009
OSsils - What Software Archeologists of the 22nd Century will discover
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2 comments:
Up at Victoria there has been a few projects to archive old computer games and early NZ software for future generations:
http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~ian/gamearchiving/index.php
Kirk
great to have you back in the blogosphere dude and talking about the issues ... but keeping it funky as brett & jermaine wld say.
i think there will definite be some wild talk about OSs that devolved to slower, fatter and vunerable versions adapting to their environment of users with smaller brains incapable of using a command window :)
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