Long-term Computing

2022-02-16

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A number of computing projects I've seen, from open hardware to Urbit to Gemini itself, have an ancillary goal to build a system a user could one day pass on to his or her grandchildren. Many posts on Gemini discuss the idea of a single computer that could last 50 years or more. For the purpose of this post, I'll refer to these ideas as "long-term computing".

Many long-term computing projects picture a machine that can be used daily or a few times a week, with equivalent parts being replaced as necessary to keep the machine running and software updates probably only consisting of security updates or critical bug fixes. I think of this subset of long-term computing as "durable computing", since the idea is that the software or hardware can withstand decades of continuous use. The updateable aspect of durable computing, however, is a nuance not to be ignored.

Imagine that I have a long-term computing device whose power port fails after a year of use, but I don't bother to buy another one and I toss it into my closet. Forty years later, as I'm preparing to sell the house, I find the device again. If it's truly long term, I should still be able to find parts for it, but it hasn't been booted once in forty years.

Once I get it up and running again, can I use it for anything productive? Can I connect it to other devices and communicate with them, for example? Updates would probably be required, sure. But could I apply one massive update with all the deltas needed to get it current, or would I need to apply a chain of separate updates? If I need a chain of updates, what do I do if one of the updates isn't online anymore? Is there a legacy mode I can use on other devices? Ideally, even with a decades-long gap, I'd want to be able to bring this old device to a state where I can use it similarly to most other computers.

I like to think of this scenario as "time-capsule computing". Both durable computing and time-capsule computing have the goal of technology being able to work decades into the future, but the difference is what happens in the interim: durable computing focuses on continued usage throughout that time period, whereas time-capsule computing allows for long periods of no use at all.

Retro computing circles often seem to confuse or even conflate these ideas. The task of building a computer or an OS that can simply last for half a century is not the same as the task of building a computer or an OS that can be used with exactly the same components half a century later. The former can morph into an entity completely unlike the latter, à la the Ship of Theseus paradox. But many enthusiasts of old hardware are often a mix of people who want to use Commodore 64s in everyday life and people who want to try to port a (stripped-down) modern Linux kernel to Amiga hardware, and there's usually not much distinction between the two.

Is the time-capsule aspect a realistic goal of long-term computing projects? In most cases, I'd guess not. Technology has evolved in ways systems designers fifty years ago couldn't have imagined, and many business-critical uses for technology simply can't scale to the needs of today. A prominent example is cryptography: encryption used in the 1980s was sufficient because computers in that day couldn't crack it, but modern hardware can bypass it in seconds. It might not be realistic for hardware designed decades ago to provide the horsepower needed to safely handle sensitive data.

On the other hand, some software--and even a few pieces of hardware--lend themselves quite well to the time-capsule paradigm. A computer from 1995 with a network card can still connect to existing dial-up services or Ethernet, and Gopherspace is still as accessible to these machines as it was in 1995. Surfing the modern Web would be out of the question, of course, but that's another issue.

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[Last updated: 2022-02-16]