I switched to Linux (Slackware, Gentoo, Kubuntu, Arch Linux) some 22 years ago. It has been a pain and sometimes I still get issues.

But I am grateful my PC basically does whatever I ask it to.

A desktop PC lasted 10 years before dying. A laptop another 6 years. No NAGs, no service subscription.

And no ads from software (browser sometimes excluded), no nothing.

I could still install it on a very old machine, with some extra work needed, I could still use less than 1GB RAM.

So I am grateful, despite some extra work is sometimes needed. Nothing is really free. It's a matter of tradeoffs.

Like wolves that evolved into dogs. Interesting.

HN effect:

Error establishing a database connection

Rewind the tape, give the head adjustment screw a tiny turn anticlockwise, and hit play again. It'll load fine this time.

Or load it over gopher:// with a Spectranet or similar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTvrIPzGAFQ

gopher://gopherddit.com

Just don’t jostle it when it’s powered on.

Hey hey 16k, what does that get you these days?

Great point!

RESTORE

This could be a solution.

It is not clear to which problem.

We'd need more people like your dad.

For the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make sense to you, then doing this won't either.

Unfortunately, I am working for an aerospace manufacturer that runs VAX VMS on emulators (which are quite expensive). We also run an even older operating system, OS2200.

The original VMS system manager who moved from 7000 series hardware to emulation was somewhat inquisitive, and we did install VMS 7 on simh. He retired and passed away some years ago, and none of his replacements have wanted to touch simh. I find that apathy appalling.

Given who wrote it, simh seems as close to an official VAX emulator as you are going to get.

The Charon/Stromasys sales staff described it as a toy.

In 1990's, maybe. Today simh-classic it's serious stuff up to the point a fork was made because some nut tried to tamper 1:1 disk/tape images with custom headers.

If you cannot learn from history, you'll have no future too, man.

That's why so many of these new age development tools, libraries and abstractions are such incredibly janky pieces of bloat that literally require what a few decades ago was supercomputers.

All downhill from here.

For nostalgia sake. It's from the computing period when there was a great influx of good idea's but still a huge shortage in memory and storage.

> a huge shortage in memory and storage

Maybe this explains why we have to call "creat" to "create" a file.

Idk about creat specifically but the utility names are all terse because you were interacting with the system on a 110-baud teletype.

For me, it's a chance to experience what it was like to use and develop software on these systems back in the day. For example, lately I've been writing some small apps and adding new kernel features to a variant of V6 Unix running on my PDP-11/05. It's humbling to see what it really took to be productive on these systems.

Some people even did y2k patches to BSD 4.3. Also, tons of 'modern' software could run on it you can get GCC 2.95 and GCC 3.4. Lynx, for instance. Or gopher and IRC clients. And, maybe, with a bit of luck, Lua and JimTCL.

Understanding, and inspiration. They had to create under serious constraints in compute, memory, and storage, and understanding how and why they did can lead to ideas about how to optimize software on modern machines.

It's also critical for understanding how and why the engineering choices were made when documenting the evolution of processing. Instruction sets, processor design, programming languages, computer culture, corporate trends, all of those things have roots in design decisions, and the software preserved on tapes like this are a sort of DNA.

The effort needed to incorporate the information is dropping, with AI you can run analysis and grab important principles and so on, and whatever principles govern optimization and performance under constraints will be useful on a permanent basis.

You never know what will be important to people in the future.

I just listened to a great new episode (podcast) of The Truth (audio drama anthology series, they’re fantastic). It was called “The Joke.” Basically this archivist finds an old hard drive with a dumb pun joke - turns out she didn’t even understand it because jokes were no longer allowed in society. Kind of has an Equilibrium vibe but more bureaucratic and less “killing people for feeling.” Anyway the joke itself takes on great importance as a result. Bit of a dramatic comparison, but you see what I’m driving at.

Old software like Unix tends to be some of the best-written software ever. Saving these systems gives us a valuable learning resource.

I’ve learned this is not the case. Bryan Cantrill taught me in the talk about tail -f (and about how it was “treasuring up” data in buffers

Ha ha -- but maybe we can finally find the mysterious headwaters of ta?[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gp-RXCLO2M&t=3500s

Software longevity: "a terrific power"

With terrific power comes terrific responsibility. :)

lovely, I hope i can manage to get you to sign my butt one day

What value do you see in Homer's poetry? How does that relate to these tapes?

Also, what risk is there to preserving?

There's so little cost to store the contents of a single 9 track tape that there doesn't need to be any reason at all to do it.

Call it a piece of art. For me it is. And I won't discuss art here, because this is difficult. :-)

Yes. Everything on internet can be deleted and modified at someone's will.

If all this is true, then it's another step towards freedom.

Freedom to delete and rewrite history.

We shouldn't rely on YouTube to write our history. It's just an American entertainment website that makes money of ads. It has no other obligations. It can do whatever it wants, or what the US government wants. This is not news.