Dan Bricklin on Software That Lasts 200 Years

Lansdowne writes "Dan Bricklin, author of VisiCalc, has written a great new essay identifying a need for software that needs to last for decades or even centuries without replacement. Neither prepackaged nor custom-written software is fully able to meet the need, and he identifies how attributes of open source might help to produce long-lasting 'Societal Infrastructure Software'."

Re:Work on the hardware first.

[Deag]

Well Dan Bricklin does point out that software of today can run on different hardware and having software tied to specific hardware is a bad idea.

He says that the system should stay fundamentaly the same and components can be replaced and upgraded, not having everything replaced completely every five years.

He is not just talking about one specific program that doesn't change, but rather open standards and techniques that mean data that is stored today, will be accessible in 200 years time.

Re:Work on the hardware first.

[Vitus Wagner]

Whole point of Open Source software is that you can compile it for any architecture you've ever imagine.

As long as you have some compilers ported to your new hardware and kernel with compatible system calls, you are perfectly safe.

See also

[CGP314]

See also The Long Now Foundation. [longnow.org]

I read their book in college and, though it is a bit pie-in-the-sky, I thought it raised some interesting ideas. One of their projects was to build a clock that could last a thousand years. When I moved to London [colingregorypalmer.net] one of the first things I did was go to see the thousand-year clock in the National Science Museum. There it was, it all it's broken-non-time-telling glory. About a month ago I checked up on it again. Status: still not fixed : \

Paul Graham said it best.

[fatcow]

It is not easy to design a 100year old language [paulgraham.com]

Re:Maybe it's needed, but who will develop it?

[pheede]

In fact, the Word document format hasn't changed since Word 97. So any Word version from 1997 or onwards will do the job.

And changing the settings to saving in RTF format by default (enabling Word versions from Word 6.0 through 2003, as well as basically all other word processors, to read the documents) isn't all that hard. Not even in a corporate setting.

Microsofts encourages upgrading of Office installations through a lot of questionable means, but the Word document format isn't one of them.

paper books

[spectrokid]

In Belgium, notary's still pay law students to copy by hand important documents on thick books, made from acid-free paper and solidly bound together. Stacked in a basement, you can throw a jerrycan of gasoline over them and set fire to it. You will lose (almost) nothing. Instead of relying on laser discs (see other post), print everything out and count on OCR.

Re:Maybe it's needed, but who will develop it?

[peragrin]

Let's try it, Let's take an Office XP doc saved in the Office XP format and open it up in Office 97,

What it doesn't open properly? Geez that's A shocker.

Now you can save an office XP doc in office 97 format, and office 97 doc's can be opened in office XP but office XP doesn't open in Office 97.

MS does this because when one business upgrades, it forces the partners to upgrade as well. Why because most people have a hard time understanding what the different formats are.

Long Now Foundation

[handy_vandal]

The Long Now Foundation: 10,000 Year Clock and Library

"The

Long Now Foundation [longnow.org] was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to todays 'faster/cheaper' mind set and promote 'slower/better' thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

* The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

Long Now is the brainchild of Stewart Brand [everything2.com].

-kgj

Re:Already there?

[eraserewind]

Some work? Hundreds of Billions of dollars were wasted on it. There is no way that having to make that kind maintenance cost can be considered not "in such bad shape after all".

Re:Paper is a bad analogy

[djmurdoch]

Similarly, the most common bulk storage methods today are the CD-R and the DVD+/-R (tape backups are practically obsolete). Now the standard for data storage on CD and DVD is, well, *standard*. So if in 200 years time someone wants to read one back, they could build a CD player from first principles.

Neither tape nor the organic dyes on CD-Rs are nearly as long lasting as acid-free paper. I've read 200 year old books, but reading a 200 year old tape or a 200 year old CD-R would require *much* more effort than constructing a reader like the ones we use today, if it was even possible.

Re:Maybe it's needed, but who will develop it?

[AKnightCowboy]

Take a look at Micrsofts behaviour with MS Office, it's a complete cash cow because they can update it when they want and force people into upgrading with changed document types.

Hmm? I still install Office97 on any brand new computer I get and it works just fine. Why would I need to upgrade it? All the functionality I need to do reports is there and it's 7 year old software.

Re:COBOL, FORTRAN and SQL

[iggymanz]

There actually are some compatibility issues before the ANSI standardization of COBOL and FORTRAN, and both languages let one use non-portable extensions. A program has to be written with portability in mind, just like most other compiled languages. No commercial database application uses pure ANSI standard SQL to get real world work done....try to substitute one db for another behind the scenes and things will break. Many applications can use multiple dbms on the back end only because they have configuration settings that tell which database you are using, often to the version (Oracle 4 doesn't speak quite the same SQL as Oracle 8, especially for database creation and modification, though MOST things are backwards compatible). I speak as one who's earned many $10K's because stuff doesn't quite act in a backwards compatible or portable manner , whether language, dbms, OS flavor

Language standards

[gr8_phk]

"Language standards don't even last 200 years"

Lisp is about 50.

The Clock of the Long Now

[garyebickford]

The Clock of the Long Now [longnow.org] is a clock designed Danny Hillis to last 10,000 years with maintenance using only Bronze Age technology. Ticking will be avoided. The century hand will advance every 100 years, and the cuckoo will come out on the millennium. The first 9 foot tall prototype was built in time for "New Year's Eve 01999" (note extra digit, and the second is under construction now.

One might argue that the clock incorporates firmware, in the sense that there will be relatively complex algorithms to maintain accuracy by comparing different timing signals, and simpler algorithms to decide when to move the century hand, or cuckoo the millennium. It's not a stored-program system though, so it doesn't meet the criteria that the Babbage engines meet. Nevertheless, this is a good example of hardware designed realistically to operate continuously for 10 millennia. For this project Hillis invented a mechanical serial-bit-adder, a mechanical digital logic element, which evidently lacks the "wearing problem" of a standard clock mechanism. The clock knows about leap years and such.

The website has images of the prototypes and the design, but I'm on dialup so I didn't look at them. The Principles Page [longnow.org] discusses some of the problems to be overcome. For example, power source - right now Hillis is tending toward a temperature-based power source - and maintaining accuracy, which may be based on a phase locked loop using a mechanical oscillator and solar alignment. There are ways to support the foundation, such as buying Brand's Book, or Eno's tunes

IMHO he might want to use three or four other checks as well. An extension of phase locking can work well with multiple nodes in a network, e.g., the multiple nodes in the human heart rhythm controller. Such networks rapidly converge to a common cycle, and this would provide additional reliability. The NTP network time algorithm is based on multiple sources of the same type, but analogous in concept. Just for fun, it'd be great if the clock also included a display of the 64-bit Unix time, in binary!

This Wired article [wired.com] was written by Danny Hillis about his original idea. The Long Now Website [longnow.org] has other interesting links about long term stuff. Hillis has some interesting friends, like Brian Eno [enoshop.co.uk] who named "The Clock of the Long Now", and Stewart Brand [edge.org]. Other links: Intro to Brand talk [edge.org], The actual talk [edge.org]. Buy the book [gbn.org], or the Eno CD "January 07003" [enoshop.co.uk] to support the foundation.