software rot

TRX
September 14, 2013
70:
@66:
Not mentioned so far: 1) In Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, two competing time- travel groups have changed history so much so often that it's not certain there ever was an original timeline.
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See also: Keith Laumer's "Dinosaur Beach."

TRX
September 16, 2013
104:
@93:
Of course, the pagans have been pointing the way out of this mess for decades: a spiral, which has both cycles and forward progress.
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Try "The Coils of Time" by A. Bertram Chandler for that very thing...

TRX
September 17, 2013 147:
@126:
to Boot a computer -- where it wakes up and builds itself from scratch every time.
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I once got a chance to play "flight simulator" at a friend's place of employment; a major airline that maintained a building full of FAA-certified, full-motion flight simulators. All running FORTRAN, on custom-made computer hardware designed to run the binaries created by a 40-year-old compiler, since it was cheaper to have custom superminis made than to re-certify a code base dating back to the Kennedy Administration...

Anyway, we went in late at night, powered up the hydraulics and various subsystems, and then I got to boot the computer. Bear in mind, it was less than a year old around 1990-ish. First I had to unroll the "prayer mat" in front of the cabinet, then enter the boot code by hand, by flipping tiny toggle switches up and down in patterns according to a laminated plastic card, and pushing a button to enter each word, which was of some bizarre length, like 23 or 37 bits.

Mostly, and to this day, I am astonished that a machine that cost more than a million dollars had to be booted with toggle switches, and completely boggled that the bozos who designed it that way put the boot panel at knee height... at least primitive desktop PCs had their switch panels up on the desk where you could get at them.

TRX
September 17, 2013
148:
@136:
Actually real ferrite core was fairly permanent unless written over.
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IBM used to make (at least some of) it's core memory cards in the Philippines.

With the connection between computers and the textile industry, I was surprised to find that the core memory cards were loomed by hand (at least at that time), with the mostly-female workers threading the tiny cores with needles and fine wire.

A core grid isn't really cloth, and no cloth ever had little rings at each junction, but my very first thought was surprise they weren't using looms. I guess IBM felt it wasn't worth building custom machinery since the market for core was, by modern standards, microscopic.

TRX
September 19, 2013
199:
@189:
About the only way to build a city from scratch is to come up with a shared need that gets folks to move there in a hurry.
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...and once that need is met, or no longer relevant, sometimes everyone just leaves. Russia is littered with cities like that, and there are some in America heading that way.