1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

Software archeology

It's not as glamorous as it sounds.

One of the many things I dislike about the SaaS era is that this will never happen. Nobody in 2075 will boot up an old version of Notion or Figma for research or nostalgia.

Like the culture produced and consumed on social media and many other manifestations of Internet culture it is perfectly ephemeral and disposable. No history, no future.

SaaS is not just closed but often effectively tied to a literal single installation. It could be archived and booted up elsewhere but this would be a much larger undertaking, especially years later without the original team, than booting 1972 Unix on a modern PC in an emulator. That had manuals and was designed to be installed and run in more than one deployment. SaaS is a plate of slop that can only be deployed by its authors, not necessarily by design but because there are no evolutionary pressures pushing it to be anything else. It's also often tangled up with other SaaS that it uses internally. You'd have to archive and restore the entire state of the cloud, as if it's one global computer running proprietary software being edited in place.

And since many applications are basically plugging SaaS with each other via APIs and webhooks, not even those.

We're living the SOA dreams, but it will be an hefty price.

A lot of software in 01972 was also effectively tied to a literal single installation. Most of the software people ran under Unix at the time was only present on one of the ten Unix installations and has consequently been lost. The shrink-wrapped mass-distribution software epoch was still ten years in the future.

That's why software archaeology from that era is hard, but it's still a lot easier than today's cloud software. It's a lot more complex, much more of a moving target, and is more interdependent with other services all of which would have to be either emulated or restored.

My other point was that we've gone back to the mainframe era. The PC revolution has mostly been abandoned.

Nobody will care what Notion or Figma are in the future. I don't know what they are, nor do I care to find out. Saas simply doesn't exist for many people, it's not a software model that all people are comfortable with.

Everybody I see on the bus has a personal computer in their hand, and a lot of them also have an additional personal computer in each ear. USB-C chargers typically each contain a personal computer to decide what voltage to output. All this doesn't necessarily result in enhanced user autonomy and agency, though; I wrote this essay about the disturbing trend in the late 90s: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kragen-software.html