[skywal_l]

I believe the sensors are used more prominently and are actually an essential element of the plot in "A fire upon the deep".

In that book, giant ships are being powered by computer systems that are so complex, nobody fully master them and you need computer archeologists who spend their entire life studying how those system works to maintain and improve them. The hero of the book is actually one of those archeologists. If I remember correctly, he's the only one to know the meaning of the "unix epoch".

Edit: got my wires crossed. Indeed the book I am refering is actually the one mentionned in the article.

[akkartik]

You're thinking of "A deepness in the sky" :) One of my favorite passages: http://akkartik.name/post/deepness

[pavel_lishin]

My favorite part of that was the historical mix-up - the Qeng Ho, and presumably the rest of humanity, assumed that the Unix epoch marked the moon landing, which was only six months' off!

[linspace]

“The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized..."

The heat death of programming