[teddyh]

I think that it was this kind of thinking which led to the Java Virtual Machine. Not for the specifical problem of archiving, of course, but for portability, which is almost the same problem. Archiving is just porting to a future platform.

[kragen]

Archiving is porting to platforms that are created after you die, which makes it harder to test on them, which in turn can make the porting task harder in some ways.

I did mention the JVM in two out of four of the notes I linked there, and it was certainly an influential step in the direction I'm going, but I'm aiming for deeper levels of reproducibility than the JVM tries to offer.

[cxr]

I'm surprised by how little attention I/O has gotten in the posts you linked.