Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by postmodest 1060 days ago
I'm reminded of the Vernor Vinge novel where a character hacking some fleet's automation hundreds of thousands of years in the future casually mentions that the tech stack is so old that the system time stamp is still the Unix Epoch

“And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”

1 comments

Part of the "Fire Upon the Deep" series of novels (that particular reference is from the "A Deepness in the Sky").