[2022-02-16] Long-term Computing

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A number of computing projects I've seen, from open hardware to
Urbit to Gemini itself, have an ancillary goal to build a system a
user could one day pass on to his or her grandchildren. Many posts
on Gemini discuss the idea of a single computer that could last 50
years or more. For the purpose of this post, I'll refer to these
ideas as "long-term computing".

Many long-term computing projects picture a machine that can be
used daily or a few times a week, with equivalent parts being re-
placed as necessary to keep the machine running and software up-
dates probably only consisting of security updates or critical bug
fixes. I think of this subset of long-term computing as "durable
computing", since the idea is that the software or hardware can
withstand decades of continuous use. The updateable aspect of dur-
able computing, however, is a nuance not to be ignored.

Imagine that I have a long-term computing device whose power port
fails after a year of use, but I don't bother to buy another one
and I toss it into my closet. Forty years later, as I'm preparing
to sell the house, I find the device again. If it's truly long
term, I should still be able to find parts for it, but it hasn't
been booted once in forty years.

Once I get it up and running again, can I use it for anything pro-
ductive? Can I connect it to other devices and communicate with
them, for example? Updates would probably be required, sure. But
could I apply one massive update with all the deltas needed to get
it current, or would I need to apply a chain of separate updates?
If I need a chain of updates, what do I do if one of the updates
isn't online anymore? Is there a legacy mode I can use on other
devices? Ideally, even with a decades-long gap, I'd want to be
able to bring this old device to a state where I can use it simi-
larly to most other computers.

I like to think of this scenario as "time-capsule computing". Both
durable computing and time-capsule computing have the goal of
technology being able to work decades into the future, but the
difference is what happens in the interim: durable computing fo-
cuses on continued usage throughout that time period, whereas
time-capsule computing allows for long periods of no use at all.

Retro computing circles often seem to confuse or even conflate
these ideas. The task of building a computer or an OS that can
simply last for half a century is not the same as the task of
building a computer or an OS that can be used with exactly the
same components half a century later. The former can morph into an
entity completely unlike the latter, à la the Ship of Theseus par-
adox. But many enthusiasts of old hardware are often a mix of peo-
ple who want to use Commodore 64s in everyday life and people who
want to try to port a (stripped-down) modern Linux kernel to Amiga
hardware, and there's usually not much distinction between the
two.

Is the time-capsule aspect a realistic goal of long-term computing
projects? In most cases, I'd guess not. Technology has evolved in
ways systems designers fifty years ago couldn't have imagined, and
many business-critical uses for technology simply can't scale to
the needs of today. A prominent example is cryptography: encryp-
tion used in the 1980s was sufficient because computers in that
day couldn't crack it, but modern hardware can bypass it in sec-
onds. It might not be realistic for hardware designed decades ago
to provide the horsepower needed to safely handle sensitive data.

On the other hand, some software--and even a few pieces of hard-
ware--lend themselves quite well to the time-capsule paradigm. A
computer from 1995 with a network card can still connect to exist-
ing dial-up services or Ethernet, and Gopherspace is still as ac-
cessible to these machines as it was in 1995. Surfing the modern
Web would be out of the question, of course, but that's another
issue.

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[Last updated: 2025-07-26]