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Comment by shantara | Hacker News Reader

In "Deepness in the Sky" a spaceship's computer is still running on Unix time many thousands years into the future. It is generally believed that the calendar starts with the first Moon landing, and only the main character as a "programmer-archeologist" discovers a small difference between it and true Unix time 0.

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Little is known about “Unix” but it is believed he or she was a charismatic spiritual leader who brought hope, healing, and comfort to countless humans on Earth and inspired numerous disciples including “BSD”, “Linux”, and “System V”.

> Little is known about “Unix” but […]

As opposed to eunuchs.

Well, isn't Unix a castrated Multics?

Vernor Vinge sounds like an intriguing author!

“Most years, since its inception in 1999, Vinge has been on the Free Software Foundation's selection committee for their Award for the Advancement of Free Software.”[0]

Since “A Deepness in the Sky” was written in 1999 as a prequel to “A Fire Upon the Deep” (from 1992), which do you recommend to read first?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge

Fire, then Deepness, then stop.

Or Fire, then The Peace War. Maybe dip into True Names, followed by Shockwave Rider by John Brunner.

Many people didn't like Deepness much. But the sequel to Fire, Children of the Sky, was interesting.

In either case, definitely read The Shockwave Rider by Brunner.

I quite enjoyed Rainbow's End as well.

There's an extra apostrophe there... this is addressed toward the end of the novel.

Yes, it's not "The end of this particular rainbow", it's "rainbows have an end". It bugged me until I got to that part of the book.

That comment is a bit of a spoiler, isn't it?

Personally I found Fire and Deepness to be equally, profoundly, good. Haven’t found any other Vinge books to be nearly as good.

For me A Deepness in the Sky is his best, and one of the most memorable novels I've read.

The Peace War is a fascinating exploration of "what if this one thing was possible?" and all its terrible consequences, but Deepness grabbed me much more as a story.

"A Deepness..." also used SI multiples of seconds to denote something approximating 24 hours, a week, a month etc.

A megasecond is a useful quantity: it's a bit less than 12 days. I mentally approximate it to a fortnight, partly because of the VMS bootloader which used microfortnights as an approximation for seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...

Another handy time_t approximation is that a year is about 2^25 seconds, or 32 megaseconds.

He should have said what that difference is.

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