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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

> 100 years is long enough, and 1000 years was always a wild-ass theoretical abstraction.

The software will be an issue before the hardware anyway inevitably

That misapplies systems thinking: It's necessary to have both the software and the hardware, so it is necessary to have the hardware.

By the above comment's reasoning, you wouldn't invest in hardware because you'll lack the software, and then you wouldn't invest in the software because you'll lack the hardware.

The hardware will definitely be a problem. Optical heads have elastomeric parts that are unlikely to last a century. They have precision plastic components that may become brittle. All of the knowhow and specialist tools to make and service them will be gone. USB and the drivers will still be around barring a complete collapse of civilization.

> USB and the drivers will still be around barring a complete collapse of civilization.

Famous last words. At the current state of software you will need a specific UEFI version with a specific certificate (which expired in 6 days) running a specific Windows version with specific drivers version. Damn, even LTO, which is used for archiving, is only compatible with 1 generation behind. The human race is only able to make things to last, by accident.

Include the source (don't use proprietary stuff), and keep it simple. That should not be an issue in this age.

I think more & more that hobbyists need to keep air gapped old-OS/hardware machines in the garage to manage this kind of stuff.

Otherwise you quickly run into connectivity / driver / application / OS compatibility hassles trying to get even 10-20 year old stuff from our own lifetime experience to run.

I'm not sure how we expect our great-grandchildren to figure out how to get data off a disc/drive in 100 years.

I can look at a film strip or print from my grandfather or play his records more easily than I can run software from my own childhood.

surely AI will just recode the entire system in minutes?

Yes, AI will simply vibe code drivers for devices it can't talk to in order to read formats it can't read

More likely it will just hallucinate content that plausibly could be on the disc and display that for the unwitting

Why would it not be able to talk to it? Clearly the io pinns can be connected forever…

I think we'll have the hallucination problems solved in a 1000 years. One would hope at least.

If 1000 year AI cannot write firmware & drivers for fairly standard discs, then AI has failed massively.

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