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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

The major problem I see with this is that while the computer itself might still boot, the world around it will have changed so radically it will effectively be useless.

You can see this with machines much younger than 50 years, they can't support the encryption required by most modern websites, interfaces age out of regular use: used a 24 pin parallel port lately? How about a modem?

Even software with long support for ancient machines eventually find it impossible to support older hardware, so you would be stuck with whatever the last release of software was available and likely any vendor would be long dead.

Machines don't age out because they stop working, they simply become obsolete to the surrounding environment. The article glosses over this problem by saying you could stick to simple use cases like email or word processing, but if you can't transfer the data off the machine, you are boned.

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I got to say you're spot on. Keeping things working is no challenge looks at his commodores.

Keeping them relevant is more of a challenge, this is one reason I hate to see people forcing redirects to HTTPS, it's just great and dandy that modern browsers suggest this to users (as long as they don't force), but for vast vast amounts of information, in the free world, you shouldn't force people into always-encrypted. There is zero good reason I shouldn't be able to choose to read Wikipedia unencrypted. And I can do that on pretty much any machine that can somehow crawl onto the Internet.

There's also the problem of "easily replaceable parts", because parts stop being produced, and I think we've been in a golden-age of new-old-stock, and I don't see that continuing in the future. Easily replaceable pose two problems, first, is sourcing the actual part as the world moves on and production stops, the other is that easily replaceable is at odds with industry demand, sure, I personally like 40 pin dip sockets for my hobby electronics, because they're easy to solder, things are large enough I can see them! But I'd not want every appliance I own to be constrained by that, meaning there's no incentive to produce them, leading back to the first problem.

There are so many problems with how to build a machine that lasts, or, even how to build an architecture, or system, that lasts, but they are worthwhile pursuits, discussing and thinking about them is worthwhile, because, systems we can understand, own and service are inherently more valuable than the ones we cannot.

There is a reason to read Wikipedia via https: ISP can otherwise inject ads or even change the page. This has actually happened.

That's not a good reason to take away my choice, and rob me of the opportunity to access this information on an older device if I wanted to.

Proxies like WeBone can solve that.

https://github.com/atauenis/webone

I use it for a solaris install.

https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/10/hacker-news-in-hotj...

Wow, WebOne looks awesome, thank you! My second computer is a 2005 mac mini..and it can't see ~98% of the web. I'll try that.

I appreciate the effort, but there's something that rubs me the wrong way about the state of this "force the world to always encrypt and offer no alternative", the same beef I have with Gemini.

"Take perfectly good protocol" -> "Wrap encryption around it" -> "Only offer encrypted version even though the plaintext version is right there" -> "Use third-party tool and extra infrastructure to unwrap perfectly good protocol before it can be used".

I sympathise somewhat but unfortunately the popularity of the internet means those innocent days of unencrypted information have been made dangerous due to too many bad actors. Like usenet, it's gone, it's not coming back. We shrug and move on.

I mentioned this in another thread, but given a secure way to acquire public keys, MITM attacks can be fully mitigated with signatures rather than payload encryption.

A tiny client doesn't have to bother checking this signature, anything capable of receiving encrypted data could be just as sure that the payload is byte-identical with the author's intention as TLS makes possible.

The difference is everyone gets to read your postcard if they want, but I'm with you: if I have an AVR barely able to GET the weather report, and strip numbers out of it if the JSON schema doesn't change even slightly, what problem is going to arise from some bad actor reading that packet on the way in?

If Mallory starts messing with my dumb Arduino garden I can set up a firewall that checks the signatures. It's progressive enhancement with graceful degradation.

Nobody took away your choice. You just need to implement/find SSL for that older device.

I think you've got something mixed up here, it's not that more effort is required by either party, it's just NOT to block port 80, and NOT write explicit redirect rules, and poof, stuff works.

Some other party then has the extra effort of security, privacy, etc. support for those using 80 with modern computers and browsers...

I don't see how, moderns browsers are free to suggest https, users are free to use it, network admins are free to require it

You may not need that extra protection (now), but society does.

It’s just like all the other kinds of safety measures we expect, such as seat belts, regulations w.r.t. food safety, fire protection, standards for tool safety, etc.

Nothing of that is needed, until you need it (I’ve never needed seat belts or airbags, for example, but can understand society requiring them)

If the industry hadn’t forced the world to https, I think governments would have.

There is one reason I can think of for encrypting websites, it tells you the information is coming from where you expect and not an interloper.

I agree its worth thinking about about serviceability and longevity but I can't help feeling like it would be like worrying about keeping a PDP 11 running for fifty years.

General Electric is actually commited to run PDP-11 for another 30 years, until 2050.

And it’s already 52 years old, today. Seems like solved problem.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/187671

This purpose could be accomplished with a cryptographic signature of the plain text. Thin clients would have the option to just take the Internet's word for the provenance of the data, any system capable of running encryption algorithms can confirm they received the exact bytes the author intended.

This would be an example of progressive enhancement, which has fallen out of favor.

Why should I value the information from one internet stranger over another? You can't authenticate if you don't know who anyone is. If someone is consistently changing the information then someone is going to notice.

Just think about all that unauthenticated information in libraries. Anyone can replace pages in the books. Books can be substituted with completely fake copies. No one bothers to do this for the same reasons no one bothers to MITM connections to plain text web sites.

In a world where governments are even changing the ending to popular movies [0], how do you know that tampering with books and other sources of information aren't taking place?

Perhaps you're speaking specifically about American libraries, probably because most Americans don't head over to a book shelf for their information these days, but more generally speaking it's not that farfetched of an idea at all.

[0]https://nypost.com/2022/01/25/fight-club-ending-changed-in-c...

This is a good argument against YAGNI. If we thought 10 years ahead with our designs, the result might not be clean or beautiful, or even optimal, but it might well be better than constantly changing every piece of code we have.

A project like this would be interesting for a computer that controls some other long lived thing, like an industrial control computer. There is an awful number of old beige boxes running Windows 95 controlling some very expensive machinery. The lack of software updates is not a problem (until somebody tries to introduce IIoT...), but finding replacement parts can become quite difficult.

There is a small business near me that has a wool testing machine that absolutely relies on custom DOS 3.3 based software and an old school serial card. They have had to become very astute at picking up old parts to keep their old rigs running as the guy who wrote the control software passed on, and they don't want to invest money in rewriting it. You would think commodity hardware would run this setup but all attempts at shifting it have failed.

The problem with old electronics is that once the chips fall out of fashion, you are never getting replacement parts. Does anybody still manufacture DDR2 ram for example? Its just not that long ago it got replaced by DDR3 and DDR4 but in 10 short years if you need a couple of sticks of it, your only option is 2nd hand. The e-waste issue is very real and the relentless pace of change doesn't help, but I don't have a good answer for solving it.

Amazon still shows as DDR2 being available from brands such as Tecmiyo and Kuesuny. With prime shipping even. You can even get DDR1 still. Now whether it's new memory or just recycled memory that's been repackaged I have no idea.

It sure looks like new. I recently ordered some DDR2 for a printer's mainboard.

If it transfers data through serial it is generally pretty easy to capture the traffic and reverse engineer, two of my jobs have been projects exactly like this. Only on one occasion have I had to replace the control electronics in the machine where the 8755 ROM/IO chip had failed and the program data was lost

not too long ago I did a flux image of a floppy, that floppy was required to boot a perfectly good cnc machine, and if it died, the machine would need its computer replaced (read: need to be replaced itself), the floppy drive was then replaced by a floppy emulator with a USB stick, and the guy now has two backups.

It was not too early either, the first tracks of that floppy were visibly worn...

I'm working on building computers designed to last longer than 50 years. They are primarily for the sort of timeless applications mentioned in the article. It's hard to imagine what people will be doing 50 years in the future, but it's not so difficult to see what people were doing 50 years ago that they're still doing today.

Transferring data off the computers won't be a problem in the future, if people are still interested there will be adapters and interface modules available, or you can make your own because of the open-source hardware, software and documentation. The software won't need to be updated because it won't need to run the latest version of everything.

There will be some advantages to using simpler and less capable computers for certain tasks, but most people will still need a modern computer for doing things like paying taxes and viewing advertisements.

Good point. Maybe this ForeverComputer could get a swappable component that does the connecting and encrypting? Kinda like you can SSH into a supercomputer from a Raspberry Pi and pretend your Pi itself has all that power.

Well yeah, but like a lot of retro computers that have a Pi emulating a modem or a disk drive as a net gateway, you might as well just use the Pi. People do it for fun or for the challenge, which is awesome. I don't think anybody on a gateway sitting at their C64 pretends that its viable.

I do love reading about that stuff though.

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