do you think you could come up with a piece of software which would be less ephemeral and more lasting
Take a look at the sort of old software people write emulators for.
There's an active scene that resurrects 70/80s video games - Space Invaders/Galaga/Defender et al have way way longer useful life than most of the software written in the subsequent ~40 years.
IBM maintain a VAX/VMS emulator, and there are various ports if it (including OpenVMS and an x86 version). This is mostly (I think?) used for "legacy apps" particularly finacuial/governemnt/adacemic/military software written in Cobol, Fortran, or Ada.
Looking at those sorts of software would be interesting in terms of knowing what sort of 40+ year old software people still care about...
Comments
Take a look at the sort of old software people write emulators for.
There's an active scene that resurrects 70/80s video games - Space Invaders/Galaga/Defender et al have way way longer useful life than most of the software written in the subsequent ~40 years.
IBM maintain a VAX/VMS emulator, and there are various ports if it (including OpenVMS and an x86 version). This is mostly (I think?) used for "legacy apps" particularly finacuial/governemnt/adacemic/military software written in Cobol, Fortran, or Ada.
Looking at those sorts of software would be interesting in terms of knowing what sort of 40+ year old software people still care about...