I forgot about the Programmer-Archeologist! Another point from (I think) these novels that stuck with me was Vinge's description of the "software midden heap". I'd like to think we can clean up some middle layers from our computing stack in the future, but with some old software only available in emulators (possibly running in WebAssembly in a browser), I am not so sure.

In fact, I realized I made an nearly identical comment here on Hacker News back in 2011. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2702231