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A comment on Japanese textile factory still uses tape cassette and punch cards. Parent comment

Re:Japanese textile factory still uses tape cassette and pun... by amiga-workbench on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:53AM (#36662923)
Can you think of any modern platform that would have the longevity, stability and lack of maintenance burden of that Sharp computer over another 40 years?

The only thing I can think of that would make their current setup more robust would be having the program burned into ROM and not on tape.

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Re:Japanese textile factory still uses tape cassette and pun... by jrockway on Monday July 10, 2023 @03:35AM (#36663164)
> Can you think of any modern platform that would have the longevity, stability and lack of maintenance burden of that Sharp computer over another 40 years?

I mean, probably any UNIX program written in C? Bill Joy vi can run on modern computers. What makes this software substantially different than a text editor?

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Re:Japanese textile factory still uses tape cassette and pun... by hulitu on Monday July 10, 2023 @04:06AM (#36663374)
Just try to compile a vi from 20 years ago on a modern computer.
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Re:Japanese textile factory still uses tape cassette and pun... by zokier on Monday July 10, 2023 @04:26AM (#36663505)
20 years ago was 2003, four years after C99. First x86-64 CPUs were released 20 years ago. Compiling 20 year old C codebase should not be an issue at all if it was half-decent to begin with.

Compiling pre-ANSI-C and pre-POSIX codebases might have challenges, but standardization has really gotten us lot of stability here.

I'd expect conservatively written C99/POSIX code to be usable certainly for another 20 years, there is just so much inertia there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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Re:Japanese textile factory still uses tape cassette and pun... by jrockway on Monday July 10, 2023 @04:19AM (#36663464)
According to Wikipedia that was a problem ... 20 years ago. That version compiles today. It's called "Traditional vi" and the Sourceforge site where it's hosted doesn't have a valid certificate so I didn't visit it.
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Re:Japanese textile factory still uses tape cassette and pun... by poplet on Monday July 10, 2023 @04:08PM (#36672240)
I wonder how old these tapes are
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