zlacker

Fire upon the deep, where space ships runs on a future version of unix and only one guy knows what the unix epoch means.

>>skywal+(OP)
I don't recall that in that book. Maybe you're thinking of A Deepness in the Sky? I haven't read that one yet.

>>larper+5d
I think the reference is in Fire: It’s an offhand line about an ancient timekeeping system which the modern engineers mistakenly believe is calibrated to humanity’s first steps onto another celestial body.

>>larper+5d
I loved that aspect of it - it's becoming more and more true as we build more and more frameworks/abstractions. Once we got to Kubernetes and some of the modern web frameworks, the notion of "Programmer-at-Arms", the one-in-thousands master developer who'd actually dig into the depths of these abstractions, made perfect sense!

>>twoodf+fg
As A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books (it's been a while since I've read it- my copy is currently on tour), I'd like to chime in and say I remember this reference, but I believe it's in A Deepness In the Sky, which goes more into Pham's backstory. It's definitely one of these two books though.

>>skywal+(OP)
I really love that series. It's been a little bit since I last re-read them but there are certain concepts/ideas in them that I still think of from time to time.

>>larper+5d
Yes, that bit is in "Deepness".

>>r2_pil+kl
> Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

- Chapter 17, A Deepness in the Sky

>>r2_pil+kl
At a conference I met Vernor Vinge and told him my entire career was basically because I read his books in high school. He was very happy.

>>joshst+DO
I think the first half of the first book is the best. Much less interested in Tine's world