From Steve Jobs in 1988:
"This is field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years—this is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries."
"This is a field where one does one's work and in ten years it'll be obsolete and really will not be usable within ten or twenty years."
"You can't got back and use an Apple I 'cuz there's no software for it. In another ten years or so you won't be able to use an Apple II. You won't even be able to fire it up and see what it was like."
"It's sort of like sediments of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher - but no-one on the surface (unless they have X-ray vision) will see your sediment. They'll stand on it - appreciated by that rare geologist - but nah, it's not like the renaissance at all."
We're constructing the platform and tools for evergreen content but what does evergreen computing look like, if it even exists? Many of the claims Steve Jobs makes here are in fact incorrect. Apple I and Apple II software will almost be guaranteed to outlast many of the other later layers of computing as they're simple enough to be remade in the future yet complicated enough to solve given tasks.
How can we make the world of computing evergreen?