fossils

Looking at ads on Craigslist, Monster, Dice, etc... I can't help but think that the time has finally come to sweep Unix and Unix-like operating systems and their assorted toolchains under the rug. Maybe what I am seeing is an economy that no longer values the incredible potential that both Unix and its derivatives as well as its associated friends (coming to mind approximately now is perl, BIND, DNS, packet filtering, ip6, gig, 10gig, and 100gig ether, and so on. There are lots.). People hiring right now a mush of support staff and second-level helpdesk; I've seen ads for ts/sci fucking sharepoint admins (that's abominable in so many ways).

So, maybe it's dead. Maybe it's quitting while it's on top. Maybe that's a good thing. I keep thinking of model planes, ham radio types, assorted hacker types (you think steampunk is getting bigger? what happens in 2048 when all this affluence and explosive growth is fifty years old!), and getting together to sit down, hack, share software (if the term even remains useful), and hax on a Unix. Maybe instead of nostalgia for what went out of style (as with bell-bottom pants, we can hope they come back in thirty years, to!) only to engage is haxing on this sort of stuff as a hobby. Be nostalgic, as it were, for the early-century-2000's.

That seems reasonable to me. Go pick up new skills in the process, and you have no idea where technology will take us, but it is not into the future, a-la Slim Pickens ride on the atom bomb. No, our ride will be into the past. Our wings today are very much the product of where we are going rather than where we are.

But it still makes me sad.