Software archeology

One of the many things I dislike about the SaaS era is that this will never happen. Nobody in 2075 will boot up an old version of Notion or Figma for research or nostalgia.

Like the culture produced and consumed on social media and many other manifestations of Internet culture it is perfectly ephemeral and disposable. No history, no future.

SaaS is not just closed but often effectively tied to a literal single installation. It could be archived and booted up elsewhere but this would be a much larger undertaking, especially years later without the original team, than booting 1972 Unix on a modern PC in an emulator. That had manuals and was designed to be installed and run in more than one deployment. SaaS is a plate of slop that can only be deployed by its authors, not necessarily by design but because there are no evolutionary pressures pushing it to be anything else. It's also often tangled up with other SaaS that it uses internally. You'd have to archive and restore the entire state of the cloud, as if it's one global computer running proprietary software being edited in place.

It's not as glamorous as it sounds.