In 1979 I was 19 years old and had just started studying CS in community college. Through a lucky break I got a job at a consulting company and my first assignment was to write a 6502 macro assembler from scratch, in 6502 assembly language. At that point I had written less than 100 lines of 6502 code on my Apple ][, but I was fairly good with 8080 and IBM-370 assembly.
My mentor / manager outlined the basic model for the assembler and I wrote the entire thing myself, quickly getting it to the point where it could self-assemble, and adding features from there. I was making about $7 / hour when I started. However, I wrote a FORTRAN simulation of the hashing algorithm that I was asked to use, shared it with my manager, and got a raise to $8-something an hour.
I had macros, a very fancy listing format that showed all of the hex codes generated by the macros in neat rows, and a lot more. The entire thing fit on two tracks of the 8" floppy disks that we were using -- definitely less than 8000 bytes.
I understand the risks of inactive accounts, but as I have pointed out here before these binary policies do not address the all-too-common situation where someone is forgetful and/or incapacitated prior to their death. These people have more important things to think about than their email and their photos,and the transition from alive to dead (to be blunt) can easily take more than two years. By the time that the estate and the executor has control of the account it can easily be too late to save precious memories.
Are you referring to the universe or to S3? Corey and I were chatting a few weeks ago during his most recent visit to Seattle and I shared my thoughts with him while we were cooking and eating homemade pizza.
> Paul Allen, who would later become a co-founder of Microsoft, was a couple of years above Gates at school. Together they fixed the school scheduling software to ensure Gates was the only boy in classes of girls.
> Under many cosmological theories, the integers under 2^63 are adequate to cover the entire expected lifetime of the universe; in this case no extensions will be necessary.
At the first day on my first professional programming job in 1980 or so, my new manager told me that I would be writing a brand-new 6502 macro assembler, in 6502 assembly language, to replace the slow & limited one supplied by the vendor (Ohio Scientific).
Under his guidance I wrote the assembler, and even earned a raise after simulating the hashing function in FORTRAN and finding it lacking.
I still have very fond memories of that job and of the 6502, and would be interested in purchasing a replica as soon as you go into production!
Talk about testing in production. You have to die first to see if this triggers, and if not -- your automation becomes the ultimate in legacy code.
Seriously, this is a very interesting idea. However, after losing both of my parents in the last 4 years, there's a sad but legitimate intermediate state between alive & well, and deceased. People lose their ability to function and make decisions on their own, might not be able to renew your service.
Amazon S3 on Outposts (more info at https://aws.amazon.com/s3/outposts/ ) runs on-premises, offers durable storage, high throughput, the S3 API, currently scales to 380 TB, and doesn't require you to watch for and deal with failing disks.
I believe that it addresses many of the OP's reasons for deciding against S3.
Oh yeah, we were in the same row!