Ages ago I was writing realtime process control software on a Tektronix 8540/8560 PDP-11 development system. At the time I was pretty high on FORTH, which was a language originally developed to control astronomical radio telescopes. FORTH had almost no overhead and functioned more like a meta-language than a language, i.e. you used it to shape and define your own language environment. It was a language equivalent in concept to UNIX.
FORTH gave me amazing control of the guts and gizmos in the PDP-11 hardware. I realized at one point that, after I was through commandeering the system, I could have my software keep part of it indefinitely. I could then write self-replicating software that would "live" in the system resources I kept. This was before I'd even heard of viruses, and I became obsessed with synthetic life. FORTH was the ideal language for this and so I played. It was a lot quieter than my prior efforts at generating music using Markov equations and fractals, so my then-wife considered it a move in the right direction.
Recently I asked myself a fundamental question-- "what is the most successful software concept in history?" I think it would be safe to say that the most successful (in a Darwinian sense) software concept is the software virus, which first caught my interest so many years ago. These simple little critters can be written and deployed almost anywhere. They manage to survive numerous attacks to eradicate them when traditional technologies take great effort to keep operational. They reproduce and move. They are a royal pain in the nether regions.
So, it seems that future software might eventually become more virus-like. Since the cloud is closer to viral than is a traditional deployment, I'm thinking that a viral concept may well be the next stage in software infrastructure evolution.
There is currently a bit of a debate on whether cloud architectures will endure. Since they are the most virus-like, I think they stand a very good chance.
©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved
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