I'd love to have a more intersting answer, but it's essentially the foundation of most modern computing. Pretty much everything else I can think of, as important and useful as they may be, are things that could reasonably be rebuilt.
Linux was not inevitable and it's probable that such monumentally huge and complicated project would never be reproduced. It came out of a culture that was rooted very much in its time, and the momentum it gained was incredible. I think it will stand as a unique and wonderful anomaly in human history.
afterthought: Actually, I'm gonna go with Ben and say GNU/Linux. As pretentious as the copypasta rant Stallman went was, Linux as we know it wouldn't be what it is without the GNU project.
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
I was trying to cheat, assuming that a backup still existed, but I guess the question rules that out implicitly, in which case I choose a hard copy of Wikipedia...
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Top comments (21)
Prrrrroooobably GNU/Linux, but I'd love to hear some more outside-the-box replies.
Linux, 100%
I'd love to have a more intersting answer, but it's essentially the foundation of most modern computing. Pretty much everything else I can think of, as important and useful as they may be, are things that could reasonably be rebuilt.
Linux was not inevitable and it's probable that such monumentally huge and complicated project would never be reproduced. It came out of a culture that was rooted very much in its time, and the momentum it gained was incredible. I think it will stand as a unique and wonderful anomaly in human history.
afterthought: Actually, I'm gonna go with Ben and say GNU/Linux. As pretentious as the copypasta rant Stallman went was, Linux as we know it wouldn't be what it is without the GNU project.
Those are separate projects. I'd go for the Linux kernel 100%; all the GNU stuff is easier to rebuild on top of it.
Whatever is required to read the GitHub arctic backup..
What's the point of being able to read a backup that's no longer there? 🤔
I was trying to cheat, assuming that a backup still existed, but I guess the question rules that out implicitly, in which case I choose a hard copy of Wikipedia...
FizzBuzz.
Linux. The rest can build on top of it always.
V8 Would also be in my list, right after Linux
TempleOS, I want to watch the world burn.
Rails :p
It's really problemtatic to choose one. But GCC probably.This way I would still be able to build free software on top of closed source OS.
Neo4j. It can be used to make massive knowledge bases of linked data
Linux 🖤
Emacs