Yesterday, Jamie was transplanting plants she sprouted indoors and planting a few new seeds as well. Some of the seeds came from a bag that was a gift from a friend and neighbor, seeds from the plants that have grown in this neighbor's garden.
Seeds like, the kind that a plant produces that can be used to grow the same plant again are referred to around here as "heirloom seeds". It struck me as weird that there was a special name for the normal reproductive cycle of a plant so out of curiosity I started looking into the history of this term.
As it turns out, it's quite controversial. Not only is the proper use of the term "heirloom" in reference to seeds a matter for debate, people have been fined and jailed over their use and distribution. Seed libraries have been shut-down and their seeds destroyed due to the threat such seeds pose to industry and the state.
This was a lot more dramatic than what I was expecting.
I won't try to enumerate all the explanations for this fear of plants reproducing and the humans with the audacity to help them (Wikipedia is a good starting point for that), but what I will dive into is how these ideas might apply to computing.
When I leaned about heirloom seeds I immediately drew parallels to the technology we depend on. Like food, many of us depend on some form of computer every day for our current mode of survival. Like a lot of food, we have little control over the computers we depend on. That control is delegated to a small group of private companies who mediate this access through the system of capitalism.
Computers are not able to reproduce in the same way as plants, but there's are ways of making computers, and especially software that could produce machines that can be rejuvenated generation over generation. In the hardware realm, computers can (and have) been designed to use components that can be reconfigured to meet the need of unexpected future generations. On the software side the type of reproduction we see in the natural world is even more possible as the copying and mutation of software distributed in source-code form consumes virtually no resources and unlimited potential forms.
Some might say that Free and Open Source Software achieves this goal, but I don't think you have to look too far into what FOSS has become to see that this is no longer true (if it eve was to begin with).
All this makes me wonder what "heirloom computing" would look like?
Certainly it means creating computers unencumbered by artificial legal constraints like licensing, copyright, etc. Modularity, in the form of making computers out of interchangeable, long-lasting parts is another component.
Something that I think is often ignored when discussing these things are the people who will be working with these computers, and in the heirloom model, the people who will be shepherding-in each generation. When I look to the heirloom seed for inspiration I see that this requires heirloom technology to be much simpler than what we have today. It must be as reproducible as planting and nurturing a seed. This isn't an oversimplification, anyone who's grown a garden from heirloom seeds knows that it can be tricky work, but this work can be written-down and even discovered through trial-and-error.
Additionally, like the seeds we received from our neighbor an heirloom technology is likely to have a regional dimension. This negates the need for modern global high-speed communication to share the knowledge needed to perpetuate each generation, and it reduces the energy expended to move the physical components of the technology from place to place. I also believe that a technology cultivated regionally will naturally evolve to suit the people and conditions of that region, diverging significantly from it's copies of itself in other regions over time. Beyond the advantages of being tailored for a time and place, such evolution allow the generational perpetuation to become easier over time, like the seed which is the descendant from generations of plants which faired well in local growing conditions.
To sum it up, and heirloom technology needs to be:
* Unencumbered by artificial constraints
* Simple enough for amateur cultivation
* Composed of durable, interchangeable parts (ideally heirloom themselves)
* Cultivated locally over generations
I don't know if that's everything, or exactly right, but it's a start. Off the top of my head I don't have an exact example of such technology, but I think many of the building blocks have been discussed elsewhere on this blog. Going forward, I'll keep these in mind as I design and build new things, and see if I can discover more of the answers.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026