Development quotes of the week

That's not so different from hardware. Given full blueprints, you can reasonably rebuild any machine from 19-th century from scratch, no matter how complicated. Even if you start from raw materials.

It's not feasible anymore. You won't be able to just take Apollo project blueprints and build your own rocket. You'll likely find that there are no modern alloys that perfectly replace the ones used back then, that some substances might be banned entirely (e.g. carbon tet fire extinguishers or PCBs in transformers), or that some tools are no longer produced.

The solution here is to move forward and standardize ever larger components, so it would be easier to keep them working. E.g. HTML for UI description is becoming such a standard.