[HN Gopher] Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
___________________________________________________________________
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
Author : manuhortet
Score : 193 points
Date : 2023-08-22 12:05 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (manu.zone)
(TXT) w3m dump (manu.zone)
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Back when syntax was a challenge for me and documentation more
| scarce generally, and, perhaps even more than I'd like to admit
| to this day, I find myself mentally thinking of programming as
| 'begging a computer to do things.'
| nlawalker wrote:
| Thanks for that, I'm going to use it anytime someone asks me
| what prompt engineering is!
| [deleted]
| criley2 wrote:
| Then it goes from begging a computer to do something to cursing
| the designers of the latest popular framework for doing The
| Thing in a Slightly Better But Radically Different Way. Oh
| great, we get to learn how to do this basic Thing for the
| eighth time, hopefully this time is sticks (it won't).
| severak_cz wrote:
| as @daisyowl tweeted: a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked
| into thinking
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| I think you mean accurate, not precise.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > How much of this is impostor syndrome and how much reality? How
| different are other fields really? I also feel any new
| programming task as something foreign, for which I am not ready,
| basically undoable from my position. But at the same time
| consider myself able to get into anything and everything, and of
| fixing and building whatever that can be done. I cannot figure
| out any straight explanation for such senseless duality, nor feel
| I adopt the same position for anything else in life.
|
| I believe this is a side-effect of the "creative" aspect of
| computer programming. Creative jobs tend to have impostor
| syndrome, because there is no piece of paper that you receive
| that says "this person is 100% certified to be a song writer" or
| whatever that creative job is. Since software engineering also
| has no paper certificate, apprenticeship, mastership, etc, there
| is no proof that you know what you are doing, and it's all a
| little too loosey-goosey "figure it out for that one job".
| There's no certainty that you're doing it right.
|
| A Computer Science degree is about as much evidence of you
| knowing what you're doing as a warranty on a hammer and chisel is
| evidence that you know how to cut wood joints. Software
| engineering is a trade, completely distinct from Computer
| Science. That's why so many people in the industry don't need a
| degree. You learn the trade on the job.
|
| It's just bizarre that we don't have apprenticeships or trade
| organizations to ratify someone as a Real Programmer(TM). I can
| hire someone with 3 years experience working as a programmer and
| they'll turn out to be almost incompetent. That shouldn't be
| possible, especially for a job that pays $140,000. But I guess it
| happens with construction contractors too, so maybe it's not
| surprising?
| developer93 wrote:
| I assume tech moves on so fast that you have to rewrite the
| course every year. But you do have some certifications which go
| some of the way, for example the sun certifications for Java..
| At least you know the holder will have an idea how it fits
| together under the hood...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Tech moves but often in circles and not in a cumulative way.
| What I mean is that if you know the basic enduring time-
| tested principles of algorithms, data structures, tradeoffs,
| principles like caching, compilers, a bedrock stable
| programming language or two, you know the concepts of Unix as
| of 20 years ago, then you are well equipped to be dropped
| into 2023 or 2026 and get yourself into the context over a
| few weeks and learn the specifics on the job.
|
| It's not like the framework churn is so important to
| remember. You can skip a lot of what happened between 10 and
| 5 years ago. So two things matter: the long term basics and
| the very recent specific permutations of it.
| robaato wrote:
| Amen!
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I did a two year technical program, it was called "Information
| Systems and Data Processing"; this was maybe two or three years
| before this book was published ('94-'96 maybe?). It wasn't an
| apprentice program but all of the people teaching the
| programming classes had worked with the language
| professionally. It made a big impression on me at the time, I
| think it prepared me (somewhat) for the big empty spaces that
| you don't really notice until you start working on a project.
|
| It's clearly no replacement for a computer science degree, but
| I think there's a real benefit to spending time with people who
| have done the work professionally.
| msla wrote:
| It isn't just the lack of a piece of paper, it's the fact every
| project is new to some extent (to exactly the extent we can't
| just reuse existing code) and present somewhat new challenges.
| Also, some difficulties scale very nonlinearly, with single
| changes turning the challenge from needing a few extra weeks to
| solve to being effectively insoluble in any reasonable
| timeframe, if ever. ("Check this program to see if our code
| standards are being followed" to "Check to see if this program
| will halt" can sound equivalent to a manager, but woe betide
| the person who tries on the second one.)
| wizofaus wrote:
| Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so
| difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it
| halts? Obviously it's not hard to imagine theoretical
| examples of a program so large nobody could figure it out
| within a human lifetime, but I'm not entirely convinced for
| real programs written by humans that checking for haltability
| is likely to be harder than checking for following coding
| standards (unless your coding standards consist purely of
| such narrowly and explicitly defined rules that it's 100%
| automatable). Just because a single algorithm that works for
| all possible programs can't exist doesn't mean that it's
| necessarily difficult for any (or even most) actual programs
| humans might write.
| consilient wrote:
| > Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so
| difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it
| halts?
|
| Any interpreter for a Turing-complete language is an
| example.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I guess I wasn't assuming you needed to determine if it
| would halt for any possible (but finite) input. But fair
| enough.
| robaato wrote:
| That may depend a little on the CS degree you do/have done!
| Showing my age, but a CS degree at Edinburgh University in the
| 1980's set me up for a good career... No idea what is currently
| taught. That said, recently terminated a contract early as the
| person was taking days to do simple tasks, whereas another
| person was showing gumption and being productive in less
| timeframe, and seemingly with less of a programming background.
| robaato wrote:
| Oh and I learnt a lot from initial working for a software
| house as my first job (Logica as it happens). But I did have
| a base to build on. Some of the lecturers in CS dept in my
| era had degrees in psychology or classics...
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| You definitely can find crappy construction contractors out
| there. People simply have a greater difficulty to judge their
| quality of work because who knows about construction as long as
| the house is not falling?
| louthy wrote:
| I think the creative and craft element is some of this (maybe
| most), but it's also often the case that software engineers are
| producing code for business domains that they are also not
| experts in. Most code is for business, and most programmers are
| not trained or experts in those business domains.
| dimatura wrote:
| I encountered Close to the Machine by chance in my university's
| library, many years ago. I flipped through the first few pages
| and was quickly hooked. Definitely a great read.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
| https://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discon...
| jbl wrote:
| FWIW - I found "The Bug", by Ellen Ullman, to be a really
| engrossing piece of fiction to read. I wasn't aware she'd
| authored other works. I'll have to check them out!
| chrsw wrote:
| Came here to say this. "The Bug" is one of my favorite novels
| ever. But I'm a biased computer programmer.
| manuhortet wrote:
| I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a
| software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the
| machine: Technophilia and its discontents".
|
| The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely
| relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job
| defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in
| the duality of the very formal computer systems and the
| subjective, messy working contexts, filled with deadlines,
| bureaucracy, "rockstars"...
|
| Her takes on the internet are also super relevant today. A
| favorite extract of mine: "When I watch the users try the
| Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents
| the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to
| believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove --
| all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium,
| some electronic library of Alexandria -- if only they could
| figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look
| disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them".
|
| What other similar books would you recommend?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| >The book was written before I was born
|
| Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
| agentultra wrote:
| My friend, it happens to everyone.
|
| I typed in my first BASIC program in '89. I dropped out of
| high school in the late 90's to program uh... high quality
| adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site
| for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school
| and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a
| living to this day.
|
| Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun.
| For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty
| more. Life's a trip.
| mikelevins wrote:
| "My friend, it happens to everyone."
|
| Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program,
| my younger daughter was two years old.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The oldest possible HN might have been a great
| grandparent at that point
| agentultra wrote:
| My daughter is 11 now and just getting into creating her
| first Minecraft mods. Life is wonderful!
| ubermonkey wrote:
| If we're lucky, it does.
|
| When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in
| college.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I typed in my first BASIC program in '89.
|
| I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't
| even remember what the programming language was although I
| suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing.
|
| Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that
| I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the
| front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50
| years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related
| since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the
| upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible,
| accepting that I know the story backwards.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| That was my first thought too - but my second was "there are
| people who were BORN after the internet who are now adult
| members of society and we're still managing software projects
| the exact same braindead broken way we were doing it back
| then".
| plagiarist wrote:
| Isn't it even worse now because we need JIRA tickets that
| all start with, "as a user," before continuing on to
| describe something like obtrusive ad placement that a user
| absolutely does not want?
| stcroixx wrote:
| I think I'm general projects are managed worse than they
| were 25 years ago. As the years go by and Agile gets
| further entrenched there is more time lost to ceremonies
| and rituals and less time spent solving real problems that
| provide value.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| My oldest niece (who is my little sister's daughter)
| graduated college two months ago and wasn't born until
| after 9/11. I think that was the most recent thing to make
| me feel old. I'm class of '99 and currently rewatching
| Buffy the Vampire Slayer, depicting kids who were also
| class of '99, and I now identity with Giles the school
| librarian, and in fact I'm exactly the same age as Anthony
| Head was when he took the role. Charisma Carpenter and
| Nicholas Brendon have now both been over 50 for years and
| Alyson Hannigan will be 50 in 7 months.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| That quote also stood out to me, but probably in a different
| way. It's missing a crucial piece of information: What is the
| correct way to use the internet? And computers, for that
| matter?
|
| A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take
| the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting
| and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few
| seconds' thought. I'm stumped.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Use the internet for the tools it provides. Maps, phone book,
| connect to news media etc.
|
| The internet is useful when you need some specific knowledge.
| It is useless when you need nothing and are just browsing.
| Sitting there watching TikTok videos or reading hackernews is
| usually going to turn out to be a waste of time.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You can also build connection online through social media.
| It has its problems, but it can be fulfilling to find an
| online social life.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Her quote reminds me of Eternal September[1], when AOL
| started allowing their users to interact with Usenet. The
| people who were already there were not happy with this influx
| of the unwashed masses coming in and breaking stuff and
| ignoring good manners and the protocols that had been
| established.
|
| In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a
| different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high
| and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving
| abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came
| all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping
| malls, and time-share condos.
|
| A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all
| the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the
| beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| dleeftink wrote:
| Unfortunate as it may be, we would be remiss to accept
| Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years.
| At the same time, I'd be interested to compare and see what
| is currently purported to be the 'golden age' and what it
| ends up being.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| > we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as
| recent, especially in internet years
|
| Why?
|
| > what is currently purported to be the 'golden age'
|
| My guess is that we're on it right now.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| And I fully admit I miss the culture of the times, too. We
| all knew it was destined to be limnal, but it still hurt to
| see it succumb.
| mannykannot wrote:
| _" The users seem to believe that they are connected to some
| vast treasure trove -- all the knowledge of our times, an
| endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of
| Alexandria..."_
|
| Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about
| as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be
| unreasonable to expect that the _benefits_ of this could be
| reaped without effort...)
| developer93 wrote:
| There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of
| trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good
| lodes are and recognise it when you see it.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| I disagree. I have had no moments of profound discovery or
| insight from surfing the internet.
|
| It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge
| and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on
| the internet.
|
| Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in
| the real world.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > Any treasure you find will be found through experiences
| in the real world.
|
| That's romantic, but why would it be true, unless you
| just define treasure as something that you find in real
| life? Specific knowledge and skills are not treasure?
|
| I'm curious if you lived before the days of having so
| much knowledge instantly accessible, practically for
| free.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Wikipedia in itself is a miracle. People forgot how it was
| back then.
| muricula wrote:
| I haven't read Ullman's memoir, but I'll just put down "Soul of
| a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder as a peek into hardware history
| you may find interesting.
| Random_BSD_Geek wrote:
| > What other similar books would you recommend?
|
| "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by
| Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.
| manuhortet wrote:
| This looks exactly like what I wanted - thanks!
| senkora wrote:
| Can you or someone else explain what they liked about
| Microserfs? I read it after hearing a recommendation for it
| somewhere online, but it didn't really connect for me.
|
| I'm young enough that I don't have any personal knowledge of
| the time period to compare it with, so maybe I'm missing a
| nostalgia angle.
|
| I don't doubt that it is a great book, it just didn't grab me
| for whatever reason.
| eep_social wrote:
| I am an "old millennial" and Coupland's work sort of
| resonates but my understanding is that it's written
| primarily for and to gen x.
| pramsey wrote:
| Both genius. Other readable computers books from an earlier
| time, that still resonate.
|
| - Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New
| Everything, Jaron Lanier
| huimang wrote:
| "When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes
| clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down
| of the computer."
|
| I think this is an asinine quote, to be honest. It comes across
| as elitist: "these idiots don't use computers how they should
| be using them, according to -me-".
|
| The internet, the ability to communicate and access data
| instantly across the globe, has been one of humanity's greatest
| achievements to date. But because some people look at junk or
| don't use it efficiently, it's "the ultimate dumbing-down of
| the computer"? Really? People like this complain about "the
| unwashed masses", but fail to recognize that the internet would
| not nearly have been as useful if it were limited to an insular
| group of similar people until now.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This line of criticism has always had elitism woven into it.
| The real internet was the internet of those that build their
| own modems/wrote their own modem code/added specific NNTP
| headers to their news messages/had their own static IPv4 IP/
| _understood what I understand_. Mix that with nostalgia over
| a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most
| common piece of advice and you get this line of critique.
|
| It's an alluring tale and appeals to the technologist in all
| of us old enough to feel nostalgic about a lost time,
| especially as the internet and then the web has become used
| by a broader swath of the population. I have a successful
| uncle who tells us stories about how calculators and CAD
| dumbed down engineering and only his ilk of paper
| calculations and slide rule approximation can _truly_
| engineer.
| wizofaus wrote:
| > nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it"
| was the most common piece of advice
|
| I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single
| most common go-to when something stops working
| mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice"
| because everyone already knows that by now?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I think restarts of home computers are rarely needed even
| in Windows. On the server we have gone down the cattle
| not pets route so that restarting is abstracted away.
| (When was the bare metal restarted on that CDN/VM/ etc.)
| wizofaus wrote:
| Had to do it just yesterday when Bluetooth just stopped
| working, and yes I tried everything else I could think of
| first. And I do software restarts (iisreset etc) all the
| time. Mind you I also tried restarting my phone(s) a
| couple of times recently when it started exhibiting
| strange behaviour. In neither case did it work - one
| phone I gave up on entirely (no internet when on cellular
| data, but it had other issues and had been planning to
| retire it). The other I had to dig around to find some
| obscure option ("reading mode") that had been activated
| somehow.
| manuhortet wrote:
| I don't think she criticizes users here, but content. I see
| how your way of understanding it is valid without more
| context.
| criddell wrote:
| I bet you'd like Ullman's book _Life in Code_.
|
| A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a
| talk given by Whitfield Diffie:
|
| > We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals!
| That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's
| unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal
| computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon
| rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with
| very little software residing on our personal machines, the
| code being on network servers, which are under the control of
| administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin
| browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our
| machines having become dumb terminals again.
| xo5vik wrote:
| >What other similar books would you recommend?
|
| Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift
| ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)
| darkwater wrote:
| Side note for the author: your LinkedIn link is broken (it looks
| like it was parsed as a relative link to your blog, rather than
| an absolute one)
| manuhortet wrote:
| You are right. Thanks for letting me know!
| polynomial wrote:
| Hmm, the 1st/top link in TFA (to the book in question on Good
| Reads) appears to be broken(?)
| Minor49er wrote:
| I read this book years ago. One part that I still think about
| from time to time is how the author was approached for a job that
| entailed maintaining an ancient mainframe. Despite the pay being
| so high, the mainframe and its model were dying. Both her and the
| employer knew this. The author turned the job down just because
| it seemed like it would have been an unfulfilling and depressing
| endeavor, despite the high pay. It reminds me that sometimes, a
| line must be drawn between pay and self-fulfillment
| Tomte wrote:
| From 'Life in Code':
|
| "We build our computers the way we build our cities--over time,
| without a plan, on top of ruins."
| sanderjd wrote:
| I feel like there is a duality here with:
|
| "A complex system that works is invariably found to have
| evolved from a simple system that worked."
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| This captures such truth to me.
|
| And it also defined the moral imperative for software to be
| malleable, for it to be _soft_ and reshapeable. Needs change,
| and it 's not just a brand new thing we slap on top, but
| something later to & extending the past. Whether we can do
| that, whether users have software that can be adapted to their
| contemporary needs, is a core liberty.
| https://malleable.systems
| sergius wrote:
| Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must
| build as if the sand were stone.
|
| Jorge Luis Borges
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Maybe that's the only possible way. More than a few systems
| have failed from over-planning and under-iterating.
|
| And they do say cities are the greatest invention of humankind
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Most successful systems are 1st & foremost practical. They do
| a job, and do that well enough to be carried forward.
|
| Imho the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" (KISS) principle very much
| applies here.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's even how we as biological systems work, there's plenty
| of evidence of old stuff and iterations still within every
| body and within every cell. This even was an explicit
| programming paradigm in the 60s and 70s, "extensible
| programming", for example driven by a lot of the designers of
| languages such as Smalltalk, aiming to enable systems that
| can grow not unlike living systems.
| dleeftink wrote:
| I'd say ruins are a precursor for cities to become beautiful
| --computation concerns similar strolling along age old paths
| and alleyways.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| The personal computers start as toys and tools of the hackers.
| I couldn't find any other way to create it. It was definitely
| without much grand planning.
| mrits wrote:
| At the time of the writing there was actually a lot of planning
| going on before you started writing code.
| sebstefan wrote:
| I think I'm one onanistic "article about engineers (from an
| engineer)" away from completely losing it
| debo_ wrote:
| When I feel this way, I think about how many films about
| filmmakers and books about writers I've experienced.
|
| It doesn't really help, but I do think about it :)
| forkerenok wrote:
| I haven't read the book, but the quotes do really read as
| timeless.
|
| I was in my early teens during dot-com era, but without a PC yet
| and still an "internet virgin".
|
| One question that really tickles my curiosity is how much the
| spoils of the dot-com era shaped the direction of the free
| software in the next decade?
|
| When looking at (the aged) projects under Apache umbrella, it
| seems a lot of them kicked off around that time. Is that because
| of the dot-com money or because Java graduated to a different
| stage around that time?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I don't know but I assume GNU/Linux and the need to complete
| the OS user space would have driven a wave if such free
| software.
| dusted wrote:
| This looks like a review or comment on something, that Ellen
| wrote, but I've no idea what, it does not link to anything ?
| neogodless wrote:
| You and the person responding to you are both right. If you
| don't know Ellen Ullman or _Close to the Machine: Technophilia
| and its discontents_ , it's kind of sideways.
|
| He does mention Ellen and says
|
| > The book is a memoir about her life
|
| but never explicitly connects the title of the article to the
| title of the book or explains this is a review of that specific
| book (though that section is titled "Review.")
|
| So I understand your confusion. I put "Ellen Ullman" in google
| and that quickly got me to Goodreads.com and seeing a list of
| her books, including this title. A little mystery left for us
| to solve. But the author could've also chosen to do a better
| job of explaining what they were doing here!
| manuhortet wrote:
| Right. I cross-posted without thinking about this, thanks for
| pointing it out. As you have figured out already the linked
| post is a short collection of notes on Ellen's book:
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/486625
| tekla wrote:
| The title of the book is the title of the article.
|
| If you read the article, the author clearly states this is a
| review of the book.
| dusted wrote:
| I read the article, and I see nowhere that the author states
| that the title of their review is the title of the book.
| However, whatever was being reviewed seemed interesting
| enough to ask here. So, except for your arrogant way of
| telling me so, I am thankful that I now know, so that I can
| look up the book.
| layer8 wrote:
| The title of the blog post (which is different from the title
| of the HN submission) is the book title (I found out after
| googling the reviewed author).
| jfarmer wrote:
| This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for
| Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/
|
| "The dumbing-down of programming"
|
| > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine
| that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had
| revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of
| skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of
| the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC;
| and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth
| memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-
| knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the
| antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward
| Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. _And down
| under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build
| our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a
| plan, on top of ruins._
|
| I repeat the last sentence to my students all the time ("We build
| our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a
| plan, on top of ruins.")
|
| There's no way to understand why our computers work the way they
| do without understanding the human, social, and economic factors
| involved in their production. And foregrounding the human element
| often makes it easier to explain what's going on and why.
| shrubble wrote:
| Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...
| Sakos wrote:
| A history lesson for some of us (including me, tbh, because I
| was only vaguely aware of any of this and wasn't born yet at
| the time):
|
| > The emergence of microcomputers in the mid-1970s led to the
| development of multiple BASIC dialects, including Microsoft
| BASIC in 1975. Due to the tiny main memory available on these
| machines, often 4 KB, a variety of Tiny BASIC dialects were
| also created. BASIC was available for almost any system of
| the era, and became the de facto programming language for
| home computer systems that emerged in the late 1970s. These
| PCs almost always had a BASIC interpreter installed by
| default, often in the machine's firmware or sometimes on a
| ROM cartridge.
|
| > BASIC was one of the few languages that was both high-level
| enough to be usable by those without training and small
| enough to fit into the microcomputers of the day, making it
| the de facto standard programming language on early
| microcomputers.
|
| > The first microcomputer version of BASIC was co-written by
| Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff for their newly
| formed company, Micro-Soft.[21] This was released by MITS in
| punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the
| machine itself,[22] immediately cementing BASIC as the
| primary language of early microcomputers. Members of the
| Homebrew Computer Club began circulating copies of the
| program, causing Gates to write his Open Letter to Hobbyists,
| complaining about this early example of software piracy.
|
| > Partially in response to Gates's letter, and partially to
| make an even smaller BASIC that would run usefully on 4 KB
| machines,[e] Bob Albrecht urged Dennis Allison to write their
| own variation of the language. How to design and implement a
| stripped-down version of an interpreter for the BASIC
| language was covered in articles by Allison in the first
| three quarterly issues of the People's Computer Company
| newsletter published in 1975 and implementations with source
| code published in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC
| Calisthenics & Orthodontia: Running Light Without Overbyte.
| This led to a wide variety of Tiny BASICs with added features
| or other improvements, with versions from Tom Pittman and Li-
| Chen Wang becoming particularly well known.[23]
|
| > Micro-Soft, by this time Microsoft, ported their
| interpreter for the MOS 6502, which quickly become one of the
| most popular microprocessors of the 8-bit era. When new
| microcomputers began to appear, notably the "1977 trinity" of
| the TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II, they either included
| a version of the MS code, or quickly introduced new models
| with it. Ohio Scientific's personal computers also joined ...
|
| > When IBM was designing the IBM PC, they followed the
| paradigm of existing home computers in having a built-in
| BASIC interpreter. They sourced this from Microsoft - IBM
| Cassette BASIC - but Microsoft also produced several other
| versions of BASIC for MS-DOS/PC DOS including IBM Disk BASIC
| (BASIC D), IBM BASICA (BASIC A), GW-BASIC (a BASICA-
| compatible version that did not need IBM's ROM)[28] and
| QBasic, all typically bundled with the machine. In addition
| they produced the Microsoft BASIC Compiler aimed at
| professional programmers. Turbo Pascal-publisher Borland
| published Turbo Basic 1.0 in 1985 (successor versions are
| still being marketed under the name PowerBASIC).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
|
| In some sense of the word, it is. Maybe not take everything
| completely literally, it'll make your life easier.
| bebop wrote:
| That may have been a reference to that fact that many
| computers of the early 80's had a basic rom that would be
| booted into if no operating system was found.
| lallysingh wrote:
| You could find some vestigial BASIC in the DOS batch
| language.
| zabzonk wrote:
| for example?
| richarme wrote:
| REM for comments
| drivers99 wrote:
| "goto" also
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| We all know. It doesn't change the discussion of the topic in
| the slightest.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Some early PCs would boot to a basic environment if it
| couldn't boot to any other OS. Not sure if that extended to
| machines that could run Win3.1, but IBM 8088 PC-XTs (and
| similar, but that's what I had) definitely did that, though
| normally one would boot them to DOS.
| [deleted]
| cassianoleal wrote:
| MSX would boot to BASIC by default. It was possible to run
| MSX-DOS instead but not entirely necessary.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Not in a technical sense, but in a historical/cultural sense,
| sure. At the time PC/MS-DOS was propagating out in the
| public, many of us were also working with machines where the
| "OS" was a BASIC prompt. And the model and syntax of command
| interaction wasn't so dissimilar.
|
| But yeah, it's a bit of a hand waving generalization.
| retrac wrote:
| Some of the code in the libre software I use every day is 30+
| years old. And if you're on a BSD you have code in your kernel
| copyright 1979.
|
| The modern software environment works, I think, just from the
| sheer quantity of useful building and patch materials. To run
| with the building metaphor, it's like having specialized
| supplies on-hand so you can throw up a passable shed in a
| weekend with just duct tape and a screwdriver.
| agentultra wrote:
| I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would
| the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to
| reconstruct this technology? Is there any object permanence in
| our creations?
|
| I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the
| streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're
| mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be
| intrigued by these little, grey squares with faded little
| pictures on them. What are they? What were they used for?
|
| Perhaps they know something about electronics. They have opened
| a few of these mysterious squares. There is that tell-tale
| green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use
| it? What does it do?
|
| The people of medieval Britain could see the ruins of Roman
| architecture dotting their landscape. They hadn't seen those
| people in a long while and had no means to repair the aqueducts
| or high ways. Yet they built on them and around them none the
| less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall.
|
| But computers? And the hardware we use to build these artifacts
| of the mind? Vastly more complicated and difficult to reproduce
| from first principles.
| glitchc wrote:
| The answer to this lies in our history. Given that we know so
| little about past civilizations, especially older than 6000
| years ago, and new discoveries sometimes startlingly reveal
| how advanced they were, the answer would be no.
| twic wrote:
| > Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A
| building is a building and a wall is a wall.
|
| A copper dodecahedron with knobs on the corners is, er ...
| rml wrote:
| Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the science fiction
| book 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller (perhaps
| you already have :-})
|
| It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear
| apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store
| artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without
| understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds
| from there.
| pilchard123 wrote:
| It also made me think of 'By the Waters of Babylon' by
| Stephen Vincent Benet. Wikipedia tells me it was also
| (indeed, originally) published as 'The Place of the Gods'.
| agentultra wrote:
| Oh heck yes. Also a big influence on the video game, Caves
| of Qud [0] which I also particularly enjoy.
|
| [0]
| https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Barathrum
| benji-york wrote:
| Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the 1632
| series[0], which is sort of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' in
| reverse.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > I've always been curious if our society were to collapse
| would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society
| how to reconstruct this technology?
|
| Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have
| a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and
| drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved
| the bulk of our science and technology to storage that
| requires that level of science and technology to access. And
| encrypted most of it. They'll be trying to climb the
| technology ladder without coal, oil or natural gas and
| without any technology documentation from about 2000 onwards.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I would really like to read a novel about future
| archeologists who rediscover brute force password lists and
| rainbow tables as they investigate a ruin. Oh, maybe they
| could be specifically looking for LLM models, LLMs being no
| longer possible to train due to energy costs.
| arethuza wrote:
| Only to discover (too late of course) that it was the
| LLMs that caused the collapse....
|
| (See: AFUtD).
| [deleted]
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| 23 years or so of lost knowledge can be regained in the
| grand scheme of things. But yes, the lack of easy access to
| coal and oil would be a problem. Maybe the next
| civilization will be more careful.
|
| That's why I think we should all be trying to help keep
| society going. I try to do my bit. I just wish the
| preppers, survivalists, deniers would get involved in their
| community and try to save it too.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I guess I'm kind of thinking of it from the point of view
| that of all the technologies that we are inventing to
| allow civilization to survive without coal and oil are
| the most likely to be lost.
| eternityforest wrote:
| And yet there seems to be shockingly little effort towards
| making sure that doesn't happen. Why isn't there an
| underground bombproof chip fab somewhere?
|
| It's like as if people don't really care about
| technological society, they just do what they always do,
| expand and try to do stuff that is hard and impressive, and
| if the computers went away... they'd be just as happy as a
| blacksmith or something...
|
| Or maybe even happier.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily
| available hydrocarbons
|
| And basically every accessible ore deposits as well... You
| can't reach bronze age if there's no available copper nor
| tin, you just end up stuck in the stone age forever.
| politician wrote:
| This is why I think that we should resolve the climate
| change crisis by reducing excess atmospheric carbon by
| seeding the oceans with iron. Oceanic iron seeding results
| in plankton blooms that consume atmospheric carbon. When
| the plankton dies, it accumulates on the seafloor. Over
| geologic time scales, the accumulated plankton will turn
| into hydrocarbons, renewing the supply of cheap fuels for a
| post-human civilization millions of years in the future.
| rurp wrote:
| If modern society collapses, starting back over with the
| same approach isn't the best plan. Cheap hydrocarbons are
| sort of like VC funding. They have allowed society to
| advance extremely rapidly, in a totally unsustainable
| way. We have yet to find out if we can stick the landing
| on transitioning to a sustainable lifestyle. It's
| possible that humans just aren't wired in a way to
| responsibly manage the risks introduced by sufficiently
| advanced technology, at least not at the current rate of
| change.
|
| In a post-apocalyptic world, survivors should _really_ be
| rethinking the approach that brought that about. Avoiding
| the cheap hydrocarbon consumption phase might result in a
| much longer lasting civilazation next time around.
| andrepd wrote:
| We can't even switch to renewables because that would
| make some capital owners slightly less money and you're
| thinking of civilisations millions of years in the
| future...
| throwaway96952 wrote:
| Where I live, it's because the taxpayers would have to
| pay too much and would be exposed to a lot of outside
| risk (it's usually not that sunny here, and we don't have
| space for wind turbines nor where to landfill the
| replaced blades).
|
| Here it's the capital owners pushing renewables because
| it's one of the easiest, cheapest, least objectionable
| (in case of solar) and least risky energy projects you
| can build on almost any useless piece of land (everywhere
| is near the grid in this country), but they just can't
| fulfill the demands of the state-owned energy company
| with their solar arrays and wind turbines. Hydro is out
| of the question, the water-environmentalists hate that -
| for good reasons I have to say.
|
| There is a nearby country that "did" (legislated) the
| switch... In result, they are the most polluting ones in
| every metric (per capita, per kWh, per km^2) _while_
| having the most expensive electricity on the continent;
| all metrics are getting worse every year there. Not a
| good look for the switch, certainly doesn 't make most
| voters in my country motivated to even try - and you'd
| need to convince half the country. Right now the support
| is around 5-10%.
|
| In conclusion, given that both our worlds coexist at the
| same time - I think it's not that simple to switch and
| wouldn't be looking for the reason in either capitalists
| or states. Perhaps the technology is just not ready for a
| full-scale switch yet.
| me_me_me wrote:
| What a coincidence, I had that discussion with my friends
| yesterday.
|
| We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding
| society back up are based on the type of collapse. The
| greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap
| before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get.
|
| A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people
| slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of
| institutions to protect the knowledge, sounds like a game
| over scenario. Small clusters of agrarian people would not
| have resources to support an engineering department tasked
| with preserving knowledge that is useless for time being.
|
| Slowly the tech that could have been re-used or restarted
| would deteriorate beyond usability, and then beyond
| repeatability.
|
| Its a scary scenario, probably good basis for a book
| series... there is probably plenty of novels written with
| that scenario already ;)
| daemonologist wrote:
| A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind, though while the
| preservation of knowledge after collapse is a central
| premise it is not what the novel is about, exactly. Worth
| reading in any case.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| On the other hand, they get some high-concentrated storages
| of refined materials, and we will leave lots of those rune-
| engraved panels that emit an unnatural power when exposed
| to light.
|
| Anyway, unless we are talking about some really
| unprecedentedly disaster, we'll leave plenty of paper books
| to help them understand those things and bootstrap their
| society.
| delusional wrote:
| Unless we inexplicably decide to burn all of our accurate
| books because of some culture war.
| dingnuts wrote:
| [flagged]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Has any book-burning movement in history actually
| succeeded in getting ride of the books?
|
| Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a
| text here or there, but there were always some compatible
| texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful
| knowledge to them.
|
| (And let's not forget that today we made life much harder
| for the book burners.)
|
| What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless
| for a long period of time. As in losing all of CS because
| nobody can make a computer yet. But we have an instinct
| to preserve knowledge, even when it's absolutely useless.
| This has already saved a lot of technology, and it's hard
| to imagine how some disaster would stop it.
|
| Personally, I have a hard time imagining something that
| would throw us at the stone (or bronze, or iron) age, but
| still fail to destroy all the life on Earth.
| norir wrote:
| Most of the early christian texts were suppressed and
| destroyed. In the 1940s some ancient texts that had been
| buried for nearly 2000 years were found in Egypt and not
| realizing their value, a family member used many of them
| for kindling. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi
| texts, the existence of these materials was known from
| references in orthodox texts but they had been completely
| lost. Of course we have no idea of what was contained in
| the texts that were burned and we have no idea what else
| is out there so we don't even know what has been lost.
| Similarly, parmenides is considered by many philosophers
| to be the "father of logic" which he brought forth in a
| long poem. Unfortunately, we only have about 160 of the
| estimated 800 verses in the poem, so again we are lacking
| basic knowledge of the origins of our civilization that
| was written down at one time but has been lost.
|
| Digital information seems especially likely to me to be
| lost over time because the recording nearly always
| requires an instrument to extract and these instruments
| do not have nearly the durability of books.
| wl wrote:
| The near loss of texts in the Nag Hammadi library and the
| fragmentary transmission of Parmenides (or Sappho,
| Thales, Manetho, and countless others, for that matter)
| is not about book burning. That's playing into
| ideologically-motivated narratives about knowledge vs.
| religion and ignores the reality of textual transmission
| prior to movable type printing making the production of
| books relatively inexpensive. We've lost most of the
| texts from the ancient world not because they've been
| suppressed or deliberately destroyed, but because tended
| to be written on organic materials that do not stand the
| test of time. In a few parts of the world like Egypt, the
| hot, dry climate preserves some of these ancient
| manuscripts to varying degrees. But for the most part,
| ancient texts survive because there was interest in those
| texts sufficient for scribes to expend considerable
| effort in making new copies by hand as older copies
| decayed or wore out. In the ancient world, texts died not
| from suppression, but from decay combined with lack of
| interest or neglect.
|
| If you want to talk about early Christian texts, the
| Didache is instructive. It's orthodox and never was
| suppressed. It's earlier than much--if not all--of the
| canonical Greek scriptures. However, the canonical
| scriptures overshadowed it and it became obscure, to the
| point where the only known complete copy today is a
| single 11th century manuscript that was found behind a
| bookshelf in a monastery in the 19th century.
| kragen wrote:
| yes, in most cases
|
| the maya codices and the khipu were lost in very nearly
| their entirety, and the more abundant maya hieroglyphs
| carved on stone have been only partly deciphered. the
| khipu are entirely undeciphered except for arithmetic
|
| of carthaginian literature not one book remains
|
| the khwarazmian empire is known from the accounts of its
| neighbors and destroyers
|
| qin shi huang ordered the burning of the history books
| for every kingdom he conquered; consequently what we know
| of most of them today is little more than legend, except
| for what the histories of qin tell us
|
| in countless smaller-scale examples we don't even know
| the names of the nations that perished along with their
| language and books
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I would say this is a text-book example of the term
| survivorship bias (smiley)
| chris37879 wrote:
| Book-burning specifically, no, but the Nazis destroyed a
| lot of research from a German institute that studied
| gender issues. Knowledge of the place and some of its
| research still exists, but a lot of the research was
| simply gone once the Nazis rose to power. That seems like
| way less of a liability these days with the internet, but
| even that is prone to government meddling, and when the
| people that agree with book burnings run the government,
| well, there's a very famous prescient book on the topic.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| > Has any book-burning movement in history actually
| succeeded in getting ride of the books?
|
| > Because I don't know of any
|
| Of course you haven't, by definition. We find out about
| the things that survive destruction, not the ones that
| don't.
|
| edit:
|
| As for the instinct to preserve knowledge, that's not all
| we have. We also have a profit-maximizing infection that
| spread to every organ, so to speak. Books printed today
| don't last very long. Heck, not even newspapers and tech
| companies give a crap about link rot! Archive.org is a
| team of volunteers. Wikipedia is very hit or miss, and
| the ego of some seems to override whatever "instinct" we
| might have real quick.
|
| So, frankly, I'm not seeing it. Even computing is rotting
| from under our hands. The Amiga came with schematics of
| the machine as part of the manual, while nowadays repair
| shops have to hunt for info. If companies were allowed,
| they'd each have their own incompatible charger cable,
| you bet. And let's not even talk about about 100MB
| applications that do 100KB things, because it's easier
| for the developer to never care about anything close to
| the machine and just use the bloated tool chain they
| already know. Recently I asked for a good (as in, other
| than "Microsoft wants you to") reason to use Win 11, and
| just got downvoted. Ever since Win 11 was announced I
| haven't gotten _one_ answer to that question, ever. There
| 's people who turn their nose up at it, and people who
| use it who don't want to talk about why. I could go on.
|
| > _No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that
| what has been written latest is always the more correct;
| that what is written later on is an improvement on what
| was written previously; and that every change means
| progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and
| people who treat their subject earnestly, are all
| exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the
| world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying
| to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations
| of the thinkers. [..] An old and excellent book is
| frequently shelved for new and bad ones; which, written
| for the sake of money, wear a pretentious air and are
| much eulogised by the authors' friends. In science, a man
| who wishes to distinguish himself brings something new to
| market; this frequently consists in his denouncing some
| principle that has been previously held as correct, so
| that he may establish a wrong one of his own. Sometimes
| his attempt is successful for a short time, when a return
| is made to the old and correct doctrine. These innovators
| are serious about nothing else in the world than their
| own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to
| make its mark._
|
| -- Arthur Schopenhauer
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But
| how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do?_
|
| They'll probably think it's some sort of coming-of-age
| fertility totem, and our datacenters will be structures built
| to pay homage to the gods.
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| And how exactly are they not?
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| That's an interesting question.
|
| I'd be inclined to think The Wonderer has no use for a
| computer. Their life is mostly about survival, food,
| shelter...
|
| But when society is again ready to automate calculations...
| it's only a hundred years before computing is back.
| agentultra wrote:
| Right, I imagine they wouldn't be seeking out the little
| grey squares. Humans are curious however and the Wonderer
| is no different. They might only collect them as they come
| across them and ponder their meaning and reason for
| existence in those rare hours they have a little leisure
| time.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| To be fair, I've thought about this sometimes too. Like, I
| contribute to technology myself, but in a very minimal way.
| And most people don't at all, they consume. But there are a
| golden few in the world who are doing _everything_.
|
| For example how many people in the world actually know how to
| build an EUV machine like ASML's one? How many people
| understand the absolute forefront of integrated circuit
| design? Maybe like, 1-2 dozen people at most?
|
| It's a pretty crazy thought. And I bet none of those guys are
| making as much bank as the suited executives above them.
| agentultra wrote:
| Exactly. A few people have attempted fabricating simple
| 8-bit CPUs in their garage but the yields are low without a
| clean room and it still requires an incredible amount of
| technology to get started. A good amount of how to set up a
| garage fabrication lab is probably available through bits
| of print media, if we're lucky... but recreating a garage
| from scratch by _finding_ all of that information would be
| quite the feat.
| [deleted]
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| >The project begins in the programmer's mind with the beauty of a
| crystal. The knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in
| its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical
| place. [...] Yes, I understand. Yes, it can be done. Yes, how
| straightforward. Oh yes. I see. [...] Then something happens. The
| irregularities of human thinking start to emerge.
|
| It's ok, so-called "software development methodologies" solve
| this problem by making sure that the project begins in the
| programmer's mind in just as chaotic and irregular a state as it
| will eventually end up once the code has been written.
| zer8k wrote:
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html
|
| Nothing will beat the Jargon File.
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