CP/M is an operating system dating to the mid-1970s that found its niche giving cheap 8-bit home computers the flexibility, if not the power, of expensive workstations. The Brother SuperPowerNote was a fancy and “very weird” portable typewriter from the early 1990s. David Given ported the former to the latter, creating a freakishly versatile laptop. The source code is on github!
Rob Beschizza
And now I’m browsing eBay for electronic/digital typewriters again. There’s so many of them! And they all look so awesome and fun! Please stop me!
One day I’ll finally pull the trigger.
The attraction to old tech is palpable, I suspect in part it is because we can see, hear and feel the cause and effect of interactions with a device. As silly as it sounds, it become hypnotic like the exposed mechanism of a mechanical clock or watch.
Pull apart and modern device and it’s exposed as a soulless pile of junk sitting on your desk, do the same for mechanical or electromechanical devices and it leaves you with a feeling of some craft. For me a great example of old versus new are slide rules versus calculators, something seems lost with the ease of use of the modern calculator, like we easily get a more accurate answer faster, but in doing so we fail to understand the problem.
“in doing so we fail to understand the problem”
Some wise words right there. In fact, this is becoming a significant problem in technology I think. We underestimate how many people are going to have to learn, on their own time, the things that the generation before learned through osmosis.
Then again, only a small fraction of the people have to do that. The ones trying to advance the layers built just above. For everybody else, they can continue to layer on ever more layers of abstraction and innovation at the level they do understand.
I imagine it has always been this way. However, the layers are getting deeper and the pace of layering is increasing. At some point, people that actually understand how the stuff below works are going to be like wizards to the rest of us. Or maybe the wizards are the ones working ever more potent magic at the top and the ones at the bottom are more like monks ( keepers of the ancient knowledge ).
tanishaj,
I love low level details and getting my hands dirty. From understanding the math and underlying mechanics to having control things without being shielded via abstraction. But the world we live in today doesn’t have much appreciation for guys like us. Employers prefer those working with abstractions, even when those abstractions are quite poor and inefficient. On the one hand this makes sense for them, they want to get as much done for as little as possible, which runs counter to detail oriented perfectionism. Abstraction is the solution, and it’s widely practiced in our industry, although sometimes I wonder if we’ve gone too far and become dependent on too much bloat and in compromising quality.
Indeed. I think a lot of us view the level of abstraction as “bloat”. As you say though, trying to strip it away is typically seen as “unproductive”. And maybe that even makes sense most of the time.
Of course, the biggest problems with abstractions is that they leak. The details will assert themselves at some point.
I did a little teaching recently and I was struck by how much “why do we need to know this” I encountered regarding concepts that I thought were not only important but deeply interesting. There was a real, how do I get stuff done bias vs how does this stuff work.
It is painful sometimes as well to see new abstractions being added to perform some action that could be accommodated much more directly at a lower level. Or sometimes, if you look at the whole stack, you can see that previous ideas have not scaled or aged well and that it makes sense to go back to an earlier point and start again. You cannot do those things if the technology is an opaque shell beyond a certain point which it really is for a lot of people these days. I feel like even fairly non-technical home users had a decent understanding of what their computer was really doing in the past. Today, deeply technical people can often have no idea of even the basics of what is really going on under the hood. It really surprises me sometimes to encounter the limits in knowledge from people that are, frankly, much more advanced than I am in other ways.
We have also lost a bit of the ability to “stand on the shoulders of giants”. Sure, we can use the previous tech as a platform to built on top of but often we are now ignorant of the challenges they faced and how they solved them. In something like mechanical engineering, you can see the full history of human advancement in modern kit. In software, there are whole classes of problems that we, as a broader group, have completely forgotten how to solve. Sometimes we are confronting situations today where similar solutions would be useful. This is especially true when considering the efficiency of possible solutions which is a good chunk of what you are talking about I think. Older stuff is fascinating sometimes in the way that software, for example, was written to leverage knowledge of the hardware it was running on to make things possible that otherwise could not be achieved. There is a lot of cleverness but also swaths philosophical and ideological thinking that may have been commonplace at one point that have become uncommon now.
It is hard to know what to do about that though or even if it is a problem that really needs to be solved. As I said above, it may just be that some of us specialize on different parts of the stack than others. After all, an electrician does not have to understand quantum physics or digital design and a physicist perhaps cannot install a Tesla charger in my garage or perhaps even a three-way lightswitch.
To counter everything above though, the availability of knowledge and the ease with which it has been consumed has never been greater. We are in the midst of a considerable renaissance really. One need look no further than the sea of retro YouTube channels and the enormity of emulated environments to see that there is tremendous interest in the knowledge I claim to be getting lost. I said above that people have to learn much more of the tech stack on their own time, however doing that takes much less initial expertise, access to hardware, and time than it used to. In absolute numbers, knowledge of the “low level” is no doubt greater now than ever before.
Yikes. Apologies for the length. I should have proof-read and edited it down.
tanishaj,
We were meeting up with friends and a friend of theirs is a linesman. He went through great lengths to differentiate himself from electricians in the same sense that a software engineer might want to differentiate himself from a database/web developer (even though outsiders don’t really care about that, haha).
Anyway, he obviously had a lot of hands on experience in the trade, but I could tell his understanding of physics was weak and even wrong. I felt my it wasn’t my place to correct him, after all my knowledge is purely academic. But it occurs to me that, just like you are saying, his job only deals with abstractions of things. On a day to day basis, his job is knowing how to use the equipment, not to invent it. I don’t mean it in a condescending way, but I think “abstraction proficiency” is common for a lot of trades.
That said, I would hope most physicists would know how to install a 3 way switch
I understand what you’re saying. Still, feel that low level “hands on experience” is dropping even if the information is out there. There are DIY platforms for people building their own tech (ie SBC). But many devices are becoming less repairable and less accessible than in the past. Corporations are building products that used to be repairable in the past and making sure they cannot easily be repaired any more. I even saw a washing machine repair guy on youtube complaining about this very thing. IMHO this matters, we are creating a society that is less agile in dealing with supply disruptions and less independent that our predecessors.
Alfman
<< IMHO this matters, we are creating a society that is less agile in dealing with supply disruptions and less independent that our predecessors. >>
As resources (cheap oil, metals) get scarcer, socioeconomic fundamentals will have to adapt. I find the guests of Nate Hagens’s podcast, The Great Simplification, refreshing to hear in this regards. As we move out of the era of over abundance consumerism will evolve into something different.
gagol2,
You’re right about that. The law of supply and demand is an ultimate arbitrator. We do have control over the levers of efficiency though. We can get more out of every unit by ensuring it can be reused/repaired/etc. It’s just such a shame that the corporations that control most of our resources are bent on shortening product life cycles and locking them down. Of course they’re putting their own interests first, but collectively we will suffer for it.
I’m not familiar with him. I guess some may find the idea refreshing. But I think non-renewable resources running down will create hardships with a possible decline in quality of life.
Even renewable resources like water are facing unprecedented threats due to climate change. While it’s obvious that we’ll have to find a way to cope somehow,, the politics are such that short term thinking almost always wins over true long term sustainability. Our handling today may be leading future generations towards catastrophe.