I can't help wondering whether or not it was any easier to keep a system running when systems were big enough to climb inside of. When my tablet bricks and refuses to take a flash, I can open the machine (I mean I can break it open) but the part that computes and remembers is all one piece now.
I enjoyed swapping parts out of desktop machines, looking for defective components. It was like a meditation. Of course I would have to power them down first, and I can only imagine this has been generally true for all electronic computers. I used to take a pair of broken computers, and use the best (working) parts from both to make a computer that would often be better overall than either machine was when they still worked. I liked doing this, and so people started bringing me a lot of old broken computers. Usually whenever I built a new one, I would give the old one away, and this motivated people, as it happened, to keep bringing me their junk, so I could be perpetually looking for a better machine. I hadn't ever looked for a biological metaphor in what I was doing with those obsolete junkers, but I think I can see one now. This is a great thread. On Jun 25, 2011, at 9:39 AM, Steve Wart <st...@wart.ca> wrote: > I've been thinking about eternal computing not so much in the context > of software, but more from a cultural level. > > Software ultimately runs on some underlying physical computing > machine, and physical machines are always changing. If you want a > program to run for a long time, the software needs to be flexible > enough to move from host to host without losing its state. That's more > of a requirements statement than an insight, and it's not a > particularly steep hurdle (given some expectation of "down time"), so > I'll leave it at that for now. > > I recently stumbled across the work of Quinlan Terry, whom I had never > heard of until I did a search for an inscription in a print that > caught my eye. I found this essay helps capture what makes him > different from most people designing buildings today: > > http://www.qftarchitects.com/essays/sevenmisunderstandings.php > > I don't make any claims that these observations have anything do with > software, except in a more general sense of the cultural values that > influence design. I suppose the pitfalls of trivializing something > because it seems familiar applies to software as well as any other > design discipline. > > We have an engineering culture that pursues change at an ever > increasing rate. The loss of eternal values in physical architecture > is sad indeed, especially in the context of urban sprawl and the now > rampant deterioration of buildings that were built a generation ago, > to last only a single generation. The ongoing global financial mess is > arguably a result of short-term thinking. > > Economics matters. One of the intriguing facets of computing is the > incredible amount of money the industry generates and consumes. And > nowhere is short-term thinking more generously rewarded than in the > continual churn of new computing devices and software. Personally I > find it overwhelming and I have been trying to keep up for 30 years. > Clearly it's not slowing down. > > I think there's a good reason for the ever-increasing rate of change > in computer technology, and that it is the nature of computation > itself. > > Seth Lloyd has a very interesting perspective on revolutions in > information processing: > > http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd06/lloyd06_index.html > > If you consider that life itself is computational in nature (not a big > leap given what we know about DNA), it's instructive to think about > the amount of energy most organisms expend on the activities > surrounding sexual reproduction. As our abilities to perform > artificial computations increase, it seems that more and more of our > economic life will be driven by computing activities. Computation is > an essential part of what we are. > > In this context, I wonder what to make of the 10,000 year clock: > > http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html > > First, I'm skeptical that something made of metal will last 10,000 > years. But suppose it would be possible to build a clock that lasts > that long. If in a fraction of a second I have a device that can > execute billions of instructions, what advantage does stone-age (or > iron-age) technology offer beyond longevity? > > I think the key advantage is that no computation takes place in > isolation. Every time you calculate a result, the contextual > assumptions that held at the start of that calculation have changed. > Other computations by other devices may have obviated your result or > provided you with new inputs that can allow you to continue > processing. Which means running for a long time is no longer a simple > matter of saving your state and jumping to a new host, since all the > other hosts that you are interacting with have made assumptions about > you too. It starts to look like a model of life, where the best way to > free up resources is to allow obsolete hosts to die, so that new > generations can continue once they've learned everything their parents > can teach them. > > So instead of a model of computation based around industrial metaphors > from the 19th century (with "registers" and "stores") we need to > recognize that computer science is more than an engineering > discipline. That should be apparent by now, given the extent to which > almost all human endeavors now depend on computers, but there's > something more important. > > We often see people lamenting the fact that software development isn't > more like engineering, where there are blueprints and top-down design > processes that can produce predictable results with realistic cost > estimates. Instead, we should understand that software is different > because it is fundamental. Software serves industry, but at the same > time, it has a profound impact on the way our social organizations are > constructed. Over time, the computational abilities of organizations > will move to where we can lead them with software. The challenge is to > build upon new metaphors that are not unduly constrained by the > assumptions of the past. > > Cheers, > Steve > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
