DJ Adams

Computing memories

Some brief thoughts on history and how we used to have to make things work, sometimes in painstaking detail.

My good friend and colleague Antonio shared some thoughts today about a post he'd just read: The Last People Who Know How It Works.

I was composing a reply to Antonio's thoughts on LinkedIn, but then thought better of it, and in the proper spirit of "owning (and being in control of) one's own content", harking back to the good old days of communication and community on the Web, I thought I'd write my reply here and then point to it via a URL. So here goes.

The post is a lovely read, and makes a great point that resonates with me, a point about the potential (or imminent) loss of knowing how things work, through having to make things work. I have many memories of building things from scratch, making computers do things (where in their default state they would do nothing).

For our SAP community readers, I also remember (in the early to mid 1990's) calculating which actual magnetic tracks across which cylinders (physical partitions on the DASD) to place different parts of the SAP R/2 document database and indices (ABEZ, ABIB, etc) for optimal head movement across the spinning platters. Most commonly we'd use IDCAMS to define VSAM Data Sets.

I'm sure that many of you dear readers have equivalent and equally fond memories.

One thing that stood out in the post was this wonderful image:

I went looking the other night for a recording of a modem connecting. People keep them around like pressed flowers.

Such sounds are indeed, at least in my mind, delicate artifacts, and worth preserving. And preserving with care.

One statement the post makes is:

A machine that cannot challenge you is a thing you cannot know. You can only use it.

I agree strongly with this. It summarises much of how I feel about using computers, and reminds me of the TEDx talk I gave back in 2012 titled Our Computational Future, on how we should not be raising generations of users, but generations of creators and builders.

Here's something else from the post:

The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads.

Now this I cannot agree with, in fact strongly disagree (based on the way I read it, which may be incorrect). We have been down those roads of information being lost to time, either due to deterioration of physical media, or due to proprietary formats where there's no way of reincarnating a reader program. If we're relying on AI to remember stuff for us, that's very short sighted. Who owns the models, the systems, the processes? What format is that stored in, and how accessible is that to everyone and anyone who wants it?

That road is a road to pain and regret.

Anyway, I don't want this last thought to take anything away from the post - it's still a lovely read.