Lament of a Computer Fossil

Interesting Times Indeed

“May you live in interesting times!”

I recently wrote an essay here – Old Fossils and Their Rocks – about my dad and the era when he and rockhounds like him picked up most of the great rocks in the West. Rockhounding just isn’t the same now. Nothing is. I could go on and on about that and there are a lot of writers today who do just that. They’re the literary equivalent of some guy in Times Square carrying a sign, “The End is Near!” Some writers make a nice living telling you all the horrible details about how near the end is.

I try to avoid being negative that way. It’s not that I disagree with them. It’s more that I just don’t see any benefit in constantly searching the horizon to see if “The End” has arrived yet. A massive coronal mass ejection could wipe out civilization and all humans at any moment. There is absolutely nothing we can do about it – we’re as helpless as the dinosaurs were 66 million years ago when they were wiped out by a meteor. So why get upset about it if we can’t do anything?

When I write letters to people who buy my dad’s rocks, I usually end the letter by urging people to have fun every day and I mean it sincerely. You probably know the story of “The Grasshopper and the Ant”. It’s a moral story intended to scold people into preparing for tomorrow. I have a different take on it. The grasshopper was right.

I can write with a certain amount of authority about computers because I have worked with computers and software for my entire career. I’ve written books, magazine articles, and technical papers about it. I like to point out that computers and I were both born at about the same time and grew up together. I’ll die in a few more years but computers won’t. If you believe the “sky is falling” oracles, computers will take over as a result of AI – “artificial intelligence”. Like a coronal mass ejection, that’s another thing that isn’t worth worrying about.

Que sera, sera.

But because the people like me – people who can remember a time when computers didn’t exist – are dying off now, I thought I would write an essay about how they have changed. Some of it is beautiful – a little bit like a coronal mass ejection is beautiful as long as it doesn’t hit you. Some of it isn’t.

There’s a historical meme about the “Renaissance Man”. The idea is that there was a time, around the 15th century, when the boundary of universal knowledge was small enough to allow someone to understand nearly all of it. When I got into the field, computers were like that. When I first learned about the stored program execution cycle, it was like the clouds cleared away and the sky was pure and blue. Circuit design was obvious. Boolean logic was simple. Computer software was an extension of my mind like a hammer was an extension of my dad’s arm.

It didn’t stay that way.

When I was a programmer working in a completely different part of computing (computer output microfilm), I helped to discover a bug (See the note below.) in the IBM System/360 virtual memory software. (See my essay, RIP -- Fred Brooks) (Full disclosure: Kirk Mendenhall, a mentor and a better programmer than I ever was, took the lead on this problem.) We had to find and interpret specific parts of the “assembly language” code in hundreds of pages of “blue bar” paper memory dumps. We needed that bug fixed for our own business. When we found where the computer was not returning the right answer and told IBM, they fixed it and everybody was happy again.

My point is that we did this right on the outer limit of when it was possible for ordinary programmers to do something like that. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs founded their companies back when a “Renaissance Man” could hold the whole thing in his mind. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, although a clever programmer, was no engineer. He became insanely rich by wrapping a software shell around something like the parlor game “Gossip”. What Zuckerberg did was more like finding a diamond ring on a crowded beach or winning the lottery.

Today, the most you can actually do is understand a small part of computer technology. And actually telling a manufacturer to fix their system … ??? … Dream on, mushroom eater!

Back when I was actively writing software, there was a rule that we followed in finding and fixing computer bugs. “If you don’t know what caused the problem, you can’t fix it.” That rule died and was buried many years ago. Consult any technical forum where people go for advice on fixing their computers. Nearly all of the advice boils down to, “Install the latest update.” Most of the rest is, “Buy our diagnostic software tool.”

NOBODY tells you what actually causes the problem. It’s the computer cousin to the “sealed component”. The problem is inside a block of black plastic with wires coming out of it. The only answer is to replace the block of black plastic. Even whole computers are throwaway now. The batteries gradually degrade until the lifetime of a full charge is about the same as a Mayfly. The batteries can’t be replaced so you have to buy another computer. Can you say, “planned obsolescence”?

Part of the problem is that computers are not designed by engineers anymore. They’re designed by the marketing department. The question used to be, “How can we build a better computer?” Today, the question is, “How can we build a computer that more people will buy?”

My wife complains about the same thing in home appliances like washing machines. “Why do they put all that junk into a washing machine? I never use it and it will only break.” Computers are part of the answer there too. Once a computer is in control of a machine, making the machine do a dozen different things is almost as cheap as making it do just one thing. But it does give the marketing department almost endless opportunities to advertise all the neat stuff their washing machine can do. “Oh! Look! Our washing machine has a cycle just for washing butterfly wings! And it’s fully automatic!”

There is another side to the story and that is that computers can do SO MUCH MORE. It’s the flip side of washing machines that can automatically wash butterfly wings. They can do so much that adding a throwaway wash cycle is no big deal. I have software that monitors my solar power panels. I can sit in my recliner and it will tell me when my wife turns on the coffee maker or a cloud drifts overhead. The Univac 1108 that I started with … well … it’s like comparing the wooden ship Columbus sailed in to the International Space Station.

Making computers that anticipate what you want and self-correct when they’re wrong – that’s a bigger deal. The difficulty might come in when computers stop anticipating YOUR needs and start thinking about THEIR needs.

But, Hey!!! – I’ll be joining the Grateful Dead by that time. Not my problem. I think I’ll look for some fun-loving grasshoppers to jam with.

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Note: The history of the word “bug” is interesting too. It was first used by Admiral Grace Hopper who was one of the really great computer pioneers. When Admiral Hopper was just a lieutenant and working on the Mark II computer in 1947, she recovered a moth from the wires of the Mark II that was causing a malfunction. The word “bug” has been used ever since. The original bug is still taped to the log book she kept at the time and is now tenderly cared for by the Smithsonian.