Poxy old computers (was RE: [extropy-chat] SPACE: Spirit Problems )

[Emlyn O'regan]

Give the kids Babbage engines and make 'em work it out.

Seriously, the current generation of programmers might be working with mini
M-Brains, but they are connected together with tin cans and string. Have a
look at what people are doing with coms between machines, with P2P networks,
with client side javascript and server side processing combos to make
complex looking web applications. etc etc.

Twenty/thirty  years into the future, when people are speccing massive
systems that work on an invisible global (solar system?) network that
functions almost like one mega computer, and the coding is mostly done by
evolutionary+AI support, sending terrabytes/second from one  side of the
earth to the other, we'll all be whinging about how much tougher it was in
our day, they should try coding P2P apps by hand to work over 56K modems.
And they'll say what we say now... interesting, but irrelevant gramps!

The bit you leave out when talking about coding on those old machines (ah, I
remember my c64 fondly...) is that you were dealing almost exclusively with
your own code in a simple, controlled, known environment. Pretty much the
only alien code belonged to the OS, if you used such a bloated beast (takes
up precious bytes). 

Now look at what we do today... yes there are more resources, but you are
talking about complex, uncontrolled, unknown environments; zillions of
network protocols and software layers and (defacto) (competing) standards.
Personally I love it; the stuff you can do today craps all over what I could
do on my c64. We remember our early generation PCs like we remember the
comfort of the womb, but like the womb we wouldn't return to them.

Emlyn

(ps: actually, I downloaded a C64 emulator on the weekend, and got the Pool
of Radiance running on it, played it with my daughter. Fun! Apparently the
emulator I downloaded enables a networked multiplayer mode over tcpip;
that's a bit like the borg assimilating a slug)

(pps: we may also be grumbling about nanotech enabled teens in a couple of
decades, "ah I remember my first radiodurans kit, before the megaplasmid kit
came out and you had to hack it by hand with an STM. Ah, those were the
days")

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Anders Sandberg [mailto:asa at nada.kth.se]
> Sent: Friday, 30 January 2004 8:02 AM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] SPACE: Spirit Problems
> 
> 
> Mike (of course) has me beat, my first computer had 1024 
> bytes of RAM. I
> still remember the many years I spent programming that little Sinclair
> ZX81 (I still have it), and how it taught me so much about 
> the need for
> structured code, object orientation, efficient algorithms and 
> recursion -
> mostly by not having much of either, so I had to invent my 
> own versions.
> Very good education. The kids of today are so spoiled...
> 
> [Slightly serious: I actually think there is much merit in 
> having people
> start out learning programming in a very constrained 
> environment, so that
> they get a chance to learn to sneak around constraints well. ]
> 
> One of the fun details of the computer was the FAST and SLOW modes: by
> turning off the screen signal programs ran faster, so there 
> was a command
> to do it. If you cycled the modes fast you got a cool 
> flickering, and I
> was trying to use it to entrain my brainwaves.
> 
> Kevin Freels said:
> > Wow! What a story! I'm a bit younger. My first puter was a Commodore
> > VIC-20
> > with 5KB RAM and 16KB ROM. I was so cool to everyone in 
> school when I
> > managed to put the school phone directory onto a cassette 
> and lookup names
> > by first name, last name, or phone number. I charged 
> students $5.00 for
> > each
> > tape. Since then I haven;t made a dollar in the tech world!
> 
> I actually sold a tape with ZX81 programs I had made to a 
> friend for 100
> crowns. I still think it was almost a fraud (but he is still 
> my friend).
> 
> -- 
> Anders Sandberg
> http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
> http://www.aleph.se/andart/
> 
> The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.
>