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I, Computer
I am a Macbook Air—the ordinary 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 machine familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
I, Computer, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. S. A. each year …
Don’t take your computer for granted.
Perhaps I just needed to feel good after yesterday’s freaky-deaky, but when I walked into that Mac Store today and walked out twenty minutes later with computing power sufficient to send a man to the moon in my hands — in a device barely heavier than a bag of croissants — it struck me, yet again, how astonishing the free market really is. How did someone like me get lucky enough to live in an era where such a thing is a household item, readily affordable even to those of us who can’t even install our own operating systems unaided?
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Computer, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.
If this little computer lasts as long as my last Mac did, I’ll end up paying less for it per month than I spend on cat litter. And less than I did on my last Mac, too.
I went to the Apple store beneath the Louvre museum, by the way. The lines to get in it on a weekend are almost as long as the lines to get into the museum. But that store belongs there: It’s one of the great design achievements of human history.
You show me a government that can provide this kind of service at this price — anywhere, even once in human history — and I’ll revise my beliefs about the blessings of the free market.
I’ll wait.
(… Steve Jobs, forgive me for the unpleasant things I said about you yesterday after the business with El Capitan. May everyone at Apple be fruitful and prosper.)
Published in Economics, General, Science & Technology
Having spent time in New York riding the subways and buses in the past, you should be thankful. Every time I got on the Subway it was ” name that psychiatric condition”….
Well, at least regarding consumer electronics–PCs are an exception–I don’t fully agree that we no longer repair things because we cannot understand them. The primary factor that makes me say that is that consumer electronics has become so inexpensive that it isn’t worth attempting to repair because this would require access to test equipment that would likely cost more than replacing said item of consumer electronics.
Remember TV repair shops? They are still out there, but compared to years ago there are very few of them because a trained technician’s labor rates mean that TVs generally aren’t worth fixing unless they are pretty expensive models.
Another–related–factor is that consumer electronics is essentially unrepairable without special tools. Your dad could replace a vacuum tube in the family TV (or he could before TVs became solid-state) because vacuum tubes were removable; they were installed in sockets that enabled them to be replaced without soldering or like surgery. Of course the reason why vacuum tubes needed sockets is because they wore-out much faster than solid-state devices. That’s why solid-state TVs last longer. (Re-reading this makes me realize how dated the phrase “solid-state” is. I was just trying to avoid a more cumbersome discussion of transistors and ICs. )
Regarding the difficulty repairing modern cars: I think you have a point. There is no way I would attempt replacing a timing belt because of the difficulty of just getting to a timing belt on a Honda Civic. I agree that the so-inclined can conduct basic service (e.g., changing oil, brake jobs, tune ups, etc.) but the list of of things that a shade-tree mechanic would be willing do do is shrinking.
She merely said that what she held was sufficient, not that it was in excess of. Point – Claire.
Five cats? You know how it goes, then.
I order in bulk, at discount rates, but yes — if this machine holds up as long as my last one, it will end up being a lot less per month.
GGG is pointing out that it’s “way in excess of.”
We are losing something with the loss of FIY culture, though. I agree that there are good, practical reasons not to do these kinds of repairs at home, but I’m getting increasingly divorced from understanding how things work, which I regret. It leads to the kind of meltdown I had yesterday when I realized, “This is so far beyond my household repair skills that I have no hope of solving this problem on my own.”
There’s a sense of satisfaction and mastery in being able to think, “I know how these things around me work.” I don’t have it anymore. (I never had it to any huge extent to begin with, but now I feel as if it’s more-or-less unlearnable — buying a good book and teaching myself doesn’t seem like a practical option.)
I love this post. It’s got a great poetic quality to it. I did have a small 2001 – Space Odyssey flash of concern as to whether I was taking my laptop for granted, but then I remembered that I work off a PC and my fears vanished…
John,
There is a very odd phenomena with computers. The physical computer really rarely is broken. Rather it is a software problem. As time progresses the software becomes more advanced and more demanding on the hardware. At a certain point the hardware can no longer support the “relevant” software. With the internet and it’s extreme constant interconnectedness this phenomenon is only intensified.
cont.
cont. from #38
I can repair most any personal computer if I need to. I can build one from scratch. However, it is not only that something new with a warranty may come out cheaper but that when I get the old one back running it won’t be able to run the relevant software anyway.
I would caution this line of thought in one way. The more knowledge that you have the more in control of your own data you are. Sometimes the only way to get that knowledge is to take a machine apart and put it back together.
Regards,
Jim
I might add that I haven’t bothered yet to retrieve and upload the data from Ye Olde Computer. It was faster just to count on the way that basically, from the moment I gave them my credit card, the machine was able to reconstruct my entire life.
“Privacy” as we once imagined it no longer exists.
Yep. The expectation is there’s more data all the time, and more to do with it. There are Bayesian Belief Networks with many millions of nodes on your phone, nevermind your laptop or desktop, doing continuous speaker-independent speech recognition in real time—something Margaret Hamilton writing Apollo mission flight software would almost certainly have insisted would remain impossible at this point.
I wish there were some effective way to convey how vast the conceptual leaps we’ve made in software are—although, oddly, also how everything old is new again, e.g. the role of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo techniques generally.
Is anyone really in doubt of it? I think we do all grasp that this is hugely more advanced than it was. That’s why it both awes those of us who don’t entirely grasp what it’s doing and freaks us out — sometimes within the same 24 hours.
Claire,
Privacy is still for a private person using their own equipment for a private use such as yourself. A Secretary of State using the office for say an extortionate rake off of foreign business interests would not come under that heading. A Secretary of State exposing the daily business of the office to espionage not to mention over 400 (known) highly classified emails is the highest malfeasance.
I must admit that it tickles me no end that my very basic knowledge of small computer systems and the need to back up & guarantee data led me to the conclusion early on that the emails would be found.
With knowledge one can vanquish a mighty foe. Of course, this is assuming the will to employ that knowledge exists in the those who have the opportunity.
Regards,
Jim
Yes, but that’s unfathomable. No Secretary of State in the modern world could be that stupid and reckless. So really, no practical value to this observation. Nope.
As a plain fact, probably not.
Right. On one hand, maybe I wish people had a less-fuzzy-enough understanding not to be freaked out. On the other, maybe I just want people to have a less-fuzzy-enough understanding to be even more awed by me and my tribe. (A depressingly plausible possibility.) On the third hand, maybe both of these are wrong—the thing to hope for is a bored “of course it does that. How else could it possibly be?”
Upon reflection, I think the third hand wins.
I agree that the FIY culture is slipping away and this cannot be good. I think that you acquire the FIY attitude from your father. That’s where I got mine from.
I lived in the suburbs when I was growing up. My father has been a farm boy and you fixed everything yourself if you lived on a farm.
Dad did almost all of the maintenance around the house and on the cars. He had me be with him when he was doing this work. I “assisted” him as he did basic electrical work, sweated copper pipes with a butane torch, threaded cold water pipes, did carpentry, car repair and other manly arts. Truth be known, I wasn’t much assistance until I was a teenager but he made sure I saw how these tasks were done.
An aside: One time I found a beat-up coaster wagon abandoned in a trash-pile near our house. I suppose it was thrown-away because its handle had broken-off. For some reason I brought it home and was playing with it. (Hey, I was eight.) Dad improvised a new handle from copper plumbing for this wagon. The new handle gave this wagon a new lease on life and my friends and I played with this wagon for a few more years.
Getting back to helping my father with repairs around the house: I didn’t mind helping him, but if I had my druthers I would have been goofing-off with my pals instead. The child I was then would have been amazed to know how valuable what I learned from “assisting” my father would be to the adult I would later become. For example, I was astounded when a twenty-something male co-worker let me know he had no idea what to do when water began pouring from the handle on his toilet’s tank.
Thank you dad.
One more experience: one of my girlfriends raised her children on her own. Under the circumstances I think she did as well as she could.
Her adult son–who is very intelligent, is a debate coach, etc.–is essentially both clueless and helpless when it came to repairing anything. I feel sorry for him. I think that he would be more self-sufficient, FIY-wise, had he grown up in a nuclear family.
If you get your “handy man” skills from your father then I expect that the FIY culture will decline in parallel with the decline of the nuclear family.
Claire,
Flawless logic no doubt. Sort of like this.
Regards,
Jim
No you can’t. You can build one from parts. But not from scratch. I’m sur that’s what you meant.
Spin,
You can neither build a pencil from scratch or parts. I can build a computer from parts, as you wish. That’s as scratch as it gets. Apple and IBM and every other computer manufacturer builds their computers from parts manufactured by other companies. In the vast majority of cases the parts were not even manufactured specifically for them.
Your point then?
Regards,
Jim
It’s sort of interesting that software is running counter to the “if a rivet is cheaper than a screw, use a rivet: repairability is an outmoded and uneconomical concept” and “ever tried to find a schematic for a Japanese amplifier?” long-running trend in manufactured thingies, what with open source, embedded interpreters, field-programmable parts, and SDKs.
The main practical advantages of knowing a little about how something works and theoretically being able to manipulate the something are:
a) The illusion of control is as powerful as the real thing. A study at Western Electric in the 1930s (I believe) told anxious assembly line workers that they could stop the line by pushing a big red button. Findings: workers felt better; no one ever pressed the button(which was as well since it didn’t do anything). Placebo is a powerful drug (and cheap).
b) You will be able to say “You should have given me a way to back out of this upgrade, jerk, and none of your technical back-sass!” to some poor genius at the Apple store with withering confidence and authority.
I haven’t read all the comments, but ever since I saw this image in the original post this morning, I’ve been smiling.
I’m also remembering Bill Gates when he was on trial saying at one point to the judge, “You want me to give away XP? Something that took 5 million worker hours to develop?”
We have all benefited from the painstaking work these code writers have done.
I was just being snarky.
Regarding the fixit culture, I wouldn’t despair too much. Earlier this summer I gave my desktop a motherboard transplant. Sure, I couldn’t fix whatever was wrong on the motherboard, but your father didn’t fix what was wrong on the vacuum tube; he just popped out the bad one and put a new one in.
Repair as a choice depends on the cost of replacement. I work in a factory (hard drive parts, which seems relevant, actually), and we repair the heck out of some very expensive machines on the floor. I can’t argue with Casey’s decision to just spend the extra $100 and get a new washing machine either.
Tom & Claire: I had never seen this picture before, or heard of Margaret Hamilton. When I read the caption, I thought it was a joke, of the type regularly featured in The Daily Shot. “Yeah, right,” I thought.
But, just in case, I looked up this “Margaret Hamilton” in Wikipedia.
Wow.
Someone needs to write a book about her . . . maybe a movie.
(Her late ex-husband, by the way, was also well-known in the Boston area, a Harvard-educated First Amendment lawyer, active in the local ACLU. So, Rob Long, there’s the power-couple, love-lost angle for your movie.)
I especially like “by hand.” Well, yes, in the sense that she typed it instead of using a fountain pen, like every programmer who wasn’t flipping toggle switches. What did the author think, the software wrote itself? (That exists, today, on a modest scale, in machine learning, but it doesn’t result in a short-person-sized stack of FORTRAN or whatever Margaret Hamilton used).
GGofG,
I don’t think they quite grasp the important difference between Hardware and Software. Hardware is capital intensive. Design it scale up the manufacturing and the price goes to zero (almost). Software is labor intensive. It takes a huge human effort to write, debug and maintain.
Like this. Battle Speed!
Regards,
Jim
I’m running El Capitan on a three-and-a-half-year-old 13″ MacBook Pro with 8GB of memory. I actually noticed some performance improvements from the last OS.
Careful Claire……
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