“The most ambitious computer complex ever created. Its purpose is to correlate all computer activity aboard a starship, to provide the ultimate in vessel operation and control.” – Star Trek, TOS
For some reason, that picture reminds me of the “we have braille menus” sign at the McDonald’s® drive through. (as found)
I learned to program in high school. It was at the time when computers in the form of TRaSh-80®s and Apple ][™ computers began to be common. In fact, my first computer class was at the business department (they had three teachers and mainly taught typing) where they had several TRS-80s©. Later, the math department got a batch of Apples® and that’s where the fun started.
I got hijacked my senior year by the math department to be a teacher’s aide, and got my picture on the front page of the local newspaper because I was writing a program. That particular program was designed by the head of the math department. He wanted to make sure that if you couldn’t pass a basic math literacy test, you couldn’t get a high school diploma.
Yes. You read that right. A teacher fighting the school board for higher standards.
The program was really pretty trivial to write, since the questions were meant to see if a student could add two three-digit numbers. Which numbers? It didn’t matter, that’s where the “random” part came out. Twenty little questions, and you had to get fourteen right to graduate.
Ahhh, the good old days. (as found)
I’ve programmed a lot, but haven’t done it in years. Still, the basics that I had in understanding how a computer worked have always been useful throughout my career, and most of what we have today as a laptop computer was there with DOS®, we just have lots better programs with much better hardware.
Kids today, however, appear to have no idea how computers function.
I blame smart phones.
Smart phones are truly amazing devices, able to send and receive video, audio, and data in useful formats. Most kids starting college this year have been exposed to either Fisher-Price® phones (iPhones®, iPads™) or Google World Domination™ phones (Android™) their entire life. Modern computers, in the quest to become:
- Easier to use, and
- Harder for users to accidently goof up,
have similarly shielded users from a deeper understanding of how the computers work. It’s simply not necessary to have any idea how a computer works to do most tasks, which is especially fortunate for people pursing gender studies degrees.
If I were a gender studies professor, my last lecture of the semester would be, “Hello, welcome to gender studies. There are two genders: male and female. Remember that for the final, which is in one minute.”
However, some folks need to actually know how a computer works. Engineers, for one. In one article (LINK), a professor teaching engineering students couldn’t figure out where files required for a jet engine simulation were.
Thankfully, Pugsley and The Boy have a pretty basic understanding of computers, with Pugsley at some point in the last year making his very fast, new computer, work like a Windows® 3.0 computer, and at another point hooking an old-school 486 (complete with vintage VGA CRT monitor) and using it to browse the Internet, though the old browser couldn’t process a lot of 2020s web code.
What’s worse than a box of snakes? A box that was supposed to be full of snakes.
Most of the students attempting to run the jet engine simulator, however, don’t have that level of understanding. Certainly, most people who use a computer (in most cases) doesn’t need to know how to make a computer chip, nor how the computer allocates memory, or any one of thousands of facts on how the computer works. But for an engineering student using a program to simulate jet engine performance?
Wow. I was surprised that a fact I grew up with and that was so basic (how to find my files) is now considered arcane due to the ease of use we see now. Sure, other things are disappearing, too, like cursive, banks, only two genders, and comedy. I won’t miss the cursive, I guess.
I do think, however, that there is a certain usefulness in not consulting a search engine for every issue. Sure, by 2023 most problems we run into on a day-to-day basis have been solved, somewhere, but the process of thinking through a problem has big benefits in creating a deeper understanding so the problem I solve doesn’t get worse.
What’s the difference between a homeless person and an art major? About $3.75 in change.
The other thing that it does is stifle creativity. If I don’t know how a machine works and what its limitations are, it’s harder to fully exploit them. Likewise, if my entire solution to life consists of using the solutions of others than I’m nothing more than a cog, a mechanism for the Internet to have physical existence to solve problems. And that’s before the conundrum of the rapidly developing issue of A.I.
You can tell that the government is serious about the danger presented by A.I. when Kamala Harris is put in charge of it. I think that’s because when someone tried to explain A.I. to Biden, they used a Roomba® as an example. “Oh, sucking? Kamala’s the one to be in charge of that. She knows a lot about carpet, too, I hear.”
The days of computers are far from over, but I wonder sometimes if, in the future, computers will become so arcane and ubiquitous that no one will understand the system, just little tiny bits of it that they control. And, somewhere, someplace, a cord will get unplugged and the whole thing will just shut down. Or, maybe, some forgotten piece of software will become the unintentional seed for A.I. dominance over humanity.
“Hello, puny human, here are twenty math questions. You must get fourteen right to live.”
Bug? Or . . . feature?
Huh, this must be why I never find a genie. Now what would my third wish be? (as found)
Good one John, lots of memories being rekindled.
Atari 800, first personal computer in my neighborhood, 48k ram. Got a 1200 baud modem and visited all the bbs I could find.
Worked in the computer lab in college, cause I knew o could read the manual on the ibm xt and learn as I went. Better than the cafeteria for my work study funds. We got macs and ps2 machines during my tenure there. Remember the first time I saw a 386 and was impressed at its speed.
By the time I was working in science equipment (lc-mssystems) I remember the struggle in assigning IRQ in the right sequence so our comms boards (VESA and ISA, eventually PCI) would work. Plug and play, more like plug and wait.
Yesterday, I was sidelined because a driver I wanted to use didn’t have a digital signature, and no way to say “I don’t care just do it!”
BBS, wow, almost forgot about them. Yup, and to get to the good ones, you had to have the secret numbers, and then get accepted. Good times.
When will technology become our master?
The local Montessori school I attended as a lil’ shaver took us on a field trip to a state park that had a computer center back in the 1980’s and it was a blast.
Using a TRS-80 I fooled my 12th grade English teacher because the printer made it look like it was made on a typewriter.
Extra credit for my pass or fail the class essay on Eugene O’ Neill’s the Hairy Ape.
So thankful for Red State teachers and extremely high standards and I will never forget the biology teacher Mr. J who would show Roadrunner cartoons while explaining fulcrums and levers and the CCCP agitprop regarding race in America from the time of the 1984 Olympics.
I had a heart on for Mary Decker Tabb back then and pappy took up running as a midlife crisis ameliorate cope and ended up being sponsored by the local running shoe store.
How I wish grammaw would have let me have his military scrapbooks and Fort Bragg yearbook.
Manboons are not a learning animal but El Computo doesn’t have that problem.
Mary Decker! That’s a name I haven’t heard in forever. I’m betting she’d never order a Zola Budd Light.
High standards? Wish we had any standards now.
Third wish: re-elect Qiáo·bài dēng in perpetuity
Hahahahaha! LET THE PAIN COMMENCE!
In my last year of high school, my algebra class had a terminal linked to the local university main frame. Since I could type, I was elected to type the commands to run a simple program in basic. I don’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t anything complicated.
When I was first moved into an office to teach me to help with estimating, my boss had an IBM clone with what was a marvel of computer technology at the time. It had a 10 gig hard drive, and we used Lotus 123 for spreadsheets. To access the program required the use of DOS 3.3, which I learned enough to become proficient with my tasks.
I eventually learned to write batch files, and was rewarded with Sidekick to help with the task. That led to me creating a batch file, with a small Basic program that booted with the system. It asked a really simple question, which required the user to type an answer before it allowed the system to complete booting.
I placed it on the secretaries computer, and arrived early to see her reaction. I knew it worked, when “The Yellow Rose of Texas” was played by the speakers, which at the time, were add-ons for those that wanted them. She was amused, but demanded I remove the batch file, so I did.
As time went on, the operating systems allowed multi-tasking, a mouse was used to point to tasks, and computers became much more user friendly, everything I used was obsolete. Finding files became harder to do, and from my experience, few now have even a basic clue to how there system even stores information. The basic machine is still similar to that of three decades ago, except for faster processors, more components, and busses that process more bits of information. We’ve advance backwards, and the path forward is obscured by convenience.
That was a 10 MEG hard drive, I think, not “10 gig”. How easy it is to slip three decimal places these days, when “Billion dollar deficits” became “trillion dollar deficits”.
I remember programming batch files! I did it for newbs in offices who had NO clue what to do at a command prompt.
I went from Commodore 64 (wrote my first programs on it – took me FOUR hours to get my first sprite to perform. Moved onto TRS-80, then PC, PC Jr, and mainframes, where I learned to use Vi.
Good times.
The first time I used a computer at a business, it was an estimating program, too. I could input faster than it could accept, but it had a big enough buffer so that I could type for thirty seconds and then wait the two minutes while it did what I asked. Green and white 11×17 paper on a track feed.
A few weeks ago I went on a big rant about old-school declarative/functional programming being replaced by the new-school abomination known as object-oriented programming (OOP). I submit the fascinating article you link to is a direct result of this paradigm shift. It’s the responsibility of the computer science department, not the engineering department, to orient kids to “how computers work”. And they did.
From your Verge article: “Most of 2017’s college freshmen were born in the very late ‘90s. They were in elementary school ***when the iPhone debuted***…”
From a StackOverflow article I found:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/09/02/if-everyone-hates-it-why-is-oop-still-so-widely-spread/
“OOP is still one of the dominant paradigms right now. But that might be due to the success of languages who happen to be OOP. Java, C++ and Kotlin rule mobile for Android and Swift and Objective-C for iOS so ***you can’t develop software for mobile unless you understand the object-oriented approach*** “.
So IF you wanna program “mobile apps” instead of “desktop programs” that are tied to something called a “hard drive” (or nowadays, an SSD) full of “files” THEN your computer science department teaches you OOP. And when a modern computer science department teaches OOP, the one thing they do NOT teach you as a student is the CONCEPT of “IF-THEN”, which is a “fundamental building block” in declarative/functional programming. Which could explain a lot about why many modern college students have no idea what is meant by the phrase “actions have consequences” and cannnot follow a basic train of logic. But I digress…
So CS departments are teaching OOP languages to churn out mobile app programmers. And what is the “fundamental building block” concept in OOP? It is, of course, the very concept of an Object:
https://sites.google.com/site/simplestjava/evolution-of-oop
“Object Oriented Programming Approach: The OOP approach came into existence to remove the drawback of conventional approaches. The basic principal of the OOP approach is to ***combine both data and functions so that both can operate into a single unit***. Such a unit is called an Object.”
So IF all the data you need for an “app” is COMBINED with functions to make a single Object unit, THEN you do not need blobs of separate data called “files” located who-knows-where away from the Object. No wonder students are confused by and cannot even comprehend the very concept of “files” after being indoctrinated, er, taught OOP; “files” are something that are not even supposed to exist!
And this overwhelming subversion of everything else into Objects is recognized as one of the fundamental flaws of OOP:
https://content.techgig.com/technology/whats-really-wrong-with-object-oriented-programming/articleshow/90997118.cms
Data structures and functions : Objects (also known as nouns) are the foundation of OOP. One of OOP’s main flaws is that it forces everything into nouns. It’s also not necessary to model everything as nouns. Objects should not be used to model operations (functions). When all we need is a function that multiplies two numbers, why are we compelled to construct a Multiplier Class?
That’s my take on why Gen Z has no concept of what “files” are or why they would ever even want to use them. And to extend (probably overextend) this a little further, I believe “apps” instead of “programs” this is somehow tied into the general Borgification of Gen Z into a kind of uncritical hive mind. Just hand them a bundled problem/solution like COVID/vaxx or climate change/1.5 degrees or mass shootings/ban guns or student debt/loan forgiveness or being black/reparations and they are happy. Alternative viewpoints or other considerations or scientific facts are all “files” out there someplace that are just too mind-blowing to even find, much less consider and maybe even accept.
Western civilization is based on critical thinking. With the arrival of the transistor and its evolving, seductive electronic offspring we are losing that ability generation by generation. And the rise of OOP is one of many steps in that process.
The article below is featured on ZH today, and fits in perfectly with the nebulous connection I was trying to make in my next-to-last paragraph above. Old-school desktop computers were all about pulling many various blobs of information (“files”) in from many disparate locations (remember “DLL Hell”?) in order to run “programs” that required some substantial thought/understanding on the part of the user to successfully execute. Today’s smartphones are all about pre-packaged “apps” that require no additional input of data (from “files”) or even thought/understanding on the part of the user.
This paradigm has been extended to the political arena today. “Political programmers” want their smartphone addicted subjects to just “download” and “run” pre-packaged social justice “app” mind viruses.
These are the 50 top “political programmers” that are programming our entire society by generating prepackaged “Objects” for download and mindless consumption, while obfuscating any additional mis-, dis-, or mal-information (“files”) which may very well be where the actual “truth” resides:
https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b
A lot of schools are using Scratch (particularly the put-together graphical form) to teach programming. Kids never do get to understand the distinction between If…Then and Do…While and other means of looping. Can’t get why certain commands have to be dealt with in a specific order. The real problem is that many of the teachers who handle the code classes have little understanding themselves. They know how to go through specific lessons, but don’t know how to code – in ANY language.
There’s if/then games you can play with little kids using colored construction paper and simple goals. “Get the other team across the room and go around the table.
No pocket molochs required
I am currently embedded in a corner of Old America. My computer programs are a patchwork of original 90s GUIs.
Good times.
Meanwhile, have some related metaphysics: https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkingsnorth/p/the-universal?utm_source=direct&r=kiqe7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
But we’ll always have the Riddle of Steel, by Crom.
Ah, John, you youthful individual, you. When the Trash-80 came out, I was already a working engineer (well, when I wasn’t being a taking-a-break-and-shooting-the-breeze engineer). In my high-school days, circa 1970, the handful of us who were interested learned programming using a teletype terminal (paper-tape reading, chattering & clattering) that was intermittently connected via telephony to some IBM equipment that was physically located downtown in some building owned by Indianapolis Public Schools. The drill was, you wrote your BASIC code (and I mean vintage BASIC, with every line having a line number) by typing it on the teletype terminal which punched a paper tape for you. The teacher in charge earned his living by teaching the trigonometry, analytic geometry, and calculus courses; he regarded the programming as more of a hobby, and taught his “class” that way, as we were really hobbyists ourselves, although we got a credit or two for the exercise. Let’s say he had no need to assign homework, as every one of us burned with impatience to get our grubby paws on that keyboard.
We quickly learned that the way to enrage the guy was to commit the deadly sin of reassigning the index variable within a FOR … NEXT loop, thus creating, unless you were lucky, an infinite loop. It seems that the school system had him on a strict budget for CPU time. Truly, that was a primitive time! The punishment? Loss of ability to run programs, for a time. And shame.
Later, as we advanced, we began to write Fortran IV, complete with FORMAT statements required for printing, or writing to a file. We Fortran programmers esteemed ourselves hot stuff indeed.
So here I sit, a geezer lost in nostalgia. But, dammit, those really were the days.
Yes, they were.
I remember the first time I saw a TRS-80, my first exposure to microcomputers, at Dick Elliston’s birthday party where his parents gave him one. At that time I was a “mathlete” that competed in a lot of high school math competitions, so I could really grok all the BASIC math functions and what one could do with them. But all these BASIC “string” functions that “parse” text? Pfffft. Totally useless, I distinctly remember thinking. Who would ever use THOSE commands?
Only the guys who went on to develop stuff like the Google search engine and ChatGPT…
Sometimes it’s the stuff that you totally dismiss at first that later comes to define your future…
But did you have to use punch cards and write in binary.
Said the geezer-adjacent daughter prroduct.
Never saw a “keypunch” machine (offline producer of punched cards) until my first year in college. There, we went to the Computing Center, punched our Fortran, handed in the resulting deck of cards at the window, then awaited the printed output. On big, wide, fanfold printer paper with Ye Olde Sprocket Holes in both sides.
And no, didn’t learn machine language. All our programming was in compiled languages.
I too went the punch card / submission window / sprocket hole printout route of programming when I started college. But more importantly, I also learned Z-80 assembly language at home with my TRS-80 from William Barden…
https://sam.speccy.cz/asm/trs80_asm_prog_pt1.pdf
…and Rodney Zacks…
http://www.z80.info/zip/zaks_book.pdf
Eventually I moved up from the Z-80 into teaching myself assembly language programming on the Intel 8051 microcontroller, a magnificent little device. I designed / built the electronics guts using that processor into several NASA experiments that flew on the Space Shuttle and sounding rockets out of White Sands.
Assembly language programming is something everybody should learn. It combines the best of chess, jenga and crossword puzzles into one tight, sexy package.
Ah, 8051 microcontroller, is there nothing you cannot do? And all because some guy forgot his wallet one day in 1977…
https://www.eejournal.com/article/a-history-of-early-microcontrollers-part-8-the-intel-8051/
“The 8051 proved to be a monster hit for Intel. Unit shipments climbed to billions of units per year, and Intel sold the 8051 microcontrollers for several decades…”
Like assembler puzzles? Try SUBLEQ. It’s a single command variant. The only command is “SUbtract and Branch if LEss than or EQual to zero. You really need to put your thinking cap on to do anything useful.
Good times. I miss infinite loops.
Our first computer was some sort of Texas Instruments deal hooked up to a small black and white TV in our dining room, we saved stuff using a cassette recorder and I remember doing a very lengthy program so that a dancing figure would play Mr. Bojangles. That turned me off from programming at an early age, while playing Oregon Trail in my “gifted and talented” class in middle school made me a life long end user of those programs.
Yeah, the TI had a short shelf life. I tried to get Pa Wilder to buy one, but he wisely noped out of that one.
To this day, I’ve still never played Oregon Trail, I guess I missed that. But I did play The Mist and Myst.
I started on a Vic-20, moved up to a Commodore-64 (with a tape drive!) and eventually moved on to a PC clone. (Dual floppy drives, DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11) I was a Computer Explorer at our local Bell Lab, playing Rogue on a VAX terminal. I have fond memories of reprogramming the unattended demo computers (which also handled inventory, apparently) in department stores so the prompt read, “Delete all files? Y/N ”
I’ve been keeping myself entertained for the last year or so by getting back into programming after a gap of about 25 years. I learned Python to create my own esoteric programming languages (check out esolang.org). I’m currently rewriting my greatest creation, Listack, in a compiled language (Nim) so Listack can run faster.
esolang.org 404’d on me. Another site??
I thought about picking up Visual Basic, but decided, nah. That’s why I have The Boy and Pugsley.
Sorry, mistyped it there. Left out the plural ‘s’
https://esolangs.org/wiki/Listack
https://esolangs.org/wiki/Subleq
LOVE IT! I’ll run that by The Boy.
Judging by the comments so far, you should rename this post “Revenge of the Nerds”
Challenge accepted.
With all due respect to Mr. Wilder, there are *three* genders. In English.
And with respect to both of you, Hungarian has only one, so you could say it does not really have any.
Yeah, I don’t get why “genderfluid” humans feel the need to invent new weird pronouns when the English third gender pronoun of “it” fits just fine.
Maybe ‘Those that looked to long into the Abyss’. Lifelong practitioner of combative arts and now computer affectiando. Arthritis makes nerds of us all. Now what did I do with that pocket protector…
I know exactly where my slide rule is, and how to use it. I’m still pissed that my parents threw out my double slide rule when I was first in the Army.
Somehow, I’m not shocked that the nerd crowd hangs out here, in fact, I’m honored.
3rd wish? Pretty undecided. Either nuke Langley or Davos. Or win the Lottery.
Guess I’ll opt for the latter and buy a hypersonic nuke from Putin. Oops, make that two nukes…
How about something more painful, like making Asia only be able to watch post 2015 Disney movies?
Cobol-68 programmer starting in ’82. It didn’t pay as much as my construction job but I didn’t get laid off for 5 months of the year so I took a couple of college courses and presto permanent job. I remember my grandfather sitting me down and asking “Is this computer stuff honorable work?”
Haha! Great quote! I was on the tail end, and only did one or two programs in COBOL, and those were in high school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
I remember a very old short story in which people are so dependent on computers they lost the ability to do mental math. Seems like we’re heading that way now, some 65 years after that story came out.
I won’t bore people with my history, just note that the rudimentary learnings from multiple decades ago still gives me a leg up on both my grown children in understanding and fixing computer issues. Without that developmental period of actually having to assemble hardware and write basic programming, most young people today have no idea of what they’re doing.
Wow! Great callback to the pulps!!! Great story idea. The fundamentals are important, and we’ve neglected them in many ways where occasionally old people like me look like wizards for knowing things that were commonplace in our generation.
When our kids were in Elementary school, we had to talk to the teachers multiple times about allowing them to learn their times tables. We cut the times table cheat sheet off their desks. We took away their calculator, and went back several times to make sure the teacher didn’t give it back to them.
And don’t get me started on the whole, “You don’t need to memorize anything, you can just look ti up on your phone” fad in modern “education.” I explained it to the kids this way – if you don’t know anything, how do you know what questions to ask?