[jfarmer]

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/

"The dumbing-down of programming"

> The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

I repeat the last sentence to my students all the time ("We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.")

There's no way to understand why our computers work the way they do without understanding the human, social, and economic factors involved in their production. And foregrounding the human element often makes it easier to explain what's going on and why.

[agentultra]

I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Is there any object permanence in our creations?

I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey squares with faded little pictures on them. What are they? What were they used for?

Perhaps they know something about electronics. They have opened a few of these mysterious squares. There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do?

The people of medieval Britain could see the ruins of Roman architecture dotting their landscape. They hadn't seen those people in a long while and had no means to repair the aqueducts or high ways. Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall.

But computers? And the hardware we use to build these artifacts of the mind? Vastly more complicated and difficult to reproduce from first principles.

[Ensorceled]

> I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology?

Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science and technology to access. And encrypted most of it. They'll be trying to climb the technology ladder without coal, oil or natural gas and without any technology documentation from about 2000 onwards.

[rml]

Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the science fiction book 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller (perhaps you already have :-})

It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds from there.

[fennecbutt]

To be fair, I've thought about this sometimes too. Like, I contribute to technology myself, but in a very minimal way. And most people don't at all, they consume. But there are a golden few in the world who are doing _everything_.

For example how many people in the world actually know how to build an EUV machine like ASML's one? How many people understand the absolute forefront of integrated circuit design? Maybe like, 1-2 dozen people at most?

It's a pretty crazy thought. And I bet none of those guys are making as much bank as the suited executives above them.

[bentcorner]

> There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do?

They'll probably think it's some sort of coming-of-age fertility totem, and our datacenters will be structures built to pay homage to the gods.

[glitchc]

The answer to this lies in our history. Given that we know so little about past civilizations, especially older than 6000 years ago, and new discoveries sometimes startlingly reveal how advanced they were, the answer would be no.

[stevezsa8]

That's an interesting question.

I'd be inclined to think The Wonderer has no use for a computer. Their life is mostly about survival, food, shelter...

But when society is again ready to automate calculations... it's only a hundred years before computing is back.

[twic]

> Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall.

A copper dodecahedron with knobs on the corners is, er ...

[shrubble]

Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...

[bebop]

That may have been a reference to that fact that many computers of the early 80’s had a basic rom that would be booted into if no operating system was found.

[cmrdporcupine]

Not in a technical sense, but in a historical/cultural sense, sure. At the time PC/MS-DOS was propagating out in the public, many of us were also working with machines where the "OS" was a BASIC prompt. And the model and syntax of command interaction wasn't so dissimilar.

But yeah, it's a bit of a hand waving generalization.

[hotnfresh]

Some early PCs would boot to a basic environment if it couldn’t boot to any other OS. Not sure if that extended to machines that could run Win3.1, but IBM 8088 PC-XTs (and similar, but that’s what I had) definitely did that, though normally one would boot them to DOS.

[Sakos]

A history lesson for some of us (including me, tbh, because I was only vaguely aware of any of this and wasn't born yet at the time):

> The emergence of microcomputers in the mid-1970s led to the development of multiple BASIC dialects, including Microsoft BASIC in 1975. Due to the tiny main memory available on these machines, often 4 KB, a variety of Tiny BASIC dialects were also created. BASIC was available for almost any system of the era, and became the de facto programming language for home computer systems that emerged in the late 1970s. These PCs almost always had a BASIC interpreter installed by default, often in the machine's firmware or sometimes on a ROM cartridge.

> BASIC was one of the few languages that was both high-level enough to be usable by those without training and small enough to fit into the microcomputers of the day, making it the de facto standard programming language on early microcomputers.

> The first microcomputer version of BASIC was co-written by Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff for their newly formed company, Micro-Soft.[21] This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself,[22] immediately cementing BASIC as the primary language of early microcomputers. Members of the Homebrew Computer Club began circulating copies of the program, causing Gates to write his Open Letter to Hobbyists, complaining about this early example of software piracy.

> Partially in response to Gates's letter, and partially to make an even smaller BASIC that would run usefully on 4 KB machines,[e] Bob Albrecht urged Dennis Allison to write their own variation of the language. How to design and implement a stripped-down version of an interpreter for the BASIC language was covered in articles by Allison in the first three quarterly issues of the People's Computer Company newsletter published in 1975 and implementations with source code published in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia: Running Light Without Overbyte. This led to a wide variety of Tiny BASICs with added features or other improvements, with versions from Tom Pittman and Li-Chen Wang becoming particularly well known.[23]

> Micro-Soft, by this time Microsoft, ported their interpreter for the MOS 6502, which quickly become one of the most popular microprocessors of the 8-bit era. When new microcomputers began to appear, notably the "1977 trinity" of the TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II, they either included a version of the MS code, or quickly introduced new models with it. Ohio Scientific's personal computers also joined ...

> When IBM was designing the IBM PC, they followed the paradigm of existing home computers in having a built-in BASIC interpreter. They sourced this from Microsoft – IBM Cassette BASIC – but Microsoft also produced several other versions of BASIC for MS-DOS/PC DOS including IBM Disk BASIC (BASIC D), IBM BASICA (BASIC A), GW-BASIC (a BASICA-compatible version that did not need IBM's ROM)[28] and QBasic, all typically bundled with the machine. In addition they produced the Microsoft BASIC Compiler aimed at professional programmers. Turbo Pascal-publisher Borland published Turbo Basic 1.0 in 1985 (successor versions are still being marketed under the name PowerBASIC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

In some sense of the word, it is. Maybe not take everything completely literally, it'll make your life easier.

[lallysingh]

You could find some vestigial BASIC in the DOS batch language.

[TheRealDunkirk]

We all know. It doesn’t change the discussion of the topic in the slightest.

[retrac]

Some of the code in the libre software I use every day is 30+ years old. And if you're on a BSD you have code in your kernel copyright 1979.

The modern software environment works, I think, just from the sheer quantity of useful building and patch materials. To run with the building metaphor, it's like having specialized supplies on-hand so you can throw up a passable shed in a weekend with just duct tape and a screwdriver.