Retrospection & The Waste Land
[Don't click on the link yet, even if you're looking for the greatest poem of the millennium just past.]
I'm glad for the encouragement I receive from fellow ACSians, whether they're self-named cows or avenging angels. Of course, there's still some sort of divide - I believe I'm right when I say that students see me as the product of a different generation. And of course, they'd be right. But what is the nature of this divide, this memetic gap?
I think that as in all the eras of Man's history, the same things divide us. They're a combination of technological and social factors. In every age of Man, the qualitative generational divide is the same - all parents in general believe theirs was a golden age, and that their offspring hail from a less cultured one. Why is this so? It's because our nature as a species is to remember either extreme trauma or extreme pleasure - anything extreme - and to slowly lose the rest. So it is always 'the best of times... the worst of times' and Great Expectations. So let's forget about the qualitative divide, because we can't do anything about it except grow up, suddenly realise we're the older generation (or worse, the oldest) and seek forgiveness.
Let's look at the quantitative divide, though. Most of my readers know Moore's 'Law' very well. Essentially, it says that computer capacity doubles for every succeeding identical period of time. What does this mean in real, human terms?
I grew up learning BASIC and Pascal. I did programming in binary, hexadecimal, and assembly language. At the worst, I had to program 1-bit (we're talking about the register storage capacity here) machines by switching things on and off manually. In 1980, the Sinclair ZX80 had an onboard memory of 1K. It was huge. By 1983, my Apple II Europlus had as much as 128K if you closed one eye and opened one page. It did this at a speed of about 8 kHz, on a good day. In 1985, the last of the 8-inch diskettes were being phased out together with dedicated word-processing machines.
In 1988, I established an Internet identity. I was Wanderer, and there wasn't much anyone else could do about it as I prowled through unguarded university and government systems. In 1992, you still couldn't access many large databases, genomics was a faint and disturbing whisper, and I was on my third Mac. If you had a 20 Mb hard disk, you were pretty happy (I remember when a 1 Mb HD cost almost $10k). But I had my own webpage, which was cool. Machines were hitting the heavy kHz speeds, though far away from the GHz level.
I'm typing this on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4. It has 768 Mb of SDRAM. This excludes the video memory, which wasn't the case 20 years ago (in those days, your program could collide with video RAM and do weird things; sometimes this was deliberate).
Qualitatively, a geek these days is as obsessive as a geek in those days. But what we obsessed about was different. I don't know if anybody still remembers the Beagle Brothers' 'what is the coolest program you can make in one line of code' competitions. A big, complicated CRPG might take up 256K of space on your HD and provide 6 weeks of entertainment. We had so little space that we obsessed about elegance and miniaturization of code. This is less common now; there is a lot more space.
In the early 1980s, we still used stencils for printing. If you made an error, you had to patch it up by plastering pink eradicator fluid over the mistake so that ink wouldn't get through. Word processing was in its infancy. You might as well have been making cuneiform inscriptions on clay tablets. This meant that we tried to be a whole lot more careful. Nowadays, it's a lot easier, so people don't care so much about errors, and it shows.
So what has all this 'you young people don't know about the bad old days' stuff got to do with the greatest English-language poem of the 20th century? Here's a quotation from it. Part 4 of 'The Waste Land', text:
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Yes, every generation looks at the dying of its elders, often with pity, sometimes with confusion, or even with affective dissonance. But remember, O you who will someday be turning the wheel into the gathering storm, we were once handsome and as tall as you.
I'm glad for the encouragement I receive from fellow ACSians, whether they're self-named cows or avenging angels. Of course, there's still some sort of divide - I believe I'm right when I say that students see me as the product of a different generation. And of course, they'd be right. But what is the nature of this divide, this memetic gap?
I think that as in all the eras of Man's history, the same things divide us. They're a combination of technological and social factors. In every age of Man, the qualitative generational divide is the same - all parents in general believe theirs was a golden age, and that their offspring hail from a less cultured one. Why is this so? It's because our nature as a species is to remember either extreme trauma or extreme pleasure - anything extreme - and to slowly lose the rest. So it is always 'the best of times... the worst of times' and Great Expectations. So let's forget about the qualitative divide, because we can't do anything about it except grow up, suddenly realise we're the older generation (or worse, the oldest) and seek forgiveness.
Let's look at the quantitative divide, though. Most of my readers know Moore's 'Law' very well. Essentially, it says that computer capacity doubles for every succeeding identical period of time. What does this mean in real, human terms?
I grew up learning BASIC and Pascal. I did programming in binary, hexadecimal, and assembly language. At the worst, I had to program 1-bit (we're talking about the register storage capacity here) machines by switching things on and off manually. In 1980, the Sinclair ZX80 had an onboard memory of 1K. It was huge. By 1983, my Apple II Europlus had as much as 128K if you closed one eye and opened one page. It did this at a speed of about 8 kHz, on a good day. In 1985, the last of the 8-inch diskettes were being phased out together with dedicated word-processing machines.
In 1988, I established an Internet identity. I was Wanderer, and there wasn't much anyone else could do about it as I prowled through unguarded university and government systems. In 1992, you still couldn't access many large databases, genomics was a faint and disturbing whisper, and I was on my third Mac. If you had a 20 Mb hard disk, you were pretty happy (I remember when a 1 Mb HD cost almost $10k). But I had my own webpage, which was cool. Machines were hitting the heavy kHz speeds, though far away from the GHz level.
I'm typing this on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4. It has 768 Mb of SDRAM. This excludes the video memory, which wasn't the case 20 years ago (in those days, your program could collide with video RAM and do weird things; sometimes this was deliberate).
Qualitatively, a geek these days is as obsessive as a geek in those days. But what we obsessed about was different. I don't know if anybody still remembers the Beagle Brothers' 'what is the coolest program you can make in one line of code' competitions. A big, complicated CRPG might take up 256K of space on your HD and provide 6 weeks of entertainment. We had so little space that we obsessed about elegance and miniaturization of code. This is less common now; there is a lot more space.
In the early 1980s, we still used stencils for printing. If you made an error, you had to patch it up by plastering pink eradicator fluid over the mistake so that ink wouldn't get through. Word processing was in its infancy. You might as well have been making cuneiform inscriptions on clay tablets. This meant that we tried to be a whole lot more careful. Nowadays, it's a lot easier, so people don't care so much about errors, and it shows.
So what has all this 'you young people don't know about the bad old days' stuff got to do with the greatest English-language poem of the 20th century? Here's a quotation from it. Part 4 of 'The Waste Land', text:
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Yes, every generation looks at the dying of its elders, often with pity, sometimes with confusion, or even with affective dissonance. But remember, O you who will someday be turning the wheel into the gathering storm, we were once handsome and as tall as you.
etched with acid at 4:00:00 am
1 Comments:
...or anonymousnoises...
funny that you should have mentioned this but my 1992 pc was a top of the line 486 sx 25 with 120 MB HD and 4 MB RAM....and then there was those BBSes....and text-based MUDDs....
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