[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.

[marcosdumay]

On the other hand, they get some high-concentrated storages of refined materials, and we will leave lots of those rune-engraved panels that emit an unnatural power when exposed to light.

Anyway, unless we are talking about some really unprecedentedly disaster, we'll leave plenty of paper books to help them understand those things and bootstrap their society.

[delusional]

Unless we inexplicably decide to burn all of our accurate books because of some culture war.

[marcosdumay]

Has any book-burning movement in history actually succeeded in getting ride of the books?

Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a text here or there, but there were always some compatible texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful knowledge to them.

(And let's not forget that today we made life much harder for the book burners.)

What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless for a long period of time. As in losing all of CS because nobody can make a computer yet. But we have an instinct to preserve knowledge, even when it's absolutely useless. This has already saved a lot of technology, and it's hard to imagine how some disaster would stop it.

Personally, I have a hard time imagining something that would throw us at the stone (or bronze, or iron) age, but still fail to destroy all the life on Earth.

[norir]

Most of the early christian texts were suppressed and destroyed. In the 1940s some ancient texts that had been buried for nearly 2000 years were found in Egypt and not realizing their value, a family member used many of them for kindling. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, the existence of these materials was known from references in orthodox texts but they had been completely lost. Of course we have no idea of what was contained in the texts that were burned and we have no idea what else is out there so we don't even know what has been lost. Similarly, parmenides is considered by many philosophers to be the "father of logic" which he brought forth in a long poem. Unfortunately, we only have about 160 of the estimated 800 verses in the poem, so again we are lacking basic knowledge of the origins of our civilization that was written down at one time but has been lost.

Digital information seems especially likely to me to be lost over time because the recording nearly always requires an instrument to extract and these instruments do not have nearly the durability of books.

[johnnyworker]

> Has any book-burning movement in history actually succeeded in getting ride of the books?

> Because I don't know of any

Of course you haven't, by definition. We find out about the things that survive destruction, not the ones that don't.

edit:

As for the instinct to preserve knowledge, that's not all we have. We also have a profit-maximizing infection that spread to every organ, so to speak. Books printed today don't last very long. Heck, not even newspapers and tech companies give a crap about link rot! Archive.org is a team of volunteers. Wikipedia is very hit or miss, and the ego of some seems to override whatever "instinct" we might have real quick.

So, frankly, I'm not seeing it. Even computing is rotting from under our hands. The Amiga came with schematics of the machine as part of the manual, while nowadays repair shops have to hunt for info. If companies were allowed, they'd each have their own incompatible charger cable, you bet. And let's not even talk about about 100MB applications that do 100KB things, because it's easier for the developer to never care about anything close to the machine and just use the bloated tool chain they already know. Recently I asked for a good (as in, other than "Microsoft wants you to") reason to use Win 11, and just got downvoted. Ever since Win 11 was announced I haven't gotten one answer to that question, ever. There's people who turn their nose up at it, and people who use it who don't want to talk about why. I could go on.

> No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers. [..] An old and excellent book is frequently shelved for new and bad ones; which, written for the sake of money, wear a pretentious air and are much eulogised by the authors’ friends. In science, a man who wishes to distinguish himself brings something new to market; this frequently consists in his denouncing some principle that has been previously held as correct, so that he may establish a wrong one of his own. Sometimes his attempt is successful for a short time, when a return is made to the old and correct doctrine. These innovators are serious about nothing else in the world than their own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to make its mark.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

[chris37879]

Book-burning specifically, no, but the Nazis destroyed a lot of research from a German institute that studied gender issues. Knowledge of the place and some of its research still exists, but a lot of the research was simply gone once the Nazis rose to power. That seems like way less of a liability these days with the internet, but even that is prone to government meddling, and when the people that agree with book burnings run the government, well, there's a very famous prescient book on the topic.

[kragen]

yes, in most cases

the maya codices and the khipu were lost in very nearly their entirety, and the more abundant maya hieroglyphs carved on stone have been only partly deciphered. the khipu are entirely undeciphered except for arithmetic

of carthaginian literature not one book remains

the khwarazmian empire is known from the accounts of its neighbors and destroyers

qin shi huang ordered the burning of the history books for every kingdom he conquered; consequently what we know of most of them today is little more than legend, except for what the histories of qin tell us

in countless smaller-scale examples we don't even know the names of the nations that perished along with their language and books

[nuancebydefault]

I would say this is a text-book example of the term survivorship bias (smiley)

[me_me_me]

What a coincidence, I had that discussion with my friends yesterday.

We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get.

A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions to protect the knowledge, sounds like a game over scenario. Small clusters of agrarian people would not have resources to support an engineering department tasked with preserving knowledge that is useless for time being.

Slowly the tech that could have been re-used or restarted would deteriorate beyond usability, and then beyond repeatability.

Its a scary scenario, probably good basis for a book series... there is probably plenty of novels written with that scenario already ;)

[ianburrell]

I think slow collapse would be the best case. It would give time for technologies like blacksmithing to flourish. It would also mean that advanced technology could be used if couldn’t be produced. It would also mean civilization that could have reason to save books. Finally, there is an advantage to knowledge, technology, and science. We forget that pre-industrial technology can be produced on small scale, and that musket and steel armor is a huge advantage.

In a hard collapse, all of that would be lost trying to survive. Books would be burned for heat, electronics forgotten, and blacksmiths killed accidentally.

[daemonologist]

A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind, though while the preservation of knowledge after collapse is a central premise it is not what the novel is about, exactly. Worth reading in any case.

[me_me_me]

Sounds like my next book then :)

[littlestymaar]

> we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons

And basically every accessible ore deposits as well… You can't reach bronze age if there's no available copper nor tin, you just end up stuck in the stone age forever.

[eternityforest]

And yet there seems to be shockingly little effort towards making sure that doesn't happen. Why isn't there an underground bombproof chip fab somewhere?

It's like as if people don't really care about technological society, they just do what they always do, expand and try to do stuff that is hard and impressive, and if the computers went away... they'd be just as happy as a blacksmith or something...

Or maybe even happier.

[lolc]

A modern chip fab needs a supply chain the size of humanity. And you can't bury a reserve humanity in case the regular one goes bust. A buried chip fab would be scrapped for steel.

[stevezsa8]

23 years or so of lost knowledge can be regained in the grand scheme of things. But yes, the lack of easy access to coal and oil would be a problem. Maybe the next civilization will be more careful.

That's why I think we should all be trying to help keep society going. I try to do my bit. I just wish the preppers, survivalists, deniers would get involved in their community and try to save it too.

[Ensorceled]

I guess I'm kind of thinking of it from the point of view that of all the technologies that we are inventing to allow civilization to survive without coal and oil are the most likely to be lost.

[Tade0]

Unless it's a complete wipeout, there will be plenty of bicycles, solar panels and IKEA knives left - that's a significant leg up in rebuilding civilisation.

Before coal there was wood, before oil there was whaling - when the global population is under 1bln, energy isn't much of an issue.

The wars over it though - that would be the tough part.

[plagiarist]

I would really like to read a novel about future archeologists who rediscover brute force password lists and rainbow tables as they investigate a ruin. Oh, maybe they could be specifically looking for LLM models, LLMs being no longer possible to train due to energy costs.

[arethuza]

Only to discover (too late of course) that it was the LLMs that caused the collapse....

(See: AFUtD).

[lacrimacida]

LLMs and even weapons and nuclear bombs are harmless by themselves. It’s about who ends up in control of something that has the potential to do more harm than good then I could imagine it’s downhill from there.

[Loughla]

Ever read ringworld? Society without access to minerals and fuel resources. Untold technology that the natives have zero capacity to understand or harness. That thought was very engaging for me. Until all the rishing. Then it spiraled.

[ianburrell]

There is still a lot of surface coal deposits left. Big open pit mines in Wyoming and Germany. It isn’t the best coal, and is far from areas with ores. We will never mine it since would cause catastrophic warming.

[userbinator]

we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons

...and put much of it back into the earth in highly processed form, i.e. plastics in landfill.

[politician]

This is why I think that we should resolve the climate change crisis by reducing excess atmospheric carbon by seeding the oceans with iron. Oceanic iron seeding results in plankton blooms that consume atmospheric carbon. When the plankton dies, it accumulates on the seafloor. Over geologic time scales, the accumulated plankton will turn into hydrocarbons, renewing the supply of cheap fuels for a post-human civilization millions of years in the future.

[andrepd]

We can't even switch to renewables because that would make some capital owners slightly less money and you're thinking of civilisations millions of years in the future...

[throwaway96952]

Where I live, it's because the taxpayers would have to pay too much and would be exposed to a lot of outside risk (it's usually not that sunny here, and we don't have space for wind turbines nor where to landfill the replaced blades).

Here it's the capital owners pushing renewables because it's one of the easiest, cheapest, least objectionable (in case of solar) and least risky energy projects you can build on almost any useless piece of land (everywhere is near the grid in this country), but they just can't fulfill the demands of the state-owned energy company with their solar arrays and wind turbines. Hydro is out of the question, the water-environmentalists hate that - for good reasons I have to say.

There is a nearby country that "did" (legislated) the switch... In result, they are the most polluting ones in every metric (per capita, per kWh, per km^2) while having the most expensive electricity on the continent; all metrics are getting worse every year there. Not a good look for the switch, certainly doesn't make most voters in my country motivated to even try - and you'd need to convince half the country. Right now the support is around 5-10%.

In conclusion, given that both our worlds coexist at the same time - I think it's not that simple to switch and wouldn't be looking for the reason in either capitalists or states. Perhaps the technology is just not ready for a full-scale switch yet.

[rurp]

If modern society collapses, starting back over with the same approach isn't the best plan. Cheap hydrocarbons are sort of like VC funding. They have allowed society to advance extremely rapidly, in a totally unsustainable way. We have yet to find out if we can stick the landing on transitioning to a sustainable lifestyle. It's possible that humans just aren't wired in a way to responsibly manage the risks introduced by sufficiently advanced technology, at least not at the current rate of change.

In a post-apocalyptic world, survivors should really be rethinking the approach that brought that about. Avoiding the cheap hydrocarbon consumption phase might result in a much longer lasting civilazation next time around.

[ianburrell]

In addition to coal that I mentioned above, it should be possible to have industrial society with renewables. It wouldn’t be as high energy as ours or as industrialized. But if they knew the science and some technology they could skip the big iron phase.

Early power could come from burning wood and windmills. That doesn’t have enough power for smelting iron, but there is more than lots of iron, Electricity could come from concentrated solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal. Nuclear would be the big jump.

[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.

[agentultra]

Oh heck yes. Also a big influence on the video game, Caves of Qud [0] which I also particularly enjoy.

[0] https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Barathrum

[pilchard123]

It also made me think of 'By the Waters of Babylon' by Stephen Vincent Benét. Wikipedia tells me it was also (indeed, originally) published as 'The Place of the Gods'.

[benji-york]

Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the 1632 series[0], which is sort of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' in reverse.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series

[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.

[agentultra]

Exactly. A few people have attempted fabricating simple 8-bit CPUs in their garage but the yields are low without a clean room and it still requires an incredible amount of technology to get started. A good amount of how to set up a garage fabrication lab is probably available through bits of print media, if we're lucky... but recreating a garage from scratch by finding all of that information would be quite the feat.

[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.

[3-cheese-sundae]

And how exactly are they not?

[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.

[agentultra]

Right, I imagine they wouldn't be seeking out the little grey squares. Humans are curious however and the Wonderer is no different. They might only collect them as they come across them and ponder their meaning and reason for existence in those rare hours they have a little leisure time.

[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.

[cassianoleal]

MSX would boot to BASIC by default. It was possible to run MSX-DOS instead but not entirely necessary.

[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.

[zabzonk]

for example?

[richarme]

REM for comments

[drivers99]

"goto" also

[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.