commit f68185da9415a1df4c7bae86c8e9e17b0d839afa
parent 51771a93159b181f8fca1ec88cab6dce5aa34997
Author: Ville-Matias Heikkila <viznut@low.fi>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:35:23 +0300
add pages
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diff --git a/Niklaus_Wirth.mdwn b/Niklaus_Wirth.mdwn
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+**Niklaus Wirth** (born 1934 in Switzerland) is one of the most prominent
+computer scientists, mostly known for developing Pascal and several other
+programming languages.
+
+A lot of Wirth's work is related to concretely proving that [[bloat]] is not
+a necessity and that smaller and more elegant computing is possible:
+
+The **Lilith** workstation, the design of which started in the late 1970s,
+was Wirth's idea of a personal computer. It was inspired by the
+[[Xerox Alto]] but particularly aimed at students with the aim of being
+powerful and simple at the same time. Lilith is thoroughly built around the
+Modula-2 programming language, even the microcode is compiled from a variant
+of Modula-2. The [[stack-based]] instruction set architecture reached
+competitive speeds particularly thanks to the high code density, and it also
+helped keep the Modula-2 compiler fast and simple.
+
+**[[Oberon]]** is an operating system centered around the
+[[object-oriented]] Oberon programming language, with the guiding principles
+of clarity and simplicity. A major reason to its existence was proving that
+a full graphical and modern operating system with a software development
+environment is possible in a moderate size (a couple of hundred kilobytes).
+It has also been used as Wirth as an example of **lean software**. Oberon is
+still being developed and maintained, largely by Wirth himself.
+
+**Wirth's law** is Wirth's variant of the [[Jevons paradox]]: Software
+is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.
diff --git a/history.mdwn b/history.mdwn
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+**History** refers to the study, documentation and narrating of
+the past. Knowing and understanding of the past is essential
+when envisioning, planning and building the future. The way how
+history is told affects the ways in which future can be
+imagined.
+
+Since permacomputing envisions a long-term future of the
+computing that, it needs to tell the **history of computing**
+in ways that make it relevant.
+
+Problems of mainstream computing history
+----------------------------------------
+
+A lot of things get eliminated from the mainstream narrative
+for various reasons:
+
+* It is essentially "winners' history":
+ * The developments in the US are overemphasized in comparison
+ to what happened in the rest of the world, sometimes even
+ eliminating prior art: Vannevar Bush's "Memex" vision was
+ not that original (see Paul Otlet), Douglas Engelbart was
+ not the first one to invent a mouse (see Telefunken's
+ Rollkugel), etc. etc.
+ * The history of computer networking is told in ways that
+ eliminates non-Internet networks, some of which were still
+ quite prominent in the 1980s. [[BBS]]es are sometimes
+ mentioned as a side curiosity because they are part of the
+ "consumer history", but what about BITNET, DECnet, etc.?
+ Even Minitel is scarcely mentioned even though it had
+ millions of users already in the 1980s, maybe because it
+ was French and therefore irrelevant.
+ * The history of personal computing very much centers around
+ a Californian narrative where the young enterpreneurs (such
+ as Steve Jobs) were the heroes who liberated the world from
+ the evil mainframe culture. This is sometimes intertwined
+ with a more general "hacker mythos" even though its
+ approach to liberation was often largely non-commercial.
+* It is also very much "consumer history" especially from the
+ 1980s onward. Consumer-grade hardware and their applications
+ (especially games) get a lot of love, and even a lot of
+ obscure platforms from small countries are documented.
+ However, it is often very difficult to even find mentions of
+ prominent institutional or scientific projects, strange
+ non-US hobbyist subcultures, etc.
+* There have been conscious attempts to make earlier
+ developments irrelevant or obsolete, especially in Internet
+ history:
+ * The "Internet years" idea in the late 1990s ("one year in
+ cyberspace is equivalent to ten years in meatspace" etc.)
+ was perhaps invented because researchers did not want to do
+ their homework. The pre-WWW Internet was so long ago in
+ Internet years that it was in a different era that didn't
+ need to be studied.
+ * "Social media" was defined in a way that made it possible
+ to start its history from the 2000s (again, eliminating
+ BBSes, Usenet, IRC, etc.)
+ * In general, each new user generation wants to pretend it
+ invented more things than it actually did.
+* Local histories are understudied, especially those of
+ non-Western countries. The same applies to minorities, women,
+ lower social classes and many other group that don't get to
+ be as loud as the affluent white Californian males.
+
+Problems in how the story is told:
+
+* The overarching story is that of economic growth and
+ maximization. Hardware systems are divided into "generations"
+ (that may sometimes be only a few years in length) that are
+ intended to obsolete the previous generation. Big companies
+ and their business "achievements" (such as the establishment
+ of [[monoculture]]s) get a lot of praise.
+* This "chain of obsolescence" narrows the technological
+ history down to a one-dimensional "highway of progress" where
+ there are only two possible directions ("forward" and
+ "backward"). This makes it difficult to envision other
+ directions and represent them in ways that don't sound
+ "backward".
+* The concept of "[[retro]]" is used to separate some parts of
+ history and technology into a different world that is only
+ relevant to personal memories. This world is also the place
+ for "backwards" ways of thinking (such as the appreciation of
+ small and efficient program code that can't be justified from
+ business perspectives, or the acknowledgement of the benefits
+ of earlier communications systems in comparison to modern
+ social media).
+
+Ideas and examples
+------------------
+
+* **Siliconization** is a concept that is used in Romania to
+ refer to how their local technocultural practices
+ ("șmecherie") were replaced by an imported "silicon valley"
+ model in the 1990s. This phenomenon was particularly
+ prominent in Eastern European countries after the fall of the
+ USSR, but similar replacements also took place in many other
+ countries at this time. In Western Europe, this era is often
+ connected to the marginalization of the earlier home computer
+ cultures by a "Wintel" monoculture and the normalization of
+ constant hardware "up"grades.
+* Eriksson and Pargman have suggested the use of
+ **counterfactual history** as a tool to imagine computing
+ futures. It is often difficult for students and other people
+ to even imagine a computing world that is not built around
+ [[Moore's law]], so for example imagining how computing might
+ have evolved in a low-coal world can be helpful at making
+ this kind of conceptual leap.
diff --git a/time-sharing.mdwn b/time-sharing.mdwn
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+Time-sharing
+============
+
+**Time-sharing** usually refers to the shared simultaneous use
+of a large computer by several users using small computers or
+terminals, but the term can be expanded to any shared or
+multi-user use of computer hardware.
+
+Server-based time-sharing
+-------------------------
+
+This is the oldest type of time-sharing originating from the
+decades when computers were very expensive. However, it has
+recently returned to prominence of broadband Internet
+connections: [[cloud computing]], [[software as a service]],
+etc.
+
+The difference is that while the original form represented a
+more efficient use of computing resources (and a more
+immediate, [[interactive access|character terminal]] to those
+resources), the current trend is more closely connected to
+corporate interests and "intellectual property". Software that
+depends on an external server cannot be pirated as easily. The
+network bandwidth requirements often make the use of this kind
+of software consume a lot more energy than running equivalent
+software locally.
+
+Distributed public computing
+----------------------------
+
+This is the idea of using the spare computing power of small
+computers to assist in a large-scale computing task –
+essentially the opposite of server-based time-sharing.
+Seti@Home was an early prominent example of this.
+
+This was a particularly relevant idea when a lot of users had
+powerful personal computers that consumed a lot of energy even
+when running idle, but nowadays more care is needed when
+assessing such projects.
+
+Sharing of computers
+--------------------
+
+This refers to the use of a single personal computer by several
+people. This may be a computer shared within a family or a
+community, or a public computers/terminals located in a place
+like an Internet Cafe, a computer classroom or a public
+library.
+
+Currently, the industry pushes everyone to own a personal
+computing device (especially a smartphone), which is causing a
+huge environmental impact which is further multiplied by
+[[planned obsolescence]]. This is accompanied by a
+psychological impact which is arguably more negative than
+positive especially if "online" becomes the default state of
+mind. Revitalizing of computer sharing might help tremendously
+with these problems.
