permacomputing

history.mdwn (4996B)

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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 permacomputing and similar alternative ways of thinking more 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|Californian ideology]] 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.
 * 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.