💾 Archived View for soviet.circumlunar.space › zwatotem › diff › intro.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:36:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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If you are reading this and are not Zwatotem, then I can congratulate myself for finally publishing a gemlog. It may not be the greatest at the beginning, but with time more experience comes.
This part of my capsule will probably be more loose than the snapshot part, there will be side commentary and personal details from my experience.
As I learned about the history of technology, I started to understand how evolution rules not only the animal world, but also human world, technology in particular. Have you ever wondered, why birds have beaks, why do we have 10-fingered hands, why do we even function the way we do, with these concrete chemical reactions in our cells, and not different ones, with the process of breathing and blood circulation? The richness of chemistry is so great I bet you could eventually construct a system with similar degree of complexity, but based on different chemical substances and processes. The only thing limiting us from doing so is incredible complexity of life. But ultimatelly what I wanted to sit on a fact, that this one set of features we might be asking about, are determined by evolution. This means that "experiments" were conducted, and many of them failed. But those, which didn't (or should I say failed the least) became a wide standard and a base for future "genetic experiments". Nobody claims the results were optimal. But they were good enough to compete with all the rest. (This is a common problem of machine learning by the way: how do we make a model not only find local optimum, but also a global one.) Unfortunatelly, evolution does not come with a way to solve this problem.
Now, to the similarities between classic biologist evolution and the evolution of tech systems. I think you can now see, where this is going. The tech systems were improved iteratively and evolutionary. New solutions were frequently kept compatible with the old ones, which is nothing bad, but holds back innovation. At the same time everyone was looking for new possibilities and tried to build them into existing tech.
My favourite examples of this are desktop operating systems. Most systems (in number, not in userbase) are a direct decendents of UNIX. UNIX system despite it's name was built for multiple user access, and as a result it keeps a strong emphases on separation of user content. These systems also greatly care about terminal support (although I'm not sure, if I would be able to connect to most of them with succes, using a traditional phisical terminal). There are many terminal focused programs, which certainly would not work with traditional terminal with paper feed, like text editors, web browsers, mail clients. They all use a backspace character to override screen content, but obviously you cannot erase characters from a tape of paper. The other thing I really don't like about these systems is how text focused they are overall. sed, grep, awk - there are all very powerfull, but at the same time all feel extremaly janky in use (especially after you came from Powershell, but that's a material for another day). And this text based approach is a common thing among almost every software system there exist, not only OS-es. That is understandable in the world of slow storage media and serial input/output devices. But today, when user interaction is done through two dimentional multi-million pixel device, and storage can be done quickly in a random access manner this approach makes little sense outside of networking (which is still unavoidably a serial medium).
The other example I wanted to mention is mobile phone form factor. You can check out a show that I like out there on the web, dedicated to this very problem:
When phones where fun (youtube)
Since the very first IPhone hit the market all the phones started approaching the same look and feel: bigger and bigger touch screens, less and less buttons. To me this is nonesense. Now no phones can turn back into decently sized phones with keypads, which I liked for their perfect fit for a pocket and ability for navigation without looking at the screen. I think the shift of lots of usecases from laptops to phones was unnecesserly hurting the goal of compactness, that manufacturers used to care about in the past.
Enough of that for now, I've written this post for over two weeks on and off now. I could write more particular cases, but I think I should leave something for future releases. Also as of now I just written about how things are, not how they should be (which is the ultimate goal of this gemlog), so the other side of this capsule will stay empty for now. Stand by to see it appearing and growing.