Image © Computer History Museum
Nick Carr posted on complex technological systems yesterday, on their past - and their presence.
"As a complex technological system evolves, it is rarely able to free itself of its past. Hidden inside it are the vestiges of all its former states, a ghostwork of progress."
He tells us about Thomas Edison and DC systems still in use in Manhattan and elsewhere until this day. An eye-opener that puts into a 125-year historical context what we usually complain about on a much smaller time scale. "What, you mean I can still use DOS commands in Vista?"
When you think about it, the signs of the past are everywhere. The DOS prompt in Vista, the Unix kernel of Leopard, the computer mouse (instead of pens and fingers), the QWERTY keyboard (instead of Dvorak or no keyboard at all), TV broadcast frequencies, and the COBOL and FORTRAN remnants all around (remember Y2K?).
BTW, in case you know the story of Grace Hopper - a US Navy admiral involved in the development of the COBOL precursor FLOW-MATIC, running on UNIVAC machines. It is told that she removed a moth from a Mark II computer relay in the 1940s as the first act of debugging. I learned today that the story is true indeed (picture of the moth above) but it seems not to be the origin of the term bug which was used years before by ...
... Edison in the year 1889: In that year, the Pall Mall Gazette reported that "Mr. Edison...had been up the two previous nights discovering a 'bug' in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble."
[If you like historical newspaper articles, make sure to have a look at Tesla's DC advantages from 1894 in addition to the article on Edison from 1882.]
Read Nick Carr's Rough Type! | Read lifehack.org (on Edison versus Tesla)!
Get the 
Comments by DISQUS