frog hop

• I thought -- and nearly answered the person asking me -- that one of us in the Rust project had coined the term "borrow" as an ergonomic adaptation, because "region" and "alias" are clunky and nonintuitive. This was a retcon on my part! Easy to imagine, but wrong.


• Even more interesting to me is how many other works there are in the Related Works section of John's paper! Not just things I've seen before[1] (eg. Cyclone, Tofte & Talpin's ML Kit, Ada, Euclid[2]) but also a spectrum of delightfully weird others: Eiffel*, Islands, Balloons, FAP, ESC with its "virgin, pivot and plenary" references, etc. This reference-set pulls at threads happening in multiple teams/projects/institutions, all through the 90s, 80s, even back into the 1970s, eg. here is Reynolds grappling with it in 1978.

• precedents for "uniqueness" / "move-semantics" I'm pretty sure I knew about


• precedents for "mutable-aliasing control" I'm pretty sure I knew about

[3]: No relation. I know, right? How can this be?

1. That list is very US-centric and there are big, important lists I haven't made that cover computing history as it developed elsewhere. Big chunks of it happened in Europe and Asia, and I am sadly very ignorant of those histories still.


2. I haven't read all of them -- some are on an overlapping to-read list or glaring at me from the bookshelf -- but they're all well enough reviewed that I think they're worth including.


3. They're very scattershot, following threads I was interested in at one time or another, not a systematic attempt to "learn subject X" completely or faithfully.

• There is a huge institutional aspect to early computing. Governments and the military foot the bill for almost everything, and giant financial institutions (banks and insurance companies) do the rest. So it is important to understand what the institutions are interested in.


• The birthplace of a lot is WW2. There's no getting around it. There are vivid and lasting developments coming out of often-separate groups concerned with ballistics, intelligence and logistics, code-breaking, radar, and atomic weapons simulation. We are all basically working today with derivatives of the IAS machine -- any time someone describes a current machine as having a "Von Neumann Architecture" you can just mentally apply the footnote "atomic weapons simulation machine".


• There's a lot of tech-transfer of military stuff. Post-war, a lot of labs and R&D groups that got war funding went into business commercializing their stuff.


• There are two very distinct historical threads -- accounting uses and scientific uses -- that literally build different machines for a long time! Business machines and science machines are separate product lines. COBOL and FORTRAN. The IBM "360" project (along with PL/I) is, among other things, a merger of the two product lines into a single one. We still see echoes of this division in (say) the presence of separate binary floating point (science) and integer-and-BCD (business) instruction sets and datatypes.


• In the US there's a big east-coast / west-coast split based on trajectories of specific people and research groups. And the east coast is huge for most of the history! Route 128 is where the action is at for a very long time. Stanford's postwar commercialization of microwave research on the west coast and Shockley's subsequent move to set up shop in Mountain View set in motion a long shift in the center of gravity, but even today MIT is still MIT for a reason.


• Besides the east-west split there's also a fascinating and very significant US-midwest (Minnesota specifically) trajectory to follow around a decommissioned US naval codebreaking group called ERA that is probably the most vivid "huge in the past, forgotten by today's youth" contrast story. This is the group that hired Seymour Cray, worked on contracts for the office of naval research for a while, bounced around ownership by some east coast companies for a bit but eventually settled into being "Control Data" for a while before forking off again as an impatient and independent Cray Research.


• There are two very large and very long-lived companies that dominate the history, that again we tend not to think too much about in recent years: IBM and AT&T / "The Bell System". It's really hard to overstate how dominant these firms were. For much of the 20th century -- and these really are century-old companies, founded in the late 1800s! -- "computer" was really synonymous with "IBM" and "telecommunication" was synonymous with "AT&T/Bell". Nobody could come anywhere near them, everything else was just a rounding error in terms of scale. The fact that both of them lost control of their natural territory around the birth of microcomputers is part of what gives that era such a different flavor (along with, obviously, the temporary transition to a personal / home / hobbyist stance -- much of which has unravelled in the post-2010 modern Big Tech era)


• Older computers were physically huge and were constantly struggling with physical problems: heat like today, but also power, weight, faulty parts, assembly and maintenance costs. And they were often changing technology as new types of memory and logic gates gained the advantage: electromechanical machines, vacuum-tube machines, discrete transistorized machines. The consolidation on integrated-circuit microchips (where the whole computer is one tiny slab of silicon) took a very long time to occur.


• What we nowadays think of as "online culture" or "cyberculture" did incubate on hobbyist BBSs and usenet and such in the late-80s but it actually has its origins in much earlier student use in the 70s and even 60s of institutional time-sharing systems intentionally repurposed for education -- PLATO and DTSS. It wasn't all stuffy science-and-accounting! People were sharing recipes and jokes, teaching each other crude programming languages, arguing politics, playing games and finding love online using mainframes and remote terminals decades before they were doing so with microcomputers and modems.


• As I've mentioned before, any history-reading is necessarily partial, incomplete, biased, overlapping and messy. You will only get part of any picture, and you can follow endlessly-earlier to find more and more material, of sketchier and sketchier certainty and more and more author-imbued bias. Studying early computing can easily drag you back past 19th century mechanical tabulators and telegraph-operator culture all the way to the deep history of logic and philosophy, where people have struggled with "formalizing thinking" (for various reasons) for centuries. Embrace the depth of it! But also don't imagine you ever know it all; anything new you learn that's worthwhile will expand rather than contract the set of things have left to learn.

But to see mechanization and automation purely as a problem in comparative cost is greatly to minimize their role -- and to pay further for the error of confining economic goals, and economic calculation, to profit maximization. The technostructure, as noted, seeks technical progressiveness for its own sake when this is not in conflict with other goals. More important, it seeks certainty in the supply and price of all the prime requisites for production. Labor is a prime requisite. And a large blue-collar labor force, especially if subject to the external authority of a union, introduces an element of uncertainty and danger. Its cost is not under the control of the technostructure, although in the planning system there is, of course, the power to offset labor cost changes with price changes. There remains the risk and consequences of a strike.

In contrast, mechanization adds to certainty. Machines do not yet go on strike. The prices are subject to the considerable certainty which, we have seen, is inherent in the contractual relationships between large firms. The capital by which the machinery is provided comes in large proportion from the internal savings of the firm. More white-collar workers and more members of the technostructure will be required with mechanization. But white-collar workers tend to identify themselves with the goals of the technostructure with which they are fused. Such is the result of replacing twenty blue-collar workers with two men or women knowledgable in computers.

If children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. The childishness noticeable in medieval behaviour, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years. About half the population, it has been estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under fourteen.

Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century

Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to (some) growth.

I am also concerned to show how, in this larger context of change, the forces inducing human effort have changed. This assaults the most majestic of all economic assumptions, namely that man, in his economic activities, is subject to the authority of the market. Instead we have an economic system which, whatever its formal ideological billing, is, in substantial part, a planned economy. The initiative in deciding what is to be produced comes not from the sovereign consumer who, through the market, issues the instructions that bend the productive mechanism to his ultimate will. Rather it comes from the great producing organization which reaches forward to control the markets that it is presumed to serve and, beyond, to bend the customer to its needs. And, in so doing it deeply influences the values and beliefs -- including not a few that will be mobilized in resistance to the present argument. One of the conclusions that follows from this analysis is that there is a broad convergence between industrial systems. The imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economic society. This, on the whole, is fortunate, although it will not necessarily be welcomed by those whose intellectual capital and moral fervor are invested in the present image of the market economy as the antithesis of social planning. Nor will it be welcomed by their disciples, who, with even smaller intellectual investment, carry the banners of free markets and free enterprise therewith, by definition, of the free nations into political, diplomatic, or military battle. Nor will it be welcomed by those who identify planning exclusively with socialism.

[...]

Accordingly, in the later chapters I turn to the effect of economic change on social and political behaviour, and to remedy and reform. As noted, I am led to the conclusion, which I trust others will find persuasive, that we are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us. This is, in many ways, a comfortable servitude; some will look with wonder, and perhaps even indignation, on anyone who proposes escape. Some people are never content. I am concerned to suggest the general lines of emancipation. Otherwise we will allow economic goals to have an undue monopoly of our lives and at the expense of other and more valuable interests. What counts is not the quantity of our goods but the quality of life.

John Kenneth Galbraith -- The New Industrial State