developer.* Blogs - Review of Markoff is available at Amazon - Comments

At Midnight, all the agents

Andy Tegethoff — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 14:14:40 -0800

Mmmm.... Dylan.....
Where was I? Oh yes -- good review, Ed. This book would actually have interested me, but you took it out of my queue.

I agree with Jeff

Edward G Nilges — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 20:32:47 -0800

...but I would add that in the summer of 1973 I experienced first hand a Hegelian contradiction when I realized that I wasn't the only Freak to become addicted to programming, a contradiction of the sort that may have passed through Shakespeare when he experienced the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism first hand.

I was on the mailing lists of the early players including the People's Computer Company and I discovered that while most "liberal" people in Chicago thought computers were tools of evil, there were some people who "looked" cool in faraway California who also like me were fascinated by software.

One confusion that Markoff spreads is that we were fascinated by machines and technology per se. But if one reads David Gerlenter in a strong sense we carried our hatred of Moloch (the image Allen Ginsberg used of midcentury rust belt technology in Howl) into software which for us represented a dialectical engagement with and triumph over Moloch-the-machine.

When I learned that "any computer can be programmed to simulate any other computer given time and space" I was like, cool, and I proposed to my boss at Roosevelt University's computer center that INSTEAD of begging IBM for an educational discounted IBM System/360-20, we should take the existing 1401 and program simulators of major architectures (including the 360 and the DEC PDP 8) to base our teaching of applied computer science.

But one IBM salesman told me my code was "disruptive". I'd told him while he was "researching" our current practice that I used /* as an end marker for card decks in order to handle multiple batches in a single run.

He said I had "disrupted" IBM's plans to convert Roosevelt to the 360 because JCL (Job Control Language, the worst quasi-programming-language ever made) used this symbol.

I should have learned then and there that no more than the lawn trolls with their beards and sandals, the suits were not my pals either, and they would alternatively use my skills and throw me aside, like Willie Loman. I should have lit out for China then and there. But I figgered that a real man would keep beating his head on a stone wall, like my father and his father before me.

Markoff and the suits thought we liked machines. The suits would give us machines and pat us on the head. They didn't even realize that Bob Dylan's Desolation Row was running through our heads: "where the heart attack machine, is strapped on to their bodies, and then the kerosene".

However, the software itself was reified and was turned to stone as heavy as the moon when it became third party, closed source.

Which is not to say that Open Source was not itself Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, as I imply in the review.

Perhaps, as the wimmen were saying at the time, we were ALL stinkers...half of us in suits becoming Yuppie thugs and the other half taking credit for other people's work in beards in sandals.

Historical change is a time of real contradiction. My father could not understand, if I wanted in 1970 to be a programmer, why I would not get a haircut: he'd visited the computer center at Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago, and, he reported, the programmers had short hair and wore jackets and ties. But I wanted to be a programmer precisely because I would no longer have to live at my father's house and obey his rules.

Years later, my son-the-C++-whiz saw the same paradox when in 1995 I became totally addicted to Visual Basic. He said, Dad, if you think Microsoft is evil then why don't you at least use Delphi?

The situation is very complex. Visual Basic gave me a wider audience for my book and there is good and evil in everything, as in the Shadow Play of Indonesia.

Nicely Done

Daniel Read — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:38:31 -0800

I like the review. While you're hard on the book (I have not read it), you explain why in the review. I liked this especially:

Basically, you don't get into the ethnocentric playbook without the proper background. Furthermore, Wirth, like his mentor and friend Edsger Dijkstra (who is unmentioned in the book as a critic of drug-addled development) were in the Californian-Markoff scheme of things speed bumps in the way of a reified and commodified Progress because both had the bad grace to think critically about software, and neither thought that Great Men should never code actual software unless their Greatness be deconstructed.

Another critical review on Amazon, by Jerry Saperstein, had this to say:

The Bay Area did have a heavy concentration of scientifically oriented universities, many engineers, technicians and scientists and a lot of companies requiring those skills. So it is not at all surprising that lots of ideas about computers and their uses came from these people and this area. Likewise, it wasn't surprising that so many automobile companies --- and there were dozens at one time --- located in Detroit, where the earliest pioneers were. It would be difficult for someone to argue that Henry Ford's auto manufacturing revolution stemmed from Detroit's culture of the time, much less its counterculture. But that's essentially what Markoff attempts here.

Worse, he links much of it to a bunch of groups he acknowledges, if not admits, were more oriented toward the goals of Stalin and Mao. Markoff glosses over the fact that it was taxpayer and corporate funding that made all of the developments he describes possible. Overall, Markoff attepts to connect coincidence (the rise of the counterculture) with the inexorable quest for new technology.

What do you think?

Dan

Review of Markoff is available at Amazon

Edward G Nilges — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 03:36:36 -0800

My review of What the Dormouse Said can be found here on Amazon.