I'm guessing some on the hacker news crowd already know this but the author neal Stephenson also wrote Crytonomicon which was the prerequisite reading book for the PayPal mafia back in the days. I've personally only read his book reamde but the accuracy in detail in the novels really reflect quite deep understanding of the tech world including the shadier parts
Cryptonomicon is OK, but far inferior to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I think the latter is an incredibly inspiring vision of technology used for good, as opposed to how today’s best and brightest are focusing their energy into increasing ad click-through conversion rates by 3%.
Diamond Age was amazing when I read it in 2008. I couldn’t believe it had been written in ‘95, given its vision of (what we call) 3d printers, Amazon Turks, software mediated 1:1 relationships, etc. I imagine reading it today, it would read as a likely near-future-history, but in 95 it must have seemed laden with far-fetched original invention, both technological and societal.
Hmm, I read Snow Crash a few years back, mainly due to the praise. It was certainly a good book, but quite honestly I felt it was overrated. I'm in my late 20s, and it's very possible the book was revolutionary and groundbreaking in 1992, but it does show some age nowadays.
Even though the technology was mostly “used for good” it was still a nightmarish dystopia except for the tiny elite phyles. Nanotech was under tight centralized control, as the Foresight Foundation recommends, in the book, but numerous disasters happened anyway. Most of the population lived lives of miserable degradation despite enjoying material abundance due to the assemblers.
the specific near-future tech product that Stephenson suggested in it never happened – he didn’t in 1999 predict ubiquitous smartphones even though they were less than a decade away. In contrast, Reamde still seems ‘right’ but that’s because it doesn’t contain technology predictions.
I downloaded the article to see if see if it also contained predictions, and if so, whether they were accurate. In classic Stephenson style, the article is a long (60 page) discursive essay, so my check might take a while….
cryptonomicon wasn't quite supposed to be predictive, though it did "predict" crypto currency. It was and always has been science Fiction, evidence being - ask yourself, how did Enoch Root die in Switzerland and then appear later in a jail cell in the Philippines?
The question was surprisingly answered in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" in a way I really wasn't expecting but did make it clear that this was an entirely made up universe.
Think of Stephenson's answer to the question, "why call what is obvious Linux, 'Finux?'" He wrote, "for the same reason it's metropolis and not new York." He wanted to be allowed to do whatever he wanted to without horde of Linux users filling up his (now non-existent) inbox. Same for his universe - like ours, but dissimilar enough to allow him to get away with pretty much anything.
Stephenson had a great sideline in really deep-dive nonfiction pieces there for a while (around the same time that Wired was experimenting with running them, in print). It was a pretty great combination.
I bought it in paperback as well, and read and loved it immediately. I then gave it to a young programmer I met in Sapporo, who was (at the time) working with BeOS.
I have the text version (the proper one, I suppose!) on my laptop as I type.
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don’t know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Speculative economists take note: abundance is hard.
I think he linked it so new readers can see the older comments and get clued in to the conversation. (:
I remember reading In the beginning was the command line back in high school. I liked the comparison with cars. I'm a little sad I never got to use the BeOS that the author so much likens to a batmobile (going from memory). This article even has its own Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...
For new readers, I'd also strongly recommend "Mother Earth Mother Board" by the same author, Neal Stephenson. In Mother Earth Mother Board, the author writes about the fiber optic cables that connect us across continents.
I loved this essay, and own a paperback copy. I also loved his novels Zodiac, REAMDE (a fast, fun read), and Anathem, which was a tough read at first, but I ended up loving it. (I started the first novel of his Baroque Cycle but got bogged down and never finished those ones.)
If you read Zodiac, Anathem and (part of) the Baroque Cycle I assume you’ve read his other books (Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Snowcrash...). If not, lucky you!
I discovered Stephenson with Anathem and I was hooked. This book doesn’t get a lot of love it seems, maybe because it’s not Stephenson's usual cyberpunk / near future sci-fi (and maybe because of all the made-up words and history—there’s even an xkcd comic about it). But (SPOILERS) you gotta admire a book that starts like The Name of the Rose and finishes in a nuke-propelled starship.
Gates worked as a programmer in high school, so he was aware that the practice of selling software was not new. IBM was a long standing company by that point that made money writing software for businesses. The first example of a person making money from machine instructions was Jaquard (1804) who encoded his instructions on punch cards and fed them into weaving machines to create pretty patterns. So graphics programmers came first.
IBM didn't sell software until the consent decree forced them to, and Jacquard cards (or dobby patterns for that matter) are uncompressed graphics files, not programs to generate graphics algorithmically. Many machines in the 1950s used Williams-tube memory and drove additional visible CRTs from the signals, so every program was a graphics program. But that was a century after Lovelace.
Jacquard and dobby patterns were generally created by employees of the loom owner.
Readit News
It's also not real clear that the outcome of the primer is a positive for the Mouse Army.
...Spoilers....
the specific near-future tech product that Stephenson suggested in it never happened – he didn’t in 1999 predict ubiquitous smartphones even though they were less than a decade away. In contrast, Reamde still seems ‘right’ but that’s because it doesn’t contain technology predictions.
I downloaded the article to see if see if it also contained predictions, and if so, whether they were accurate. In classic Stephenson style, the article is a long (60 page) discursive essay, so my check might take a while….
.
.
cryptonomicon wasn't quite supposed to be predictive, though it did "predict" crypto currency. It was and always has been science Fiction, evidence being - ask yourself, how did Enoch Root die in Switzerland and then appear later in a jail cell in the Philippines?
The question was surprisingly answered in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" in a way I really wasn't expecting but did make it clear that this was an entirely made up universe.
Think of Stephenson's answer to the question, "why call what is obvious Linux, 'Finux?'" He wrote, "for the same reason it's metropolis and not new York." He wanted to be allowed to do whatever he wanted to without horde of Linux users filling up his (now non-existent) inbox. Same for his universe - like ours, but dissimilar enough to allow him to get away with pretty much anything.
Stephenson had a great sideline in really deep-dive nonfiction pieces there for a while (around the same time that Wired was experimenting with running them, in print). It was a pretty great combination.
https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-was-Command-Line/dp/0380815...
Edit: Amazon informs me that I purchased it on 19 June 2000.
I have the text version (the proper one, I suppose!) on my laptop as I type.
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Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don’t know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Speculative economists take note: abundance is hard.
I remember reading In the beginning was the command line back in high school. I liked the comparison with cars. I'm a little sad I never got to use the BeOS that the author so much likens to a batmobile (going from memory). This article even has its own Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...
For new readers, I'd also strongly recommend "Mother Earth Mother Board" by the same author, Neal Stephenson. In Mother Earth Mother Board, the author writes about the fiber optic cables that connect us across continents.
Original: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
Previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635028
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8242682
I discovered Stephenson with Anathem and I was hooked. This book doesn’t get a lot of love it seems, maybe because it’s not Stephenson's usual cyberpunk / near future sci-fi (and maybe because of all the made-up words and history—there’s even an xkcd comic about it). But (SPOILERS) you gotta admire a book that starts like The Name of the Rose and finishes in a nuke-propelled starship.
Jacquard and dobby patterns were generally created by employees of the loom owner.