Friday, August 29, 2008

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Fall Syllabi?

Noticed that Amanda Gailey, who teaches digital humanities at University of Georgia, has included Mechanisms on her fall syllabi (thanks Amanda; if you see this please encourage your students to follow the blog and post questions here).

If you're teaching the book, or know of others who are, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Friday, August 1, 2008

July/August Open Thread

Questions, comments, have at.

Living With a Computer (in 1982)

Just read through James Fallows "Living With a Computer," a piece he wrote for The Atlantic back in 1982. Fallows, then a recent convert to word processing, enthusiastically sang the praises of his first system, a Processor Technology SOL-20 running a software package called Electric Pencil.

It's a fascinating look into the early home computer industry, and also a bracing reminder of how much certain fundamental affordances of the computing experience have changed over the years. One of the points Mechanisms tried to hit repeatedly is that storage was a far more visible and . . . grungier dimension of that experience than we typically understand today, when storage devices are abstracted into disk partitions (accessed via icons on a desktop) or else accessorized as fashion and lifestyle statements (iPods or thumbdrives). Here are some of the best bits. Keep in mind that Fallows is writing within a year of the ascendancy of MS-DOS.


The practical limit on what a computer can do is not the memory built into the machine itself [. . .] but rather how much information it can quickly draw from its disks.


So, living with a computer circa 1982: hard drives are still as yet exotic indulgences (storing up to 2000 pages!), disk operating systems have been the subject of bitter industry infighting, and the experience of computing itself is characterized in part by the repeated activity of swapping diskettes in and out of drives. (I remember what a big deal it was when my family added a second 5 1/4" drive to our Apple IIe, allowing me to run games and other programs which depended on being able to draw data from two disks at the same time.) There's still much work to be done on storage, inscription, and the machinery of computation.