twenty-nine years of progress

[egypturnash]

For instance, on some computers there are marvelous text-editing systems
which allow pieces of text to be "poured" from one format into another,
practically as liquids can be poured from one vessel into another. A thin page can
turn into a wide page, or vice versa. With such power, you might expect that it
would be equally trivial to change from one font to another-say from roman to
italics. Yet there may be only a single font available on the screen, so that such
changes are impossible. Or it may be feasible on the screen but not printable by
the printer-or the other way around. After dealing with computers for a long time,
one gets spoiled, and thinks that everything should be programmable: no printer
should be so rigid as to have only one character set, or even a finite repertoire of
them-typefaces should be user-specifiable! But once that degree of flexibility has
been attained, then one may be annoyed that the printer cannot print in different
colors of ink, or that it cannot accept paper of all shapes and sizes, or that it does
not fix itself when it breaks...

- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)

After dealing with computers for a long time, most of these things are now malleable. But nobody is surprised when the machine breaks, or that it cannot repair itself...

Comments

[graybunny.livejournal.com]

We're surrounded from birth by made things which break and can't repair themselves, so it's not a surprise when yet another made thing can't.

We would all love cars which could repair themselves, but we know that's a fantasy*. It says a lot about how different computers are from our other made objects that we think that maybe they should, that it might be possible for them, if we're clever enough.


*When we make cars into computers, by suffusing them with nanomachines, then they'll be able to repair themselves. But it all hinges on the computers.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

…or that it does not fix itself when it breaks…

That has to be the second most ridiculous thing I've seen all day.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I love you for that. It's been so long since I've played that, I had forgotten that that's actually why I started saying "that's the second adjectivest noun I've ever seen". :D

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, most of our computers DO fix themselves when they break, within certain tolerances. How many times has a problem occured, only to be fixed by a reboot?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Surprised? No. But ANNOYED? Oh hell yeah.

Come on, tell me that some permutation of "WORK, you piece of SHIT" has never escaped your lips.

That's Hofstaeder's point: even when you get a machine that CAN do all those wonderful page-and-font tricks that seemed like a pipe dream thirty years ago and are standard issue now, you'll still be annoyed by the things it CAN'T or WON'T do.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

So true, really. Twenty years ago, I was swearing (figuratively) at a CP/M-based computer with a twitchy 7-bit text-markup-based typesetting system which was like T_eX's retarded little brother that couldn't even cope with more than nine fonts (as in bitmap fonts, meaning every different family and size and weight and style was a different source font!) in a single document, and now I have access to software a zillion times better and I bitch because it doesn't automatically line up two Unicode characters from different languages in a precisely aesthetically pleasing way? Seriously, talk about spoiled, eh?

I really, really, really need to make that typography icon for myself.