alt Hacker News> We had a human/computer interface a hundred years before we had computers. When computers came into being around the time of the Second World War, humans, quite naturally, communicated with them by simply grafting them on to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vice versa: teletypes and punch card machines.
Is this… right?
I thought some of the earliest mechanical computers (as opposed to human computers) that had much real uptake were “fire control computers,” for things like naval guns (for example). You move around dials and cranks to put the measurements in. I’d call this essentially graphical… it isn’t a series of text based commands that you issue, but a collection of intuitive UI elements, each of which is used to communicate a particular piece of data to the computer. Of course the GUI of the past was made of gages and levers instead of pixels, but that’s just an implementation detail.
I much prefer the command line to a gui, but I think we should call it what it is: an improvement. A much more precise and repeatable way of talking to the computer, in comparison to cranking cranks and poking dials. And a general, endlessly flexible channel that can represent basically any type of information, at the cost of not necessary being intuitive or glance-able.
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This is a terminological confusion. The "computers" you're describing gave their name to the universal symbol manipulators we now call "computers" because, historically, the universal symbol manipulators were originally funded to perform mathematical calculations. They don't have much else in common. The "computers" that Stephenson is talking about are the universal symbol manipulators, the smallest and most limited of which can boot Linux: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004
In this context I believe 'computer' refers to only general purpose computing devices, not fixed function calculation machines.
In some sense, early player pianos (IIRC with holes in paper that controlled key presses) weren't computers, but were a related precursor technology / infrastructure.
This is absolutely right.
The teletype system was invented shortly after 1900. It was in widespread commercial use by the 1920s, for sending text over telegraph wires.
The US government began using punch card machines to do the census in 1890. They were named Hollerith machines. Hollerith is one of the companies that later became IBM. When they entered into electronic computers, their prime market was their own customers who were already using their punch card machines for things like accounting and payroll. For backwards compatibility, they kept the format the same!
Punch cards themselves date back to the early very 1800s, where they were introduced for the Jacquard loom. With the cards providing programmable instructions for fabric design.
It is worth noting that Hollerith was not the first place to try to repurpose punch cards to computation. That honor goes to Babbage's analytical machine (which admittedly was not actually completed).
Basically everything in technology has a far longer and richer history than people realize. I could go on for a while about this...