As I was walking around The Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday I couldn’t shake this one quote that I’d read earlier that morning: “The computer is a feeling,” says Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan in their blog post manifesto, “not a device.”
Instinctively, intuitively, I know what that computer-feeling is. I’ve sort of built my whole life around it, to some degree. When you figure out a big programming problem, that’s the computer-feeling. Or when you hit publish on a website: pure, distilled computerness. But when I try to break it down and describe what it means in words and why some computers give me that feeling and others don’t, I start to give myself a headache.
I realize walking around the museum that some computers are computers to me and some are just...infrastructure.
“Are you a computer?” I thought to myself when I stared at the lone panel that’s left of the original ENIAC, the world’s first programmable computer in 1945 that was used to calculate bomb trajectories. “All I see is a cabinet, a bunch of wires and cables. I look at you and I see endless rows of dials, switches, nobs—and it reminds me of the underbelly of a bridge or the scaffolding on an apartment building. But a computer, I do not see.”
“Sorry,” I wanted to say to the ENIAC as I walked away.
The Computer History Museum is real neat because you realize that the difference between a calculator, or even an abacus, and a full-fledged super computer in your pocket is not one lone technological revolution.
Folks in tech wanna break it down like that because those neat legal divides in intellectual property are where billions of dollars emerge—as if ideas have owners! How silly and dystopian that is I now realize!—but tech is much more like evolution than we care to admit. There was nothing that came before a chicken, it was all things that kinda looked like a chicken until about a million years ago when the ascendents of that chicken suddenly looked...less chickeny.
The difference between an abacus and a calculator, between the ENIAC and the Xbox suddenly seem so marginal to me as I walk around the exhibits. Important, sure. Enormous amounts of progress between those points in time but also...I discover something new (to me). I realize there isn’t a moment when computers became a thing. There was no time before computers. Just like there were always chickens walking around.
Since humans were a thing, computers were there too.
It just depends on what you call a computer.
Most of the folks who built these machines weren’t as romantic as me. The computer-feeling for many was economic or perhaps it was the joy of installing a room-sized machine designed to count things that help kill people.
Perhaps this is why I don’t get much of a computer-feeling when looking through these glass cases.
Or perhaps it’s because these machines are off, broken, out of battery, sleeping. I can’t walk up to them and poke em, prod em, pull out a wire or two. (You poke the computer, and the computer pokes you back—is that the computer-feeling?)
Instead, the feeling I get is fear: look at how little of the world I know! Before this trip I thought I understood the rough shape of computers and how everything fit together but now, standing on the other side of this glass case full of machines and devices I’ve never heard of, I’m shocked by the gall of my own ignorance.
I don’t know nothin’.
My head spins when I think about the enormous effort put into all these machines. And not even all the programming and manufacturing of the products themselves but the machine around the machine: the ads, the writers, and even the musicians and poets.
In one glass box dedicated to IBM there’s a book of poetry written by the company for their staff. I assume it’s the equivalent today of really embarrassing company swag that tech startups have where they try desperately to make you enthusiastic by any means necessary, shame or embarrassment be damned.
Let’s build the future of computing together! Here are some socks!
Imagine rooms and rooms of these things, clacking away!
As I walk through these halls I get this other kind of feeling though: it’s as if we’re all whittling down the same chunks of raw materials together, collaborating on something so enormous—THE COMPUTER—that we don’t even realize we’re working together to build it. Every new programming language and front-end framework, every new device that launches and then bombs—it’s all part of this enormous collaboration to build a computer.
In a place like this, all those petty squabbles between competing typewriting manufacturers and web browsers feels so silly and unnecessary. Everything behind glass here was pushing towards a future they couldn’t see, but they had to feel instead.
Do you feel it, too?
