Karl-Erik Tallmo on Thu, 10 Jan 2002 03:35:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Behind the Blip: Software as Culture |
This is a very interesting article, Matthew. I have two questions. matthew fuller wrote: >Computers must be understood already as assemblages. In his 'Lectures >on Computation', Richard Feynman notes research that specifies thirteen >levels to an operating system. "This goes from level 1, that of >electronic circuitry - registers, gates, buses - to number 13, the >Operating System Shell, which manipulates the user programming >environment. By a hierarchical compounding of instructions, basic >transfers of 1's and 0's on level one are transformed, by the time we >get to thirteen, into commands to land aircraft in a simulation or >check whether a forty digit number is prime."22 Since the time of his >writing, 1984, many more additional 'levels' have become involved, the >various protocols of interface, licensing, network, the ways in which >computation has been coded and styled for various markets, are only a >few examples. What is contended here is that any one of these levels >provides an opportunity for critique, but more importantly - for forms >of theorisation and practice that break free of any preformatted >uniformity. Since it is what they are further assembled with that >determines their metamorphosis, it is the task of such practical and >theoretical work to open these layers up to the opportunity of further >assemblage. This brings to mind an idea I had back in 1988 - a pedagogical idea for displaying to non- computer geeks (including myself) exactly how the different layers on a computer are working. In medical literature one might see illlustrations showing e.g. different layers of the kidney and what they do, so my idea was to show everything that is going on inside a computer in a similar way, from what is well-known to the user, say a word in italics on a text line in a wordprocessor. Beneath that would be a hole displaying ascii with some tag for the formatting, something lika a <i>xxx</i>-tag or whatever kind of "flag" is used. Then, I don't know what comes next - some hexadecimal? Somewhere in this hierarchy the program code that allows the program to italicize a string of characters would also be visible. Then all levels down to machine code. Everybody I spoke with said that this was impossible. Reading the above, my old idea popped up again and I just wonder, would it really be impossible to depict the goings on like that? --- Another question that arises when we talk of future programming and future interfaces is what will new kinds of processing do to line oriented code in general? Linear, although vertically aligned, instructions have been the idea from the beginning of computing. I know many are involved in trying to find new kinds of logic for the old kinds of code, or code writing machines - which I believe would probably just cement the way we write code today. But how will, for instance, quantum computers be programmed? Or is there even some entirely new method for controling the processing of information that does not even require a program anymore but something else? Karl-Erik Tallmo -- _________________________________________________________________ KARL-ERIK TALLMO, Swedish writer, lecturer ARCHIVE: http://www.nisus.se/archive BOOK: http://www.nisus.se/gorgias ANOTHER BOOK: http://www.copyrighthistory.com MAGAZINE: http://art-bin.com _________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold