Reference - a great read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
One of my top 5 favorite books of all time - the audiobook version on audible is excellent as well. A lost world - and we are all worse off for it.
The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#12I'd forgotten how close to printing machines the old photocopiers were. You would basically either have a crap one you could operate yourself, or take your stuff to the printery to have professionals (a subset of librarians I think, or the logical join over librarians and computer operations staff) do it for you. Printing machines had a fleet of maintainers, craft unions who walked off the job if you touched a dial.…
Back in my mainframe days (late 70s) we ran a large mainframe, the only one in the local uni - way slower than your phone, a couple of Mb of core, ran payroll and 30 terminals. We had a dedicated local engineer who had his own onsite office. In the south of NZ we were a really long long way away from his home office in the US, he was expected to be able to fix anything, and mostly he could. But one time the machine s…
> way slower than your phone
For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second.
Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#13The latter half has a lot of criticism of allegedly boneheaded management
(from the perspective of the writer and researchers they quote).
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#14Reference - a great read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
"a great read" - Almost underselling it. It won the Pulitzer for non-fiction that year.
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in my mainframe days (late 70s) we ran a large mainframe, the only one in the local uni - way slower than your phone, a couple of Mb of core, ran payroll and 30 terminals. We had a dedicated local engineer who had his own onsite office. In the south of NZ we were a really long long way away from his home office in the US, he was expected to be able to fix anything, and mostly he could. But one time the machine s…
> way slower than your phone For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second. Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.
True, but 90% of the mainframe instructions weren't tracking, telematics, data exfiltration, and user profiling. So it kinda evens out.
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#16Reference - a great read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
This book is so good. It's about building early computers but it feels just like tech does today in the way it's described. Which make it feel like this bigger context you're reading into. That even before computers were mainstream, there were still those who tinkered.
Two things are especially memorable to me. One is a casual remark in the book that they found the best way to get things done is to pair someone very experienced and cynical with someone very inexperienced and naive. Combined they would get lots done together compared to either alone. I think this is still true today.
The other thing is the intro. It's about the head of the project getting a group together and renting a sailboat on vacation. On the sailboat the get tossed and at times feel like they barely survived and it ends with someone saying "if this was his vacation...what did this man do for fun!?"
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#17This passage particularly struck me: He noticed when a technician on a call began by examining copies that had been thrown in the trash and deduced from them that the problem with the machine was different from what the customer had reported. “The trashcan is a filter between good copies and bad,” one technician explained “Just go to the trashcan to find the bad copies and then… interpret what connects them all.”
On a related note, I'd like to highly recommend Lucy Suchman's work, mentioned in this article as Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, but the updated version now called Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. The new version has several extra chapters and some other revisions. I've read it several times, and had my mind blown each time.
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in my mainframe days (late 70s) we ran a large mainframe, the only one in the local uni - way slower than your phone, a couple of Mb of core, ran payroll and 30 terminals. We had a dedicated local engineer who had his own onsite office. In the south of NZ we were a really long long way away from his home office in the US, he was expected to be able to fix anything, and mostly he could. But one time the machine s…
> way slower than your phone For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second. Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.
> Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.
Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times faster than Cray-1.
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#19This was such important and transformational work and I remember at the time being quite dismissive of it.
I knew Orr’s and Suchman’s work (they worked in a physically adjacent area, but completely different group, though we were all under John Seely Brown and because they were nice people). Thankfully I was grown up enough to be polite, but really I was such a techno-determinist that I figured user problems came from ignorance.*
To be fair, I was not the only one: the insights described in this book draft surprised a lot of people, not just how they improved the copiers but how those two even approached the problem (starting with the sociology of the repair workers). It sure surprised Xerox management. But I’ve heard it said many times that this work led to restructuring the paper path in a way that justified (paid for) everything spent on PARC.
I did grow up of course and now do see my work (machines, chemistry, etc) as a small part of a large social system. A successful company has to base its product plans starting this way.
To choose an example of failure to appreciate the social scope (but not pick on it) the crypto folks spend their time on technology, based on a social model they want to exist rather than the one that currently does. I think it’s a big reason why it’s barely impacted the world in, what, 15 years? Xerox was the same, and it helped them sell a lot of copiers, but didn’t make them as ubiquitous as they could have been. Another example: everybody laughs at Google for launching “products” that go nowhere and are quickly forgotten. We all know it’s because of a screwed-up, internally-focused culture. But sometimes a product succeeds without marketing (e.g. gmail, at the time) because it happened to be matched to the actual, external need. It makes this kind of continuous failure even more damning.
* TBH, 40 years later I have not 100% shed this view — e.g. my attitude towards complaints about git. Maybe this means I’m still a jerk.
Re: The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
#20> Though they were doing messy blue-collar work, Xerox required the technicians to act and dress white-collar. They carried their tools in a briefcase.
We don’t carry tools in briefcases because it makes us appear white collar, but because the shell is hard and protective, there are many sizes, and the boxy interior can be formed to however you like if you use foam and cut it to fit your tools. Briefcases fit readily into many tight spots for transportation. The photo shows the usual layout of tools that techs use. Companies sell high end equipment in briefcase-like containers because it keeps them safe and waterproof in needed situations.
Not a big fan of the anthropology aspect. It’s a job. Techies improvise, it’s not a clandestine operation to fix a machine.