I'm going to reach deep into someone else's life's work, and grab hold of something they feel passionately about. I'm going to take that thing and appropriate it. I'm going to say, thank you for suggesting this, and I am almost certainly going to misunderstand what you actually intended, but I'm going to take your idea and use it for my own purposes. I did this recently, and I regret the way I did it.#
But I'm going to do it again. Why would I do that?#
You thought I was going to say something about Drummer, JavaScript, GitHub and DOS, didn't you? Well, I'll get to that particular yoink in a few minutes. #
But first, I need to badly misstate something Philip K. Dick broke his brain trying to comprehend and explain. This is a man who wrote many, many novels that could be described as pulp science fiction attempts to explain just what the fuck reality actually is. They've since been made into movies like Blade Runner and Total Recall and a dozen other blockbusters, but he barely knew that was going to happen. Mostly, he wrote and wrote and wrote.#
He also took a lot of drugs, and, in particular, his work A Scanner Darkly explores what that sort of thing can do to your brain if you keep it up. It's possible this caused his divine revelations, but maybe god really was speaking to him through an ancient satellite, and that burst of pink light that shot from a girl's necklace and changed him forever was a real thing. It's hard to say, none of us were there. And all we really have to go on is what he wrote about the experience.#
He wrote a lot about this, in fact, thousands of pages, called "the exegesis," in non-fiction form, and lots of novels like Valis. But it really doesn't matter. There's no way you or I or anyone else could possibly understand it the way he did. And that's the kind of irony that hunts you down, because his entire fucking life was explaining this one remarkable revelation. And we'll never, ever get it.#
All we really can do with anybody else's work is dig around in it and see if we can find anything useful. Your life's work is a junk drawer to the rest of us. That's OK, you'll be dead, and you will have no idea that billionaires trade your paintings for hundreds of millions of dollars instead of doing something useful with their money. Probably better to be dead in that case anyway, especially since the odds are that you, like 99 percent of humanity before you, died poor, and sick, and hurting. This is the way of my people, and yours, too.#
So I am going to reach into a man's life's work, and I am going to pull out one little idea and run with it. If you have the slightest interest in science fiction, the nature of reality, how to tell a story with plain language without being Hemingway, retelling a story again and again trying to finally get it right, well, you should go look at his stuff. Real writers are pretty impressive once they get their teeth into something, and Phil Dick chomped deep and hard.#
(In particular, I recommend thinking about what he meant by the idea which I'm about turn into a lamp that is also an ashtray.)#
I mean, look around, there are centurions and robes and senators and slaves everywhere, right? Obviously not. But we still have the military, and fashion, and government, and forced labor, right? Sure. But that's facile, and I don't think that's exactly what Phil Dick meant. But again, I also can't really care what he meant. #
When I sit down and start typing here, I have no idea what I'm going to write about. That's deliberate. I spend a lot of time thinking, and less time typing, but I still generally don't know what I'm going to do with the raw material I'm mulling over. Usually, I don't even know I'm going to write something. (How this post happened: I was trying to sleep, I got up, I typed, I hit the cloud up-arrow button, I went back to bed.)#
Here, for example, I was fully intending to run with the notion I've described as facile. It's a useful way to look at things, actually: There are human needs so common, so natural, that structures inevitably arise, and we should look for similarities between the solutions of the present with the past with the possibilities of the future. Which, duh.#
So instead, let's take that "Roman Empire never ended" thing and get all Connections with it. This is a series of science shows from the '70s where James Burke picks some event or invention from the past, and explores all the little ways the future got created from that, in ways nobody could possibly have predicted at the time, when nobody was actually looking.#
In this case, let's talk about wagon ruts and railroads. #
Back before the internet was the internet, back before anybody knew what dot coms were or mined bitcoin or posted selfies, there was Usenet. And dialup bulletin boards, which were exactly like Facebook, except slower. This is where we all first discovered just how fast folklore can accumulate. Prior to this, folklore passed via word of mouth, and samizdat, and fax, and I guess there were things like books, too, but books are slow. These other things were faster, so that's how folklore develops. #
Folklore is stories we tell ourselves about how things are. Forgive me for being stupidly obvious. But we like these stories, we need these stories. They help us make sense of things. They help root us in a shared experience. When you are a kid, and you learn that pop rocks will make your head literally explode if you drink a coke, now you are in a shared, consensus reality with everybody else aware of these simple, scientific facts.#
I'm trying to change your reality, right now, by the way. (Too late! I already did.)#
The best folklore, the stuff that sticks around, is the stuff that speaks to people. It has plausible explanations for complex phenomena. Or it tells colorful stories about colorful people to make a point that resonates with people, one that reinforces beliefs we find useful, or comforting, like the value of hard work, or the lone genius, or the foolish wise. Of course, if the story does all these things at once, you will never stop hearing people talking about the Bible.#
So I have no idea if the wagon ruts-to-railroad gauge story is real, I'm sure it's been investigated and debunked, or validated, or set aside and later reconsidered, or held up as an example of something kind of true but which elides important historical facts and therefore deserves an extensive talk page on Wikipedia. #
If you put wheels on your wagon, and then drive that wagon around, you will leave ruts in the road.#
Other people want to use the same road, so their wheels end up fitting the same ruts.#
Later, when it's time to invent railroads, you need parts, and those parts get delivered on roads established millennia ago by those wagons. Also, you make your railroad tracks that same width because it really ties the room together.#
Millennia ago, the Romans standardized their wagon wheels, and this allowed them to take over the entire world, because all their wheels were interchangeable. Just like their horses and elephants. And now, our wheels are all interchangeable, too, every couch and bed and every single car is exactly the same width, and they drive in the same ruts, and the trains, apart from exploding occasionally, fit precisely in your living room just like in Julius Caesar's day. #
This is why your typewriter says QWERTY on top. If you put your wagon wheels too close together, they will jam, so you deliberately make them harder to use. Or something. It's hard, with folklore. Things drift.#
And you see, if we could just do that, but with technology, instead of, umm, wheel technology, then everything will really start to flourish!#
That's what I'm saying, right? This is where you go when you write this essay. There's a checklist. You have to name-check mass production and Henry Ford, of course. Bonus points if you can work in an aside about how ironic it is that behaving like soulless automatons gave us the free time to maximize our potential to sit down and watch some quality TV. Slip some Muybridge in there, too, and some Warhol soup paintings while you're at it.#
OK, that's not this post, which apparently isn't even about standards at all. #
I'm done with the Roman thing, by the way. If you're looking for a resolution to that notion, a point that draws it together, something that explains just how this essay's version of the story is different from and more useful than Phil Dick's, you're not going to get it. Sorry, that's the way it is. I reached into someone's life's work, and I appropriated, and I misrepresented, and I was shameless about it. I'd do it again. I probably will. (I absolutely will.)#
Because that's how we do things around here, we humans. #
Every single word of the preceding, every bit of it, is to prevent criticism of the following. Because I'm about to take someone else's life's work, this time in the form of a deceptively simple comment, and run with it in ways that are absolutely not anything they said.#
If you want to read just the GitHub and MS-DOS parts, you could skip all the previous stuff and start here. Probably should've mentioned that up top. Plus, it’s incredibly late and that first part, in particular, needs some editing. (“Some,” he says.) #
It's a good choice. You could go with the Apple II, or HyperCard, or Windows, or even Facebook. But MS-DOS is good, let's go with that. #
If you pick the Apple II, you're saying, this is the dawn of the era in which we all finally get to taste the power of computing for ourselves. You don't have to rent time on a mainframe, you don't have to solder it together yourself and flip switches, you can finally do it yourself. You can shade this in various directions by selecting other machines from the same era. #
In particular, the Commodore 64 pushed this so far it killed the company—it gave everyone a chance to use a computer in ways that the Apple II, or even cheaper machines like the VIC-20, didn't. It hit the sweet spot, and left a mark. But the Apple is the one you'd pick these days, because people, improbably, still know who Apple is.#
If you pick HyperCard, bless you, and I'll be over here writing up some important notes on my Newton. HyperCard says, this is the first time you can make a computer do something, by yourself, that isn't 10 PRINT "RADIO SHACK SUCKS" GOTO 10. #
You can pick VisiCalc if you like, but VisiCalc was never fun. This is not my essay about about how if you just add one tiny little fucking feature to HyperCard, the ability to request a stack over a network, and also have a time machine, humanity could have jumpstarted the last 20 years of progress 20 years ahead of time, but I should totally write that one someday. #
Facebook is interesting, because what that says is you are going to play for the "progress is social and increasing connections between potential sources of information can only be good for society, because that's just like science" card, and believe me, I want to read a post about how Facebook can actually be a model for advancing justice and scientific truth. I think we all would, right now. (Fuck you, Mark. Stop thinking of yourself for one fucking second, you fucking asshole.)#
So let's look at MS-DOS. We'll set aside all the obvious gags about IRQ and low res and everything we all hated about it back when we had to use it. #
Remember that, how we all had to use it? Why was that? Well, when you choose MS-DOS as your metaphor, you're saying, this is the first time your code can run on a whole LOT of different hardware. There were little nudges in that direction before. For example, CP/M, which was basically DOS, but a couple years early. Minicomputers started out by implementing mainframe instruction sets, which meant your computer could run software written for an entirely different kind of machine. (And from a different manufacturer, which was the real point.). Then there were things like the UCSD Pascal system, which was a virtual machine. This is a computer that doesn't even exist, which is a remarkably useful notion. But computers didn't get fast enough to make this really widespread until long after the MS-DOS era.#
MS-DOS is the first platform worth targeting. The first actual platform.#
Before then, you wrote your code for a platform like the Apple II, and then you wrote it again for every single other type of machine your customers might own. In today's terms, that is not much of a platform, just one type of machine, from one manufacturer. In fact, it's such a dingbat idea that you'd need to go to Kickstarter to find anybody willing to give you money to try it. If you want to really reach people, you go where the people are, and these days, thanks to the internet, that's everywhere. #
MS-DOS was the first taste we all had of that particular dynamic. And it was good. I mean, really good. There was a shit ton of innovation going on. You had to, the hardware was moving so incredibly fast. The idea that you could buy a computer, and use it, unchanged, unupgraded, untweaked, for literally years, and nobody would think twice about it, would have boggled us then. #
Memory standards were going bananas. You could have 640K, then it was extended, or expanded, and there was literally a difference between those two things, but then it became something else after that. Video cards went from proprietary black-and-white to multiple colors at scan rates and resolutions that just kept going up, and up. Sound cards. Joysticks. Mice. Multifunction cards. Clock batteries. Clock batteries!#
And through it all, even though you had to keep rewriting your code to be terminate-and-stay resident, or take advantage of what you could do on a 286 or 386, or use undocumented API calls, or draw your own windowing system with character-mode graphics, just to keep up with the relentless pace of change and explosive innovation, there was one thing, at least, that didn't change: at least it was still DOS.#
And that fueled the innovation which fueled the change which fueled the innovation which fueled, which, well, you can see where I'm going with that.#
But why GitHub? I'll tell you why, because Amazon blew it, just like TiVo, and I'll never get why, but that's just because I wasn't in the room when things got voted down for whatever reasons.#
First, let's do TiVo, because that one really pissed me off. Way back in the long ago, we had only three channels on the TV, and it sucked in ways you cannot believe unless you were there. You couldn't pause it, and you couldn't pick what you wanted to watch. Whatever was on, was on. #
VCRs changed that—you could rent a movie, which meant you could choose when to watch it, and you could pause it whenever you wanted. This was a great advance. #
Seriously, this experience was so incredibly fucking awesome that Hollywood threw shit fits because they thought we'd all just sit at home, remote in hand, clicking endlessly through choices, watching hour after hour after hour, and never once go to the theater. This obviously never happened.#
Anyway, it worked pretty good for movies, but for actual TV the VCR was a complete fucking disaster. It was so bad, entire swaths of the economy were devoted to writing and performing jokes about setting the clock on the VCR. It absolutely eclipsed the airline food sector, destroyed rolling up the toothpaste tube, and came close to unseating relentless, horrific sexual harassment, like that featured during the Henry Blake era of M*A*S*H, as the top source of quality jokes.#
TiVo changed that, like the iPhone changed cell phones. Before the iPhone, I wanted Apple to make a phone. I had no idea what kind of phone they should make, but I wanted them to make one, because my theory was, maybe I wouldn't want to fucking jam the phone right through my temple in frustration every time I used it, because maybe they'd spend some time on usability instead of licensing fucking ringtones. #
With TiVo, you could suddenly pause the show you were watching, no matter what show. And you could record shows, without setting the blinking clock, and remembering to put a tape in. And you could watch the show, whenever you wanted. And you could pick which show from the couch, instead of digging through the bin of tapes, trying to remember which unlabeled tape was wound the correct amount through to be the one you were looking for. #
TiVo was fucking amazing. It was so amazing that anybody that had any interest in TV, and disposable income, had one. And those were exactly the same kind of people who might, say, get interested in streaming video. #
TiVo should have owned that shit. TiVo should have completely fucking dominated. There should have been absolutely no room left for Roku to maneuver. Their hardware was already in your house. #
I had a TiVo that could play streaming video. But the interface made me want to jam the TiVo remote right through my temple, which would have been hard, because the TiVo remote was literally delightful to hold in your hand, and curvy and textured and balanced and smooth. You could use it in the dark. You could immediately tell without looking at it if you were holding it the right way. It had a button that would jump ahead 30 seconds at a time.#
I don't know what happened. At the time, I pointed at their software, and decisions to start over and build the wrong thing, from scratch, rather than iterate over what they already had. But that's the software developer in me, and now I know it's more complicated than that. There's egos involved, too. (I am just guessing here. But there are always egos.)#
Anyway, back to GitHub and Amazon. I think Amazon should have owned the spot where I am going to say this is going (and putting so, so many words into Dave's mouth).#
AWS, because you were building this fucking thing anyway.#
I think the notion that Amazon should add useful things to Prime is pretty obvious, so I won't belabor that one. And everyone knows why AWS exists, which is that if you want to scale, you need to disintermediate, and that includes yourself. So you take that monolithic, million-line website templating horror, and you refactor, and refactor, and refactor, relentlessly, until you've split it apart into the dozens of individual services that you can scale properly.#
And then, once you've built it, rent it out to businesses, and make extra money. #
The part that I have never figured out is, why not rent it to regular people, too?#
Why is it so incredibly fucking hard, basically impossible, for me as a normal consumer to take advantage of AWS in any meaningful way? (If you say that I am, every time I watch Netflix, I will punch you.)#
Why can't I have my own website on AWS through Amazon?#
Why does everything have to be free with fucking ads pasted all over that shit?#
Why can't I pay for my website as part of the normal annual Prime tax I'm paying anyway?#
Why am I limited to talking about simply hosting a website on AWS, anyway? There are some ridiculously cool things going on in the cloud these days. Why can't I put little chunks of code in the cloud and link them together? Why do I have to understand Stack Overflow to make anything work? Whatever the fuck happened to HyperCard?#
The really funny part about this blog post, to me, is that I still haven't even gotten to what I think you could even do with GitHub and Drummer. (I do have some ideas on that.)#
But I hope it's clear that there's an opportunity here, room for creativity to maneuver. And who knows what kind of shit we could all get up to?#
I'm going to reach deep into someone else's life's work, and grab hold of something they feel passionately about. I'm going to take that thing and appropriate it. I'm going to say, thank you for suggesting this, and I am almost certainly going to misunderstand what you actually intended, but I'm going to take your idea and use it for my own purposes. I did this recently, and I regret the way I did it.#
But I'm going to do it again. Why would I do that?#
You thought I was going to say something about Drummer, JavaScript, GitHub and DOS, didn't you? Well, I'll get to that particular yoink in a few minutes. #
But first, I need to badly misstate something Philip K. Dick broke his brain trying to comprehend and explain. This is a man who wrote many, many novels that could be described as pulp science fiction attempts to explain just what the fuck reality actually is. They've since been made into movies like Blade Runner and Total Recall and a dozen other blockbusters, but he barely knew that was going to happen. Mostly, he wrote and wrote and wrote.#
He also took a lot of drugs, and, in particular, his work A Scanner Darkly explores what that sort of thing can do to your brain if you keep it up. It's possible this caused his divine revelations, but maybe god really was speaking to him through an ancient satellite, and that burst of pink light that shot from a girl's necklace and changed him forever was a real thing. It's hard to say, none of us were there. And all we really have to go on is what he wrote about the experience.#
He wrote a lot about this, in fact, thousands of pages, called "the exegesis," in non-fiction form, and lots of novels like Valis. But it really doesn't matter. There's no way you or I or anyone else could possibly understand it the way he did. And that's the kind of irony that hunts you down, because his entire fucking life was explaining this one remarkable revelation. And we'll never, ever get it.#
All we really can do with anybody else's work is dig around in it and see if we can find anything useful. Your life's work is a junk drawer to the rest of us. That's OK, you'll be dead, and you will have no idea that billionaires trade your paintings for hundreds of millions of dollars instead of doing something useful with their money. Probably better to be dead in that case anyway, especially since the odds are that you, like 99 percent of humanity before you, died poor, and sick, and hurting. This is the way of my people, and yours, too.#
So I am going to reach into a man's life's work, and I am going to pull out one little idea and run with it. If you have the slightest interest in science fiction, the nature of reality, how to tell a story with plain language without being Hemingway, retelling a story again and again trying to finally get it right, well, you should go look at his stuff. Real writers are pretty impressive once they get their teeth into something, and Phil Dick chomped deep and hard.#
(In particular, I recommend thinking about what he meant by the idea which I'm about turn into a lamp that is also an ashtray.)#
I mean, look around, there are centurions and robes and senators and slaves everywhere, right? Obviously not. But we still have the military, and fashion, and government, and forced labor, right? Sure. But that's facile, and I don't think that's exactly what Phil Dick meant. But again, I also can't really care what he meant. #
When I sit down and start typing here, I have no idea what I'm going to write about. That's deliberate. I spend a lot of time thinking, and less time typing, but I still generally don't know what I'm going to do with the raw material I'm mulling over. Usually, I don't even know I'm going to write something. (How this post happened: I was trying to sleep, I got up, I typed, I hit the cloud up-arrow button, I went back to bed.)#
Here, for example, I was fully intending to run with the notion I've described as facile. It's a useful way to look at things, actually: There are human needs so common, so natural, that structures inevitably arise, and we should look for similarities between the solutions of the present with the past with the possibilities of the future. Which, duh.#
So instead, let's take that "Roman Empire never ended" thing and get all Connections with it. This is a series of science shows from the '70s where James Burke picks some event or invention from the past, and explores all the little ways the future got created from that, in ways nobody could possibly have predicted at the time, when nobody was actually looking.#
In this case, let's talk about wagon ruts and railroads. #
Back before the internet was the internet, back before anybody knew what dot coms were or mined bitcoin or posted selfies, there was Usenet. And dialup bulletin boards, which were exactly like Facebook, except slower. This is where we all first discovered just how fast folklore can accumulate. Prior to this, folklore passed via word of mouth, and samizdat, and fax, and I guess there were things like books, too, but books are slow. These other things were faster, so that's how folklore develops. #
Folklore is stories we tell ourselves about how things are. Forgive me for being stupidly obvious. But we like these stories, we need these stories. They help us make sense of things. They help root us in a shared experience. When you are a kid, and you learn that pop rocks will make your head literally explode if you drink a coke, now you are in a shared, consensus reality with everybody else aware of these simple, scientific facts.#
I'm trying to change your reality, right now, by the way. (Too late! I already did.)#
The best folklore, the stuff that sticks around, is the stuff that speaks to people. It has plausible explanations for complex phenomena. Or it tells colorful stories about colorful people to make a point that resonates with people, one that reinforces beliefs we find useful, or comforting, like the value of hard work, or the lone genius, or the foolish wise. Of course, if the story does all these things at once, you will never stop hearing people talking about the Bible.#
So I have no idea if the wagon ruts-to-railroad gauge story is real, I'm sure it's been investigated and debunked, or validated, or set aside and later reconsidered, or held up as an example of something kind of true but which elides important historical facts and therefore deserves an extensive talk page on Wikipedia. #
If you put wheels on your wagon, and then drive that wagon around, you will leave ruts in the road.#
Other people want to use the same road, so their wheels end up fitting the same ruts.#
Later, when it's time to invent railroads, you need parts, and those parts get delivered on roads established millennia ago by those wagons. Also, you make your railroad tracks that same width because it really ties the room together.#
Millennia ago, the Romans standardized their wagon wheels, and this allowed them to take over the entire world, because all their wheels were interchangeable. Just like their horses and elephants. And now, our wheels are all interchangeable, too, every couch and bed and every single car is exactly the same width, and they drive in the same ruts, and the trains, apart from exploding occasionally, fit precisely in your living room just like in Julius Caesar's day. #
This is why your typewriter says QWERTY on top. If you put your wagon wheels too close together, they will jam, so you deliberately make them harder to use. Or something. It's hard, with folklore. Things drift.#
And you see, if we could just do that, but with technology, instead of, umm, wheel technology, then everything will really start to flourish!#
That's what I'm saying, right? This is where you go when you write this essay. There's a checklist. You have to name-check mass production and Henry Ford, of course. Bonus points if you can work in an aside about how ironic it is that behaving like soulless automatons gave us the free time to maximize our potential to sit down and watch some quality TV. Slip some Muybridge in there, too, and some Warhol soup paintings while you're at it.#
OK, that's not this post, which apparently isn't even about standards at all. #
I'm done with the Roman thing, by the way. If you're looking for a resolution to that notion, a point that draws it together, something that explains just how this essay's version of the story is different from and more useful than Phil Dick's, you're not going to get it. Sorry, that's the way it is. I reached into someone's life's work, and I appropriated, and I misrepresented, and I was shameless about it. I'd do it again. I probably will. (I absolutely will.)#
Because that's how we do things around here, we humans. #
Every single word of the preceding, every bit of it, is to prevent criticism of the following. Because I'm about to take someone else's life's work, this time in the form of a deceptively simple comment, and run with it in ways that are absolutely not anything they said.#
If you want to read just the GitHub and MS-DOS parts, you could skip all the previous stuff and start here. Probably should've mentioned that up top. Plus, it’s incredibly late and that first part, in particular, needs some editing. (“Some,” he says.) #
It's a good choice. You could go with the Apple II, or HyperCard, or Windows, or even Facebook. But MS-DOS is good, let's go with that. #
If you pick the Apple II, you're saying, this is the dawn of the era in which we all finally get to taste the power of computing for ourselves. You don't have to rent time on a mainframe, you don't have to solder it together yourself and flip switches, you can finally do it yourself. You can shade this in various directions by selecting other machines from the same era. #
In particular, the Commodore 64 pushed this so far it killed the company—it gave everyone a chance to use a computer in ways that the Apple II, or even cheaper machines like the VIC-20, didn't. It hit the sweet spot, and left a mark. But the Apple is the one you'd pick these days, because people, improbably, still know who Apple is.#
If you pick HyperCard, bless you, and I'll be over here writing up some important notes on my Newton. HyperCard says, this is the first time you can make a computer do something, by yourself, that isn't 10 PRINT "RADIO SHACK SUCKS" GOTO 10. #
You can pick VisiCalc if you like, but VisiCalc was never fun. This is not my essay about about how if you just add one tiny little fucking feature to HyperCard, the ability to request a stack over a network, and also have a time machine, humanity could have jumpstarted the last 20 years of progress 20 years ahead of time, but I should totally write that one someday. #
Facebook is interesting, because what that says is you are going to play for the "progress is social and increasing connections between potential sources of information can only be good for society, because that's just like science" card, and believe me, I want to read a post about how Facebook can actually be a model for advancing justice and scientific truth. I think we all would, right now. (Fuck you, Mark. Stop thinking of yourself for one fucking second, you fucking asshole.)#
So let's look at MS-DOS. We'll set aside all the obvious gags about IRQ and low res and everything we all hated about it back when we had to use it. #
Remember that, how we all had to use it? Why was that? Well, when you choose MS-DOS as your metaphor, you're saying, this is the first time your code can run on a whole LOT of different hardware. There were little nudges in that direction before. For example, CP/M, which was basically DOS, but a couple years early. Minicomputers started out by implementing mainframe instruction sets, which meant your computer could run software written for an entirely different kind of machine. (And from a different manufacturer, which was the real point.). Then there were things like the UCSD Pascal system, which was a virtual machine. This is a computer that doesn't even exist, which is a remarkably useful notion. But computers didn't get fast enough to make this really widespread until long after the MS-DOS era.#
MS-DOS is the first platform worth targeting. The first actual platform.#
Before then, you wrote your code for a platform like the Apple II, and then you wrote it again for every single other type of machine your customers might own. In today's terms, that is not much of a platform, just one type of machine, from one manufacturer. In fact, it's such a dingbat idea that you'd need to go to Kickstarter to find anybody willing to give you money to try it. If you want to really reach people, you go where the people are, and these days, thanks to the internet, that's everywhere. #
MS-DOS was the first taste we all had of that particular dynamic. And it was good. I mean, really good. There was a shit ton of innovation going on. You had to, the hardware was moving so incredibly fast. The idea that you could buy a computer, and use it, unchanged, unupgraded, untweaked, for literally years, and nobody would think twice about it, would have boggled us then. #
Memory standards were going bananas. You could have 640K, then it was extended, or expanded, and there was literally a difference between those two things, but then it became something else after that. Video cards went from proprietary black-and-white to multiple colors at scan rates and resolutions that just kept going up, and up. Sound cards. Joysticks. Mice. Multifunction cards. Clock batteries. Clock batteries!#
And through it all, even though you had to keep rewriting your code to be terminate-and-stay resident, or take advantage of what you could do on a 286 or 386, or use undocumented API calls, or draw your own windowing system with character-mode graphics, just to keep up with the relentless pace of change and explosive innovation, there was one thing, at least, that didn't change: at least it was still DOS.#
And that fueled the innovation which fueled the change which fueled the innovation which fueled, which, well, you can see where I'm going with that.#
But why GitHub? I'll tell you why, because Amazon blew it, just like TiVo, and I'll never get why, but that's just because I wasn't in the room when things got voted down for whatever reasons.#
First, let's do TiVo, because that one really pissed me off. Way back in the long ago, we had only three channels on the TV, and it sucked in ways you cannot believe unless you were there. You couldn't pause it, and you couldn't pick what you wanted to watch. Whatever was on, was on. #
VCRs changed that—you could rent a movie, which meant you could choose when to watch it, and you could pause it whenever you wanted. This was a great advance. #
Seriously, this experience was so incredibly fucking awesome that Hollywood threw shit fits because they thought we'd all just sit at home, remote in hand, clicking endlessly through choices, watching hour after hour after hour, and never once go to the theater. This obviously never happened.#
Anyway, it worked pretty good for movies, but for actual TV the VCR was a complete fucking disaster. It was so bad, entire swaths of the economy were devoted to writing and performing jokes about setting the clock on the VCR. It absolutely eclipsed the airline food sector, destroyed rolling up the toothpaste tube, and came close to unseating relentless, horrific sexual harassment, like that featured during the Henry Blake era of M*A*S*H, as the top source of quality jokes.#
TiVo changed that, like the iPhone changed cell phones. Before the iPhone, I wanted Apple to make a phone. I had no idea what kind of phone they should make, but I wanted them to make one, because my theory was, maybe I wouldn't want to fucking jam the phone right through my temple in frustration every time I used it, because maybe they'd spend some time on usability instead of licensing fucking ringtones. #
With TiVo, you could suddenly pause the show you were watching, no matter what show. And you could record shows, without setting the blinking clock, and remembering to put a tape in. And you could watch the show, whenever you wanted. And you could pick which show from the couch, instead of digging through the bin of tapes, trying to remember which unlabeled tape was wound the correct amount through to be the one you were looking for. #
TiVo was fucking amazing. It was so amazing that anybody that had any interest in TV, and disposable income, had one. And those were exactly the same kind of people who might, say, get interested in streaming video. #
TiVo should have owned that shit. TiVo should have completely fucking dominated. There should have been absolutely no room left for Roku to maneuver. Their hardware was already in your house. #
I had a TiVo that could play streaming video. But the interface made me want to jam the TiVo remote right through my temple, which would have been hard, because the TiVo remote was literally delightful to hold in your hand, and curvy and textured and balanced and smooth. You could use it in the dark. You could immediately tell without looking at it if you were holding it the right way. It had a button that would jump ahead 30 seconds at a time.#
I don't know what happened. At the time, I pointed at their software, and decisions to start over and build the wrong thing, from scratch, rather than iterate over what they already had. But that's the software developer in me, and now I know it's more complicated than that. There's egos involved, too. (I am just guessing here. But there are always egos.)#
Anyway, back to GitHub and Amazon. I think Amazon should have owned the spot where I am going to say this is going (and putting so, so many words into Dave's mouth).#
AWS, because you were building this fucking thing anyway.#
I think the notion that Amazon should add useful things to Prime is pretty obvious, so I won't belabor that one. And everyone knows why AWS exists, which is that if you want to scale, you need to disintermediate, and that includes yourself. So you take that monolithic, million-line website templating horror, and you refactor, and refactor, and refactor, relentlessly, until you've split it apart into the dozens of individual services that you can scale properly.#
And then, once you've built it, rent it out to businesses, and make extra money. #
The part that I have never figured out is, why not rent it to regular people, too?#
Why is it so incredibly fucking hard, basically impossible, for me as a normal consumer to take advantage of AWS in any meaningful way? (If you say that I am, every time I watch Netflix, I will punch you.)#
Why can't I have my own website on AWS through Amazon?#
Why does everything have to be free with fucking ads pasted all over that shit?#
Why can't I pay for my website as part of the normal annual Prime tax I'm paying anyway?#
Why am I limited to talking about simply hosting a website on AWS, anyway? There are some ridiculously cool things going on in the cloud these days. Why can't I put little chunks of code in the cloud and link them together? Why do I have to understand Stack Overflow to make anything work? Whatever the fuck happened to HyperCard?#
The really funny part about this blog post, to me, is that I still haven't even gotten to what I think you could even do with GitHub and Drummer. (I do have some ideas on that.)#
But I hope it's clear that there's an opportunity here, room for creativity to maneuver. And who knows what kind of shit we could all get up to?#