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In 1945, while working in a World War I vintage non-air-conditioned building on a hot, humid summer day, the computer stopped. We searched for the problem and found a failing relay — one of the big signal relays. Inside, we found a moth that had been beaten to death. We pulled it out with tweezers and taped it to the log book. From then on, when the officer came in to ask if we were accomplishing anything, we told him we were ‘debugging’ the computer.
Right now we’re in the business of collecting information. No one has really analyzed the total flow of information. What is most important? Is it Joe’s two hours of overtime, or is it a nuclear power plant that might blow up if we don’t change a valve setting? We have not correctly addressed that.
We haven’t researched the value of information or the cost of incorrect information—or even which information gets priority. It is my experience that the senior squeaking wheel gets the top priority.
In the IBM/360, which appeared a year later, such queueing was done by “command chaining”: in the chain of queued commands, the last one carried an end marker, and attaching a new command was done by overwriting that end marker by a pointer to the command to be attached. But the design contained two serious flaws.
If at the moment of attachment the channel was still active, the new command would be executed in due time, otherwise the channel had to be reactivated. To establish whether this obligation was present, the instruction code contained test instructions testing whether channels were active or not, but the trouble with such a test instruction is that when a channel is reported to be still active, that information can be obsolete a microsecond later. In the IBM/360 the result was that, when a new command had been attached while before the attachment the channel was observed to be active and after the attachment it was passive, this information was insufficient to determine whether the channel had deactivated itself before or after the attachment, i.e. whether the last command had been executed or not.
Reporting completions was similarly defective. Command chaining had introduced channels that in due time would report a sequence of completions, but instead of a counter there was only the binary interrupt flipflop to record a next completion. If an interrupt signal came before the previous one for that channel had been honored, it would just get lost! They had traded the minor evil of moral urgency for the major one of essential urgency.
At the time I was shocked by the fact that the major product of the world’s largest and most powerful computer manufacturer could contain such a serious blunder. Later I realized that to a certain extent I myself was to be blamed, for when I invented the semaphores and the synchronizing primitives, I did not publish my invention.
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The other vivid memory is of what I heard about IBM’s mechanical debugging aid. In order to make errors reproducible they equipped the IBM/360 with a special hardware monitor; in the recording mode it would capture precisely where in the computation each interrupt took place, in the controlling mode it would force the computer to replay exactly the recorded computation, thus making intermediate results available for inspection. It struck me as a crude and silly way of proceeding, and I remember being grateful that lack of money had protected me from making that methodological mistake. I felt grateful and superior, and when a few years later it became clear that IBM couldn’t get its OS/360 right, I was not amazed.
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>Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
“It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, h is prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in here early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Case?”
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
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>Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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Images are neither the bearers of ideology, nor the representations of the real, but what Baudrillard calls “the hyperreal”: the television image, the advertisement, the pop song become more “real” than “reality”, their sensuous imperative is so strong that they are our experience, they are our pleasure. Denying the narrative domain of these objects dislocates them from the ideological one as well. The pleasure here is not in resisting ideology, nor in challenging it with a “better” one, but in evading it, in liberating oneself from it.
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La simulation s’oppose à la représentation.
I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?
>Reality is subjective.
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諸君はまたそう云う大きな建物の、奥の奥の部屋へ行くと、もう全く外の光りが届かなくなった暗がりの中にある金襖や金屏風が、幾間を隔てた遠い遠い庭の明りの穂先を捉えて、ぽうっと夢のように照り返しているのを見たことはないか。その照り返しは、夕暮れの地平線のように、あたりの闇へ実に弱々しい金色の光を投げているのであるが、私は黄金というものがあれほど沈痛な美しさを見せる時はないと思う。
そして、その前を通り過ぎながら幾度も振り返って見直すことがあるが、正面から側面の方へ歩を移すに随って、金地の紙の表面がゆっくりと大きく底光りする。決してちらちらと忙しい瞬きをせず、巨人が顔色を変えるように、きらりと、長い間を置いて光る。時とすると、たった今まで眠ったような鈍い反射をしていた梨地の金が、側面へ廻ると、燃え上がるように耀いているのを発見して、こんなに暗い所でこれだけの光線を集めることが出来たのかと、不思議に思う。