For most of human history, furniture was built by hand using a small set of simple tools. This approach connects you in a profoundly direct way to the work, your effort to the result. This changed with the rise of machine tools, which made production more efficient but also altered what's made and how we think about making it in in a profound way. This talk explores the effects of automation on our work, which is as relevant to software as it is to furniture, especially now that once again, with Clojure, we are building things using a small set of simple tools.
I met a guy once who had actually done programming with a hand drill.
He was working on an old mainframe that controlled a steel plant and originally this beast booted from paper tape but that had long since been worn away and replaced by a thick leather strap with holes bored in it. He had to modify the boot process so had to get a hand drill out!
I heard this around '94 from a guy in his 40s so it probably happened in the 1970s.
I really miss programming by toggling switches on the front panel of the machine, to set bits in memory words, like they used to do in some of the earliest computers, like in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Stephen Levy ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw
Summary:
For most of human history, furniture was built by hand using a small set of simple tools. This approach connects you in a profoundly direct way to the work, your effort to the result. This changed with the rise of machine tools, which made production more efficient but also altered what's made and how we think about making it in in a profound way. This talk explores the effects of automation on our work, which is as relevant to software as it is to furniture, especially now that once again, with Clojure, we are building things using a small set of simple tools.