Earlier today, a friend of mine used his iPhone to shell into a remote machine, edit a file with Vi, and commit it to version control:
Yes, that’s right: he used a hand-held computer a million times more powerful than any available in 1970 to connect over a ubiquitous wireless network to a computer billions of times more powerful than any available in 1970 to run a set of tools that do their best to emulate a line printer. Coincidentally, at about the same time as he was doing this, I was holding a sticky note with “Can you hear me?” written on it up in front of the camera built into my laptop to transmit a real-time video image to people thousands of kilometers away because, well, because it was simpler than anything else I could do at the time.
All of which prompts me to rephrase William Gibson: the past is still here, it’s just not evenly distributed either.
What makes this practical is that the UI on the remote machine isn’t a GUI. In this case, older is better.
Nice one, nice one (nice pair?). People forget that Gibson’s jockeys navigated cyberspace from their decks (Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 still beats Retina MBP) entirely using keyboards (“fingers flying automatically across the board”).
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding –
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
That handheld device uses a graphical emulation of a 1878 mechanical typewriter layout, whose ‘shift’ mechanism handles a case-distinction which started around 1300. The letters are for a written language whose current grammatical form started in the early 1600 and with glyphs finalized in the late 1500s. The bottom left uses numerical glyphs from the early 1500s, derived from older Arabic and Hindu system. The ‘space’ button exists because of writing conventions started 600-800. The ‘esc’ and ‘ctrl’ are due to the telegraph-derived ASCII standard from the 1960s.
Your last sentence made me laugh, and I’ll be stealing it. But a complementary thought is: it’s not a bad thing when things from the past stick around. They may just be particularly well-suited to their purpose. And it creates a nice continuity between the past and the present, a link that mediates new technologies.