Core Memory

"Core Memory is completely different from the others, and in no way makes any attempt to be historically complete or chronologically correct. It’s an art book of absolutely stunning, high resolution photographs of computers in the Computer History Museum that moved from Boston to San Francisco. The photos are utterly gorgeous, and give you a visceral sense of the hand craftsmanship that went into these machines. Hand-soldered wires, massive disc drives five feet in diameter – things like that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Colossus was pretty big, and ENIAC was so huge you could go inside it. This book gets into the innards of some of these old machines and turns them into works of art. It’s like a children’s book of dinosaurs – if you’re interested you will go through page after page, and if not you will look at three pages and put it aside. It goes into the early age of personal computing. It has the first Macintosh, and the first computers you could buy for under a thousand dollars. There’s a few of them in there, as a nod to the world we’re in today. But it’s primarily about the age of what we call “big iron” – the huge mainframe computers that had to be moved around with forklifts and trucks. I use an absolutely modern Mac laptop. In fact, I just got a new one. My last one was six years old. My new laptop, quite miraculously, has a solid state drive – it no longer has a magnetic disc spinning around and waiting to crash. That’s a fabulous step ahead. But my boatbuilding business at home still runs on an ancient Mac – not the earliest generation but a completely extinct operating system. And it’s amazing how many companies’ accounting systems still run on punch cards. I think Moore’s law is going to keep going. The question is, what are we going to do with it? Every episode of every bad show that’s ever been on television is on YouTube for free, and we still can’t use all our bits [of processing power]. So what is going to happen next is a very interesting question. Turing is not at all a dead prophet who is of historical interest only. Almost every word he wrote can be read today and speak to the future. He believed in true artificial intelligence, and I think he was right. Things like Google are the fruition of his vision, and we’re going to have to wait to see where that goes. The way Google is doing it is to keep everybody happy, make sure everything is free and keep everyone on their side. I don’t subscribe to the Terminator scenario [of computers becoming self-aware and enslaving mankind]. Human beings are a part of this, and are not going to be extinguished by it. I think we need to worry less about whether machines are becoming more intelligent, and more about whether humans are becoming less intelligent. The jury is out on that. You could make the argument that because of smartphones we are losing the ability to visualise maps in our brains. That frees up part of our brain, but what do we use it for? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think he’s partly right, and his concerns are definitely worth worrying about. It’s not clear which way it’s going to go. We have to be very cautious and watch what’s happening with the next generation very carefully – because it is entirely possible that we could start losing some of the intelligence that has evolved over such a long period of time. Very much so. We are losing a lot of our craftsmanship, our ability to do things with our hands. That’s sad and a mistake, but it’s happening and we have to make the best of it. I think we should try to preserve human knowledge that will be very hard to reconstruct, like how you rebuild a carburetor. Things that we take for granted are being lost left and right. You don’t want to preserve them as artifacts, you want to preserve a working knowledge of them as much as we can, while leaving space for new skills to develop. One thing is for certain – we’re in a very transitional period."