There is No Software

tags

Computer

Notes

The bulk of written texts ­ including this text ­ do not exist anymore in perceivable time and space but in a computer memory's transistor cells.

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seems to hide the very act of writing: we do not write anymore.

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incurable confusion between use and mention.

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moment when, in the early seventies, Intel engineers laid out some dozen square meters of blueprint paper (64 square meters, in the case of the later 8086) in order to design the hardware

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because eventual differences between hardware implementations do not count anymore, the so-called Church-Turing hypothesis in its strongest or physical form is tantamount to declaring nature itself a universal Turing machine.

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these layers which, just as modern media technologies in general, have been explicitly contrived in order to evade all perception. We simply do not know what our writing does.

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May the users of Windows or UNIX forgive when I, as a subject of Microsoft DOS, limit the discussion to this most stupid of operating systems.

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it seems to bring back truly magical power; WP does what it says. Executable computer files encompass, by contrast not only to "WordPerfect" but also to the big, empty old European words such as "Mind" or "Word", all the old routines and data necessary to their self­constitution. Surely, tapping the letter sequence of "W", "P" and "enter" on an AT keyboard does not make the Word perfect, but this simple writing act starts the actual execution of WordPerfect. Such are the triumphs of software.

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these actions of agent WP are virtual ones, since each of them has to run under DOS

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The same argument would hold against DOS which, in the final analysis, resolves into an extension of the basic input and output system called BIOS.

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All code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as "call" or "return", come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences.

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there would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded any longer by an environment of everyday languages.

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the so­called philosophy of the computer community tends to systematically obscure hardware by software, electronic signifiers by interfaces between formal and everyday languages.

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psychopathological risks of writing assembler code

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on an intentionally superficial level, perfect graphic user interfaces, since they dispense with writing itself, hide a whole machine from its users.

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the concept of mental property as applied to algorithms has become meaningless.

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Precisely because software does not exist as a machine­independent faculty, software as a commercial or American medium insists all the more.

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the value of a message is the amount of mathematical or other work plausibly done by its originator, which the receiver is saved from having to repeat.

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impossibility of digitizing the body of real numbers formerly known as nature.

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discrete and synthetic microworld image of the original problem, whose structure is arbitrarily fixed

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This all­ important property of being programmable has, in all evidence, nothing to do with software; it is an exclusive feature of hardware, more or less suited as it is to house some notation system.

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most consequential MA thesis ever written

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Switching components, however, be they telegraph relays, tubes or finally microtransistor cells, pay a price for their very composability.

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computing power as such, is proven to have a square root function as its upper bound

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only computations done on nonprogrammable machines could keep up with them. In all evidence, this hypothetical but all too necessary type of machine would constitute sheer hardware, a physical device working amidst physical devices and subjected to the same bounded resources. Software in the usual sense of an ever­feasible abstraction would not exist any more.

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these interactions are still treated in terms of system limitations, physical side­effects, and so on. To minimize all the noise that it would be possible to eliminate is the prize paid for structurally programmable machines. The inverse strategy of maximizing noise would not only find the way back from IBM to Shannon, it may well be the only way to enter that body of real numbers originally known as chaos.

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