Despite all the computations you could just dance to that rock'n'roll station

With the complete obsolescence of every form of computing scheduled for this September 18th I think it's worth taking some time to review the history of computing, since after we make the changeover we're going to be far too busy furiously whacking information technology people upside the head with our new lycopodium-foam tablets to learn how we got here and why. Probably our maps were printed wrong, is how.

In the stone age only the most basic computing needed to be done. Tasks were carefully painted onto cave walls in the hopes that after the language was invented in 1964 someone would work out the problems and send the results back to them. Unfortunately the relatively little experience stone age programmers had meant their code is quite buggy, and nearly every problem so far has crashed with a ``?CARIBOU NOT FOUND  ERROR''. The most popular platforms were stone tablets, so IT departments think the modern preference for plastic tablets is a great improvement as they hurt less. For users the appeal is not so obvious.

The ancient Phoenicians, being a trade- and turntable-based society, found their computing needs dictated by their ship needs. Thus they worked out a costly and time-consuming but accurate method of counting things by the number of ships which had sunk. These methods were sharply limited by the size of the sea they had available for sinking --- thus their continuous drive to find new bodies of water in which to do the sinking --- and the number of ships on hand or soon under it. Despite the inconveniences the Phoenician were doing swimmingly well until someone had the idea of putting bottoms underneath their boats. While popular for the traders, except those selling swimsuits, it ruined the whole counting scheme, and the society went home to sulk. They're still a bit touchy.

The Ancient Greeks supported a conceptual breakthrough in calculation by using letters as numerals: alpha for 1, beta for 2, gamma for 3, and so on up to epsilon, after which they too forgot what the letters are except that pi's in there somewhere and they think there's something called an ``upsilon'' and maybe ``antikythera'' or ``ypsilanti''. In the middle of the night they would sometimes wake up crying out, ``iota'', and get whacked upside the head with a computational pillow. Despite these advances in working with numbers the didn't realize the need for a zero, and as a result whenever they compiled software into binary it came out as strings of alphas. Naturally these alpha releases were the most unstable of all, and Ancient Greece struggled along with computations that would minimally work until suddenly they froze and a volcano erupted or something. The Ancient Greek civilization later collapsed, but it would be exaggerating to say this was the only reason.

The Romans, being driven by more practicality than the theoretically-inclined Greeks solved the lack of zeroes by counting how far the desired number, such as zero, was from the none or nine, which was nine except in months with thirty days in them, when it was seven, and thus using the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, which they didn't know either but thought ``lumbda'' sounded good. But since the Roman system of month-keeping identified the date of this month as the number of days until the next month not counting today or the start of the next month, except in the first half of the current month in which it was counted to the start of --- look, just trust me that this is why Romans almost never got their database software to work, OK? And even if they thought they worked out the day of the month thing the uncertainty about how many years it had been since Rome's founding left them unsure what to list as the ``year''. They decided, practically, to wait until these two jokers finished both jokes about the losting and founding of Rome. Thus in 1464, in what was then Kenosha, Wisconsin, and today is Kenosha, Wisconsin, only later on, was Rome finally founded.

Do keep your notes on this, as when we resume the topic they will be useful kindling.

Trivia: Along with the debut of the System/360 --- in six different model computers --- IBM unleashed over 150 new, different things, including tapes, desks, and card punches, the same day. Source: A History Of Modern Computing, Paul E Ceruzzi.

Currently Reading: Winning The Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming Of Age As A Superpower, Nicolaus Mills.

PS: Bad Luck on Deal Or No Deal, starting from the point of a person who had really bad luck on Australia's Deal or No Deal and going on to asking what the wiser course is in a particular Deal situation.