Lights out
Let me start from days before it gone bright and shiny.
OK, I’m going to talk about a technology. A technology that has helped a lot of people by now, by the time you’re reading this. No, not you guys — it’s fine that you don’t get the joke, you’re all too close to see. Just like me. But not quite.
The technology was invented to solve a problem. An elephant in the room kind of problem. It’s a sheer fun to hunt those, and there are a few more in my drawer waiting.
The very core of the problem, the big issue was to remain unsolved for now. The big issue is the education, the learning of people — the lack of trivial ability to see and comprehend, silly silly illiteracy in layfolk. But the technology was to stab that big issue in its back as hard as possible.
One man, whom I pretty much don’t know anything about invented an idea of computing machine abstraction. Alan Turing he was called, and as a pioneer in his area he’s marked a few areas of the land. At first, it was an academic research, then it’s gone viral, but still — even people who understood the fundamental importance of the idea didn’t realise its practical potential.
Basically, at a point the technology went out in the wild, in the middle ‘twen-teens’ we all had a proper full-blown full-scale Turing-complete device in our pockets. And virtually nobody understood the hillarious profound meaning of it!
Some grew fascinated on a phylosophical level, drawing silly poetic parallels, and dreaming of flying cars and diamond dust robots. But hardly anybody realised it’s all very much practical and specific, and it’s a part when your thoughts shall be coming real.
Turing-completeness, man. Meaning computer A is equivalent to computer B and equivalent to some abstract electro-mechanical tape device that wretched beautiful man invented all these years ago.
Equivalence not in your stupid theoretical sense, but in most practical. It was always going to happen, and the wise men knew it — but they’ve managed to miss it when it did!
And it did. With that, turn to the next page.