Neuromancer also doesn't fit the cyberpunk genre, as Gibson would attest. It still produced the genre.What? First of all, the term Cyberpunk was around before Neuromancer was written. Second of all when did Gibson ever say his books weren't cyberpunk? What makes them not cyberpunk? For most people they are considered the canonical cyberpunk books. From wikipedia:
William Gibson with his novel Neuromancer (1984) is likely the most famous writer connected with the term cyberpunk. He emphasized style, a fascination with surfaces, and atmosphere over traditional science-fiction tropes. Regarded as ground-breaking and sometimes as "the archetypal cyberpunk work,"[10] Neuromancer was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. After Gibson's popular debut novel, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) followed. According to the Jargon File, "Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly naïve and tremendously stimulating."I think the steampunk aesthetic is kind of interesting, and so is the idea of powerful mechanical devices and so on, but the whole "steampunk thing" is pretty ridiculous these days.
Had Babbage built the Analytical Engine then it might be that we would all be using IBM PCs - but in this case that would stand for International Babbage Machine and Powered Computers! You would also be reading “I-Analytical Engineer”!And:
Of course it is also entirely possible that silicon lithography, the technique use to manufacture chips, would have been invented for a very different purpose.This stuff is just nonsense. People were well aware of using mechanical calculators before the advent of electronic ones, and people were already making gears as small as they could in order to make watches. The first electrical computers were done using relays, and relays signaled by electrical signals rather then gears signaled pistons and cogs would have been much more efficient.
If you know about transistors and electronic logic then presumably you can see how to use the doping of silicon to build integrated circuits but if what you know about is mechanical logic - presumably you start to think about ways of miniaturising mechanical devices.
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With a start in mechanical computers micro-engineering would have been developed and the division between the machine that does work and the machine that thinks would have been less obvious.
Were the inner workings of as computer to be as visible as a mechanical machine, I think it would cause many problems. I don't really understand how the computer beneath my fingers works, but it gives me no sense of its workings as it does so, and so is no distraction. But to see moving parts and spinning axles would annoy me endlessly as I tried to follow each input through the machine and figure out what it does. I doubt anything would get done if every keystroke were an entertaining mystery to be investigated, and not the blackboxed magic that it seems.First of all, there wouldn't be any 'keystrokes' You would put your programs down on punchcards, at home, then drop them off. If you're lucky, you could put them in yourself. Then, after whirring away for a few hours, you would get your result. Most likely, you'd just drop them off and come back a few hours later.
How would Moore's law apply to mechanical computers?. It wouldn't. Moore's law is not a physical law, it is merely a smart observation about the interactions of physics, consumer demand and capital.I think it's actually more of a self-fulfilling prophecy then anything else. Everyone else in the industry expected the '18 month' thing and didn't push any harder because they knew no one else would. Had Moore not made that observation (very, very early on by the way) we might have advanced faster. There's no physical reason why we couldn't have.
The obvious technological applications would have been in textile manufacturing, but since British cotton manufacturers already dominated the world market, it's not clear that the existence of an Analytical Engine would have given them any commercial edge they didn't already have. Perhaps it might have encouraged the development of scientific management, but that happened anyway in the 1880s and 1890s and it's not clear how much influence it actually had on industrial productivity. All in all, I suspect a mid-Victorian Analytical Engine would have been a solution in search of a problem.Huh? you're assuming that everything would have been the same, except with mechanical computers. Obviously, it would have changed things. The biggest differences wouldn't be obvious right away, but businesses could start using computers to do their books. For scientists and engineers they could use computers to do their mathematical work rather then spending most of their time doing arithmetic.
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(Also I'll be all snooty and say that The Difference Engine doesn't really fall under the area of modern Steampunk since it retains an awareness of actual history and engineering and isn't just people with goggles doing magic stuff with cogs. )
posted by Artw at 12:37 PM on December 28, 2011 [1 favorite]