Artifacts of history

We were talking about old-fangled console designs a while back. by Huinesoron on 2019-10-15 10:12:25 UTC Reply

(All right, it's only halfway down the Front Page, but I'm trying to ease us back into the habit of scrolling down gently.)

I've just run into this video (via Paleofuture), which features the home computing system of 1999... as predicted in 1967.

Hooooo boy.

Here we see The Wife (who I'm pretty sure is an old Doctor Who companion) using her video console to shop for clothes. The cameras at the store will scan (live) the display of products for her to peruse, slowly scrolling through them. She makes her selections using single buttons on the front of the console.

Meanwhile, and I'm going to quote this precisely, 'What The Wife selects on her console, will be paid for by The Husband on his counterpart console'. He too carries out this futuristic act through the use of small, unlabelled buttons on the front of his device. The bank's central computer will debit his account, and credit the department store's.

Should he be concerned that The Wife's extravagance will put a strain on the budget, The Husband can receive a printed copy of said budget instantaneously, at the push of a button! It includes the taxes he owes, and the payments left on the car.

"But wait!" you cry. "What if he needs to communicate with other people through something other than a single button? Are we to believe that The Husband has access to some manner of electronic typewriter? Preposterous!" Quite so, my friends, but fear not: the man of 1999 will have something far more plausible.

This is The Husband's electronic correspondence machine, or 'home post office'. None of this mucking about with buttons for the electronic letter of the future - The Husband is able to employ his masterful penmanship to send messages to individuals all over the world!

As long as no-one knocks any of the wires out of the plug-board, at least.

I assumed this was going to be a post about what a wacky retro-future console would look like, but honestly, I suspect there are consoles in HQ running on exactly this system. Only without the misogyny.

Artifacts of history by Thoth on 2019-10-15 15:32:34 UTC Reply

If we're looking for historical dead ends to pillage for ideas here, it's worth looking at France's Minitel network, where you'd have a mostly dumb terminal jacked into a BBS-style service that provided country-wide information services.

Man, imagine if that had taken off.

Early PPC may have used consoles based on telex systems, essentially two-way teletypes. Presumably, there was a cadre of agents in Intel tasked with literally typing assignments down the line. Or maybe some sentient blobs. Who knows.

Other fascinating systems from the past include the memex. I don't think there was ever a working version of this in real life, but it's the conceptual ancestor of the wiki and of the internet itself. I can totally imagine a bunch of agents in SAT or intel wiring together Memex exchanges to transfer intel notes and research data in some sort of primitive wiki system.

Other ideas... by Scapegrace on 2019-10-15 19:26:43 UTC Reply

This could fit more into the solarpunk AU (still working on it, don't you fret), but there are some really fascinating methods of communication that I think would work well in a kind of updated, automated way. First, there's message sticks, common all across Australia's indigenous communities; for something like a secure message system, you could transmit a message pattern from a hub to an ethernet-connected rhubarb forcing house, whereupon the message is carved onto the rhubarb and the agent is alerted to its arrival via some other means. It's coded and secure, because afterwards you can eat the rhubarb. Also, FYI, rhubarb forcing is basically a way of making rhubarb grow so fast you can hear it.

A more complex version, and one that could involve more in-depth messaging opportunities, is the stick-chart navigation system of the Marshall Islanders. These are bent sticks that show the positions of swells, tides, islands, and so forth in a more permanent manner; a very flexible semi-liquid wood-pulp version with parts that move via fluid induction and kirigami could be extremely useful as both a display piece and an objet d'art, which fits into the solarpunk aesthetic very nicely.

Stick charts by Huinesoron on 2019-10-16 10:04:44 UTC Reply

Would it be going overboard to imagine an earlier PPC using these for navigating plotholes? Stick charts require you to learn to read the waves and swells of the sea; perhaps a PPC-analogue around the time of Robinson Crusoe could adapt them to work with ripples in the fabric of reality. You map the known plotholes(/portals), but also use your understanding of the way they affect the world to find new ones.

hS

That's an amazing idea. by Scapegrace on 2019-10-16 12:06:08 UTC Reply

The image of some past veteran agent gently helping a new agent understand the nature of the Wordseas, out on a tiny ship somewhere that's nowhere at all, and everywhere at once, and also somehow always Tuesdays and July, and also sometimes never. The new recruit is so eager to learn; it's all so big and new, this part. There's a sense of wonder to it, in this homebuilt pioneer age of the PPC...

Oh, absolutely! by Scapegrace on 2019-10-15 10:58:00 UTC Reply

And some enterprising sort has almost certainly ported Skyrim to it. And possibly Minecraft. =]

Doom is frankly a given (nm) by Mattman The Comet on 2019-10-15 12:57:52 UTC Reply

I mean, the TOS consoles had Quake... (nm) by Thoth on 2019-10-15 15:21:17 UTC Reply