Nobody ever knew how it worked

Cyrus Lopez published an essay last week, ‘The Last People Who Know How It Works’, and it’s the best thing I’ve read about computing this year. It mourns an intimacy with machines that he thinks is ending: the boot disk built for one game, the IRQ jumper set with a fingernail, the modem handshake you could diagnose by ear before the line dropped. His case is that competence is safe, because the models have read every manual we never bothered to, while acquaintance is dying. We’re about to lean on these machines harder than we’ve leaned on anything, and know them worse than he knew a beige PC in 1995. He’s mourning the wrong thing. Nobody ever knew how it worked, him included. You learn the layer you were born onto, maybe a rung or two below it, and past that your understanding gets thin and then stops. The boy poking at IRQs had no idea what the silicon under his sound card was doing. The people who understand the silicon couldn’t tell you much about the lithography that made it, or…