The shock of the old

What Hacker News says

1. libraryofbabelNov 2020
   Rather than reading yet another article about how there’s all that COBOL still out there powering critical systems, which should comes as no surprise whatsoever to regular readers of Hacker News —— why not read a book about the deeper reasons how and why old technologies persist, and the ethic and duty of maintaining them. Specifically:

   David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2006).

   Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (2020).

   You won’t agree with everything in those books, but they will make you think deeply about old technologies and the stories we tell ourselves about innovation.

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2. tuatoruNov 2020
   Thanks for these!

   I have a copy of The Shock of The Old and I did find it thought-provoking. I had recently become aware of the ideas/discipline of discourse analysis[1] so it was more enlightening than it might have been to someone who wasn't really aware that our narratives are framed (like younger me).

   I'll be checking out the Russell and Vinsel.

   1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysis

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3. tuatoruNov 2020
   Very much this.

   People need to look at things from a "technology in use" perspective rather than just read press releases about the latest invention.

   David Edgerton's The Shock Of The Old[1] is a useful corrective to the gee-whizzery of pieces like the OP. (I'm re-reading it at the moment.)

   1. https://www.amazon.com/Shock-Old-Technology-Global-History/d...

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4. libraryofbabelApr 2020
   It depends on what you're looking for. Do you want popular "fun" accounts or "serious" historical scholarship? Heavy on technical specifics or lighter on details and stronger on the historical big picture? All of those are fine, but the answer will mean you'll want to look in different places.

   There is a active subfield of academic history of technology that deals with the history of computing. It's generally populated by professionally-trained historians who rigorously employ archival sources and tend to focus on the bigger picture, i.e. linking computing to wider historical trends and events (examples: the Cold War, Capitalism, the rise of programming as a profession, etc.). Some notable historians in this area are Mar Hicks and Nathan Ensmenger. The field is still growing and has a lot of ground to cover, but if you seek a deeper understanding (as readers of HN tend to do) then this is the place to go. Writing accurate history that also grapples with the big picture is hard, and it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that it takes specialists to do it.

   There's of course an abundance of popular accounts of innovation, along the lines of Walter Isaacson's _The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution_. Academic historians of technology generally dislike these accounts because they focus on a small set of "heroic" individuals at the expense of the bigger picture. To pick on Isaacson a bit, he's generally most interested in personalities (Steve Jobs, say) and must less interested in digging deeper into the economic and social history that lies behind the "Digital Revolution". Nonetheless, these accounts sell very well, there are also tons of articles out there written in a similar vein, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying them provided you are aware that you're only getting one version of the story.

   I also like some practitioner-accounts, really more memoir than history; they give you a nice sense of what it was like to live through a particular set of changes and to be part of building systems that we now take for granted. A good recent example, if you are interested in the genesis of UNIX, is Brian Kernighan's _Unix: A History and a Memoir_. Some excellent journalistic "on the ground" accounts also fall into this category of giving you a sense of what it was like to be there. The Soul of A New Machine, by Tracy Kidder is a good example.

   Finally, there is some very good general history of technology that doesn't focus exclusively on computing. An example is the superb _The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900_ by David Edgerton (polemical, controversial, easy to read, and even if you disagree with his argument it will likely change how you see technology forever).

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5. r41nbowdashJan 2018
   At the beginning of the 20th century something around 40% American cars was electric, same with 20% of the Berlin taxis.

   There's a wonderful book "The Shock of the Old" about the meandering ways innovation takes.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_of_the_Old

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6. libraryofbabelDec 2017
   Nice piece of journalism.

   Maintenance isn't sexy. It doesn't make for catchy political campaign promises. It's dirty, it's hard, it never ends, and you've succeed best when no one notices.

   But we live in a world full of old technologies and old systems that need constant maintenance and repair. Big infrastructure like the NY Subway is a prime example. 'Innovation' is only of marginal help when dealing with a system like that. Sure, if we had a spare ~$200 billion and were willing to completely evacuate New York City for 3 years we could rip everything out and build a new subway system to rival Singapore or Hong Kong. But this is the real world, and we have to rebuild the proverbial ship while it's still at sea. And the degree to which we have the tools and money to do so is a consequence of our political system.

   For anyone who found the OP article interesting, and who cares about technology as it really is across the world rather than as it's portrayed by the Silicon Valley hype machine, I highly recommend the book cited at one point in the article: The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, by the historian David Edgerton. It completely changed how I think about technology and the ways people use it.

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