Drudgery killing the soul. I was listening to "99 percent invisible" podcast about elevators and it was a person's job in some European palace to stay hidden in

Drudgery killing the soul. I was listening to "99 percent invisible" podcast about elevators and it was a person's job in some European palace to stay hidden in a tiny closet and work the pulley to raise and lower the king between floors. Something about that stuck with me as having its own particular horror. I imagine a space that is dark and cramped. Nothing to do but wait for a signal to pull on a rope... The desire to play is the most moving part of this parable. Amazing things come from this impulse even though it is transitory and trivial on the surface. I am pretty sure that Space Travel is not widely played any more but the desire to play it has shaped my life in more ways than I could count: "When Bell Labs withdrew from the Multics research consortium, Ken Thompson was left with some Multics-inspired ideas about how to build a file system. He was also left without a machine on which to play a game he had written called Space Travel, a science-fiction simulation that involved navigating a rocket through the solar system. Unix began its life on a scavenged PDP-7 minicomputer[14] like the one shown in Figure 2.1, as a platform for the Space Travel game and a testbed for Thompson's ideas about operating system design." http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html