10 ms·

No Damned Computer Is Going to Tell Me What to Do – Story of Naval Data System

174 points by bulla 4y ago

joelberman 4y ago
I was one of the first sailors to go through DS A school at Mare Island. Previously the DS went through ET school first. We learned the purpose of every gate in the UDT a 15-bit computer with 512 words of memory before stepping up to the 642A and 642B computers. This was in 1967 when it was still possible to know how every bit of hardware and software worked.
- albatross13 4y ago
  Now that is cool- I have to ask, is there a moment in your memory where looking back you kind of realized "Wow, I can no longer keep track of everything going on with these computers?" (in regards to it being possible to know how every bit of hardware/software worked).
  - segmondy 4y ago
    It's still possible to do so. Just get an EE degree, you will understand hardware down to the gate level. Take a solid CS course and you will understand software down the basic levels. Understanding hardware to OS is something that a lot of people still know, what is difficult to know these days is the layers of software by 3rd parties running on the OS.
    - izzydata 4y ago
      You can analyze any single part of a modern large piece of software, but I think the point is that you can no longer remember the entirety of the software or hardware. Even a single function is going to get compiled through multiple layers of obfuscation until it hits the hardware and at that point modern CPUs are also extremely convoluted. Nobody is going to know how a function on your OS will compute with absolute certainty.
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Not all modern CPUs are high performance devices. In fact the vast majority of microprocessors are no more complicated than an early minicomputer.
  - cptnapalm 4y ago
    From what I've read from others a PDP-8 or maybe a PDP-11 is about the limit. They got a 12-bit computer with 32 KiW to be a time sharing system for 17 users with TSS-8. So they were still quite capable.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      4k words of RAM, and it ran a Fortran compiler.
  - GrumpyYoungMan 4y ago
    Contrary to some sibling posts, datapath width isn't really the limiting factor for comprehension IMO; everything is "wider" but not more difficult to understand. For example, undergraduate computer engineering students could and did design pipelined in-order 32 bit processors as part of their studies. At least IMO superscalar + out of order execution was when things really became too complex to hold comprehension of the entire processor in one's head.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      > datapath width isn't really the limiting factor for comprehension IMO People reckon that changing the head gaskets on an old Rover V8 engine is a complicated and scary job but it's exactly the same as doing it on an old Mini A-series engine, you've just got to do two of them and they're twice as big.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  '67...wow. I'd bet I understand the reason for that kind of training. Folks who remembered (for instance) the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (14–15 November, 1942) would still be serving. And the vast differences in the performances of the battleships USS Washington and USS South Dakota in that battle. Admiral Lee, aboard the Washington, had an incredibly detailed understanding of the ship and its systems. He made "Sink enemy battleship while taking no damage" look easy. Vs. the South Dakota's massive screw-ups in her electrical switchboard room - just before the battle got interesting - converted her into a helpless, easy target for enemy fire.
  - mwint 4y ago
    Sounds interesting, do you know of any good places to read about this?
    - jandrese 4y ago
      Beyond what was already posted there is a good starting overview video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI24zwFLcuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI24zwFLcuU
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - bell-cot 4y ago
      Start at the mouth of the Wikipedia rabbit-hole - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal#Second_Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal,_14%E2%80%9315_November https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal#Se... - and beware! - Wikipedia has some seriously deep citations on this, if you don't have plenty of hours to kill.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      I'd also be interested. Any books by professionals - historians, for example?
kloch 4y ago
Reminds me of this scene from War Games https://youtu.be/iRsycWRQrc8?t=66 https://youtu.be/iRsycWRQrc8?t=66
birdman3131 4y ago
This feels like a real interesting article that was chopped up and mixed. They will mention something interesting for a paragraph or two and then go on to something completely different. Its difficult to read for me.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of great content in it, but it's very disorganized.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    There was a lot going on at the same time. Some jumping around could not be avoided.
imwillofficial 4y ago
If they didn’t use the system “they would probably be instantly removed from their commands and maybe court martialed” Dumbest shit I’ve read all day. That’s not how the Navy works. A captain is given wide latitude in how to run His ship.
- BuildTheRobots 4y ago
  "A captain is given a wide latitude in how to run Their ship." Though, after a quick google, it seems that the US took until April 2022 (a fortnight ago) to get their first female Captain. I'm slightly agog it's taken so long. https://www.forces.net/services/navy/royal-navy-history-first-female-captain-takes-command-ship https://www.forces.net/services/navy/royal-navy-history-firs...
  - rsofaer 4y ago
    That article is about the UK!
  - ranger207 4y ago
    That's the UK Royal Navy. According to Wikipedia[0] (which cites a broken link unfortunately) the first female ship captain in the US Navy was LT CDR Darlene Iskra in 1990 commanding the USS _Oppertune_, and CDR Maureen A. Farren was the first to command a combatant ship, the USS _Mount Vernon_ in 1998. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Navy#Timeline_of_women_in_the_United_States_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Nav...
    - BuildTheRobots 4y ago
      Apologies, I'm so used to HN being US centric. Even more reason for Their ship, if the UK has been doing it for 30 years...
      - imwillofficial 4y ago
        HN is US centric because ycombinator and Silicon Valley are in the US.
rocqua 4y ago
This is an amazing read, but damn is it long. I was happy to reach the end of the page, only to see "for chapter 2 click here". Guess I am going home late today.
- axus 4y ago
  I'd definitely be interested in buying this as a book for reading after work
aeortakertj 4y ago
Oh yeah. My dad was an Air Force officer for twenty years. He spent most of that time loudly, proudly refusing to learn how to use computers. Throughout the 70s he got shipped around to ever-smaller facilities with the oldest-available technology. He finally got fired in the 80s when there was nowhere left to send him to. He still tells the story frequently and doesn't understand why no one recognizes what a genius he is. If you really want to see some shit, look up the story of the Permissive Action Link and how the USAF intentionally bypassed the system and lied to Congress about it for decades.
sandworm101 4y ago
The Sum of All Fears. The scene where Russian BACKFIREs attack a US Carrier with AS-4 missiles. That is why you have to let the computers make many decisions. Humans are just too slow.
caycep 4y ago
I'm kind of wondering - at the beginning of the war, the IJN seemed to be on the upper hand with technical innovations, at least at the tactical level, and training. Why did it not keep pace with the tech development vs. the allies? Surely there were no shortage of talented individual intellectuals (Jiro Horikoshi, etc). Is this primarily a case study in management styles? i.e. the IJN had too many of those "No Damned Computer is going to tell me what to do" officers that shot down ideas like fighter director officers or NTDS systems?
- paulmd 4y ago
  I'm not any kind of an academic on the subject, but I'd guess a combination of lack of resources, and general lack of scale. Japan simply was not that big a country and even if you assume they had a disproportionate amount of intellectuals or amount of advancement per individual, they're a tiny tiny fraction of the size of the US, the US simply could be working on a lot more projects at once, and even long-shot ones that might not bear fruit, and they were working on the shorter-term ones at the same time. And that size factor also translates into much poorer availability of the strategic materials that are necessary for a lot of advanced research. After Midway the Japanese military really shifted into field-expedient mode, you can see it even in things like the quality of their small arms production, they started cutting every corner that it was possible to safely cut and then some. At that point I imagine that a lot of the advanced research was cut hard unless it was really really important (iirc they still had, for example, a nuclear program) or seemed likely to bear immediate fruit. The pacific front was really over when Japan didn't get the US carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor and it was definitely over after Midway, everything after that was just stubbornness. Same as the European front - there was really no chance of victory once the US shifted off a market-economy to a command-economy focused around war production and you had an industrial nation 2-3x the size of everyone else sitting 2000 miles away (which, realistically, might as well have been on the moon as far as Axis force projection) pumping war materiel into the battle. The US could build tanks faster than the Germans could blow them up, they could re-tool the Russian industry to modern standards, and they could build ships faster than the Japanese (or German u-boats) could sink them, all at the same time. In that sense even if they had gotten the pacific fleet, the US probably still could have won in the long term, it would just have taken years longer. It's a "what if the germans had actually taken moscow" counterfactual... it probably still wouldn't have changed anything given the biggest factor, which is an untouchable foe sitting on the other side of the planet pumping out war materiel while you run out of your own resources. But yeah in general the role of the military in Imperial Japan is very interesting... the army and the navy both had their own armies and navies and air forces, and they basically were in competition for the favor of the emperor. It wasn't quite what we think of as a modern professional military where everyone is at least theoretically "on the same side", the armed forces VERY MUCH did not like each other and would go out of their way to screw the other over. I could definitely see some disdain for eggheads, or refusing to adopt a technology because it came from the wrong branch too.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
You know, if Luke Skywalker hadn't listened to Obi Wan and switched off his targeting computer that Death-star would still be out there menacing peaceful planets. Good job the Rebels didn't disable manual over-ride.
- krisoft 4y ago
  Yeah, because space based fairy tales provide a proper basis to engineer a fighting force. There are many good reasons why one would want a manual over-ride. The imagination of popular script writers is not one of them.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I'm glad we're in agreement. If only Ronald Regan has listened to his 'Star Wars' advisors. And a shame Boeing's 737 MAX software team had parents who took them to see Smokey and the Bandit in 1977.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      RR (rather, the people writing his script) knew that Star Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It only need to panic the Soviet military brass enough to to get them to crash the Soviet economy.
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        > Star Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It only need to panic the Soviet military brass enough to to get them to crash the Soviet economy. It's a good, and perhaps trivially true theory, insomuch as warfare is always bluff. I think by mid-80's the writing was already on the wall with respect to Soviet over-reach and CIA knew that. But don't you think the ruskie scientists knew "space lasers" were never going to happen? As I understand it, the best we ever got were some kinds of chemical MASERs (Ammonium liquid phase) that could take out a slow missile at a couple of kilometres on a perfect day. Any confirmed advances on that? Ironically enough, in the context of this thread, such weapons absolutely could not function without total computer control of the ranging and targeting angle.
wazoox 4y ago
I've read the whole book (probably from HN recommendation) and it's awesome what they achieved back in the 50s. Networking huge computers at sea for C&C and targeting back in the 50s and 60s. The writing may not be great, but the whole thing is incredibly interesting!
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug
webmobdev 4y ago
I guess it's a cultural thing - as a nation of immigrants with low population, once scientific knowledge grew, slavery started to become unpopular and communist / socialist ideas started becoming popular with the labour class, Americans increasingly turned to technology to try and replace them or make their work redundant. Thus, the powers to be in the US have an affinity to trusting technology. Most of Europe and Asia especially does not share this enthusiasm and have policies that dictate that humans should be able to override the "machine" at any point.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Can you provide any credible sources for this theory?
  - webmobdev 4y ago
    No. It's an extrapolation of something one of my history teacher taught in school when teaching us about our colonial history. While early imperialism was about enslaving people for labour and obtaining raw resources from the colony, as the industrial revolution happened the goals changed. With the advent of industrialisation the capitalist-imperialists found a way to reduce dependence on human labour and this was considered a necessity to counter the potential economic might of the colonies in Africa and Asia with huge populations. (And this did give some colonies an edge - for example, at one point in history both India and China were economically richer because of the easy availability of cheap labour). To ensure their economic edge, apart from using industrialisation to reduce the need for human labour by finding machines to replace them, they also used the colonies as a market for their industrialised goods. For this, they also had to destroy the local industries of the colonies (deindustrialisation) that had the advantage of surplus and cheap labour, and thus make colonies importers of their manufactured goods. ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britain-took-more-out-of-india https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britai... ). After the French revolution, and later the Russian revolution, once freed colonies got influenced by socialism and / or communism, it was common to see some socialist or communist parties organising protests against machines or computers that were "stealing" human jobs to "enrich" the capitalists at the expense of human workers. Thus, there is a political history in past colonies to view mechanisation / industrialisation with suspicion and distrust, and the debate on humans vs machines in these countries leans towards humans being "superior".
openasocket 4y ago
I'd love to see a deep dive like this into how the modern Aegis system works from a programming and architectural standpoint
- Marthinwurer 4y ago
  Anything technical about the actual system is probably classified because it's active military hardware, but some possible avenues of reading would be the F-35 sensor fusion paper, as well as some radar textbooks like Stimson or Skolnik.
ncmncm 4y ago
This series is outstanding! Be warned, it is five long chapters, and will take hours to read. But it is well worth the time. I learned more computer history from this one book than everything I had picked up in decades before.
gumby 4y ago
I am surprised there was opposition given the by then decades of deployment of targeting computers for the canon. OTOH there was a lot of resistance to radio connection, as many captains felt it diminished their autonomy. What’s fascinating about the latter that appears right now is that the US military did retain autonomy in the ranks while deploying radio communication. By contrast the USSR used it to reinforce top-down decision making. We can see the contrast in Ukraine today.
dang 4y ago
Related - one past thread with one comment: No Damned Computer Is Going to Tell Me What to Do - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580701 - June 2020 (1 comment)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hbarka 4y ago
You know you need a break from the interwebs when your brain sees Naval and thinks it’s about Ravikant. And I’ve lived on naval bases.

174 points by bulla 4y ago

I was one of the first sailors to go through DS A school at Mare Island. Previously the DS went through ET school first. We learned the purpose of every gate in the UDT a 15-bit computer with 512 words of memory before stepping up to the 642A and 642B computers. This was in 1967 when it was still possible to know how every bit of hardware and software worked.

albatross13 4y ago
Now that is cool- I have to ask, is there a moment in your memory where looking back you kind of realized "Wow, I can no longer keep track of everything going on with these computers?" (in regards to it being possible to know how every bit of hardware/software worked).
- segmondy 4y ago
  It's still possible to do so. Just get an EE degree, you will understand hardware down to the gate level. Take a solid CS course and you will understand software down the basic levels. Understanding hardware to OS is something that a lot of people still know, what is difficult to know these days is the layers of software by 3rd parties running on the OS.
  - izzydata 4y ago
    You can analyze any single part of a modern large piece of software, but I think the point is that you can no longer remember the entirety of the software or hardware. Even a single function is going to get compiled through multiple layers of obfuscation until it hits the hardware and at that point modern CPUs are also extremely convoluted. Nobody is going to know how a function on your OS will compute with absolute certainty.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Not all modern CPUs are high performance devices. In fact the vast majority of microprocessors are no more complicated than an early minicomputer.
- cptnapalm 4y ago
  From what I've read from others a PDP-8 or maybe a PDP-11 is about the limit. They got a 12-bit computer with 32 KiW to be a time sharing system for 17 users with TSS-8. So they were still quite capable.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    4k words of RAM, and it ran a Fortran compiler.
- GrumpyYoungMan 4y ago
  Contrary to some sibling posts, datapath width isn't really the limiting factor for comprehension IMO; everything is "wider" but not more difficult to understand. For example, undergraduate computer engineering students could and did design pipelined in-order 32 bit processors as part of their studies. At least IMO superscalar + out of order execution was when things really became too complex to hold comprehension of the entire processor in one's head.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    > datapath width isn't really the limiting factor for comprehension IMO People reckon that changing the head gaskets on an old Rover V8 engine is a complicated and scary job but it's exactly the same as doing it on an old Mini A-series engine, you've just got to do two of them and they're twice as big.
bell-cot 4y ago
'67...wow. I'd bet I understand the reason for that kind of training. Folks who remembered (for instance) the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (14–15 November, 1942) would still be serving. And the vast differences in the performances of the battleships USS Washington and USS South Dakota in that battle. Admiral Lee, aboard the Washington, had an incredibly detailed understanding of the ship and its systems. He made "Sink enemy battleship while taking no damage" look easy. Vs. the South Dakota's massive screw-ups in her electrical switchboard room - just before the battle got interesting - converted her into a helpless, easy target for enemy fire.
- mwint 4y ago
  Sounds interesting, do you know of any good places to read about this?
  - jandrese 4y ago
    Beyond what was already posted there is a good starting overview video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI24zwFLcuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI24zwFLcuU
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Start at the mouth of the Wikipedia rabbit-hole - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal#Second_Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal,_14%E2%80%9315_November https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal#Se... - and beware! - Wikipedia has some seriously deep citations on this, if you don't have plenty of hours to kill.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    I'd also be interested. Any books by professionals - historians, for example?

kloch 4y ago

Reminds me of this scene from War Games https://youtu.be/iRsycWRQrc8?t=66 https://youtu.be/iRsycWRQrc8?t=66

birdman3131 4y ago

This feels like a real interesting article that was chopped up and mixed. They will mention something interesting for a paragraph or two and then go on to something completely different. Its difficult to read for me.

xeromal 4y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of great content in it, but it's very disorganized.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There was a lot going on at the same time. Some jumping around could not be avoided.

imwillofficial 4y ago

If they didn’t use the system “they would probably be instantly removed from their commands and maybe court martialed” Dumbest shit I’ve read all day. That’s not how the Navy works. A captain is given wide latitude in how to run His ship.

BuildTheRobots 4y ago
"A captain is given a wide latitude in how to run Their ship." Though, after a quick google, it seems that the US took until April 2022 (a fortnight ago) to get their first female Captain. I'm slightly agog it's taken so long. https://www.forces.net/services/navy/royal-navy-history-first-female-captain-takes-command-ship https://www.forces.net/services/navy/royal-navy-history-firs...
- rsofaer 4y ago
  That article is about the UK!
- ranger207 4y ago
  That's the UK Royal Navy. According to Wikipedia[0] (which cites a broken link unfortunately) the first female ship captain in the US Navy was LT CDR Darlene Iskra in 1990 commanding the USS _Oppertune_, and CDR Maureen A. Farren was the first to command a combatant ship, the USS _Mount Vernon_ in 1998. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Navy#Timeline_of_women_in_the_United_States_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Nav...
  - BuildTheRobots 4y ago
    Apologies, I'm so used to HN being US centric. Even more reason for Their ship, if the UK has been doing it for 30 years...
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      HN is US centric because ycombinator and Silicon Valley are in the US.

rocqua 4y ago

This is an amazing read, but damn is it long. I was happy to reach the end of the page, only to see "for chapter 2 click here". Guess I am going home late today.

axus 4y ago
I'd definitely be interested in buying this as a book for reading after work

aeortakertj 4y ago

Oh yeah. My dad was an Air Force officer for twenty years. He spent most of that time loudly, proudly refusing to learn how to use computers. Throughout the 70s he got shipped around to ever-smaller facilities with the oldest-available technology. He finally got fired in the 80s when there was nowhere left to send him to. He still tells the story frequently and doesn't understand why no one recognizes what a genius he is. If you really want to see some shit, look up the story of the Permissive Action Link and how the USAF intentionally bypassed the system and lied to Congress about it for decades.

sandworm101 4y ago

The Sum of All Fears. The scene where Russian BACKFIREs attack a US Carrier with AS-4 missiles. That is why you have to let the computers make many decisions. Humans are just too slow.

caycep 4y ago

I'm kind of wondering - at the beginning of the war, the IJN seemed to be on the upper hand with technical innovations, at least at the tactical level, and training. Why did it not keep pace with the tech development vs. the allies? Surely there were no shortage of talented individual intellectuals (Jiro Horikoshi, etc). Is this primarily a case study in management styles? i.e. the IJN had too many of those "No Damned Computer is going to tell me what to do" officers that shot down ideas like fighter director officers or NTDS systems?

paulmd 4y ago
I'm not any kind of an academic on the subject, but I'd guess a combination of lack of resources, and general lack of scale. Japan simply was not that big a country and even if you assume they had a disproportionate amount of intellectuals or amount of advancement per individual, they're a tiny tiny fraction of the size of the US, the US simply could be working on a lot more projects at once, and even long-shot ones that might not bear fruit, and they were working on the shorter-term ones at the same time. And that size factor also translates into much poorer availability of the strategic materials that are necessary for a lot of advanced research. After Midway the Japanese military really shifted into field-expedient mode, you can see it even in things like the quality of their small arms production, they started cutting every corner that it was possible to safely cut and then some. At that point I imagine that a lot of the advanced research was cut hard unless it was really really important (iirc they still had, for example, a nuclear program) or seemed likely to bear immediate fruit. The pacific front was really over when Japan didn't get the US carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor and it was definitely over after Midway, everything after that was just stubbornness. Same as the European front - there was really no chance of victory once the US shifted off a market-economy to a command-economy focused around war production and you had an industrial nation 2-3x the size of everyone else sitting 2000 miles away (which, realistically, might as well have been on the moon as far as Axis force projection) pumping war materiel into the battle. The US could build tanks faster than the Germans could blow them up, they could re-tool the Russian industry to modern standards, and they could build ships faster than the Japanese (or German u-boats) could sink them, all at the same time. In that sense even if they had gotten the pacific fleet, the US probably still could have won in the long term, it would just have taken years longer. It's a "what if the germans had actually taken moscow" counterfactual... it probably still wouldn't have changed anything given the biggest factor, which is an untouchable foe sitting on the other side of the planet pumping out war materiel while you run out of your own resources. But yeah in general the role of the military in Imperial Japan is very interesting... the army and the navy both had their own armies and navies and air forces, and they basically were in competition for the favor of the emperor. It wasn't quite what we think of as a modern professional military where everyone is at least theoretically "on the same side", the armed forces VERY MUCH did not like each other and would go out of their way to screw the other over. I could definitely see some disdain for eggheads, or refusing to adopt a technology because it came from the wrong branch too.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

You know, if Luke Skywalker hadn't listened to Obi Wan and switched off his targeting computer that Death-star would still be out there menacing peaceful planets. Good job the Rebels didn't disable manual over-ride.

krisoft 4y ago
Yeah, because space based fairy tales provide a proper basis to engineer a fighting force. There are many good reasons why one would want a manual over-ride. The imagination of popular script writers is not one of them.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I'm glad we're in agreement. If only Ronald Regan has listened to his 'Star Wars' advisors. And a shame Boeing's 737 MAX software team had parents who took them to see Smokey and the Bandit in 1977.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    RR (rather, the people writing his script) knew that Star Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It only need to panic the Soviet military brass enough to to get them to crash the Soviet economy.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      > Star Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It only need to panic the Soviet military brass enough to to get them to crash the Soviet economy. It's a good, and perhaps trivially true theory, insomuch as warfare is always bluff. I think by mid-80's the writing was already on the wall with respect to Soviet over-reach and CIA knew that. But don't you think the ruskie scientists knew "space lasers" were never going to happen? As I understand it, the best we ever got were some kinds of chemical MASERs (Ammonium liquid phase) that could take out a slow missile at a couple of kilometres on a perfect day. Any confirmed advances on that? Ironically enough, in the context of this thread, such weapons absolutely could not function without total computer control of the ranging and targeting angle.

wazoox 4y ago

I've read the whole book (probably from HN recommendation) and it's awesome what they achieved back in the 50s. Networking huge computers at sea for C&C and targeting back in the 50s and 60s. The writing may not be great, but the whole thing is incredibly interesting!

zikduruqe 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug

webmobdev 4y ago

I guess it's a cultural thing - as a nation of immigrants with low population, once scientific knowledge grew, slavery started to become unpopular and communist / socialist ideas started becoming popular with the labour class, Americans increasingly turned to technology to try and replace them or make their work redundant. Thus, the powers to be in the US have an affinity to trusting technology. Most of Europe and Asia especially does not share this enthusiasm and have policies that dictate that humans should be able to override the "machine" at any point.

wolverine876 4y ago
Can you provide any credible sources for this theory?
- webmobdev 4y ago
  No. It's an extrapolation of something one of my history teacher taught in school when teaching us about our colonial history. While early imperialism was about enslaving people for labour and obtaining raw resources from the colony, as the industrial revolution happened the goals changed. With the advent of industrialisation the capitalist-imperialists found a way to reduce dependence on human labour and this was considered a necessity to counter the potential economic might of the colonies in Africa and Asia with huge populations. (And this did give some colonies an edge - for example, at one point in history both India and China were economically richer because of the easy availability of cheap labour). To ensure their economic edge, apart from using industrialisation to reduce the need for human labour by finding machines to replace them, they also used the colonies as a market for their industrialised goods. For this, they also had to destroy the local industries of the colonies (deindustrialisation) that had the advantage of surplus and cheap labour, and thus make colonies importers of their manufactured goods. ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britain-took-more-out-of-india https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britai... ). After the French revolution, and later the Russian revolution, once freed colonies got influenced by socialism and / or communism, it was common to see some socialist or communist parties organising protests against machines or computers that were "stealing" human jobs to "enrich" the capitalists at the expense of human workers. Thus, there is a political history in past colonies to view mechanisation / industrialisation with suspicion and distrust, and the debate on humans vs machines in these countries leans towards humans being "superior".

openasocket 4y ago

I'd love to see a deep dive like this into how the modern Aegis system works from a programming and architectural standpoint

Marthinwurer 4y ago
Anything technical about the actual system is probably classified because it's active military hardware, but some possible avenues of reading would be the F-35 sensor fusion paper, as well as some radar textbooks like Stimson or Skolnik.

ncmncm 4y ago

This series is outstanding! Be warned, it is five long chapters, and will take hours to read. But it is well worth the time. I learned more computer history from this one book than everything I had picked up in decades before.

gumby 4y ago

I am surprised there was opposition given the by then decades of deployment of targeting computers for the canon. OTOH there was a lot of resistance to radio connection, as many captains felt it diminished their autonomy. What’s fascinating about the latter that appears right now is that the US military did retain autonomy in the ranks while deploying radio communication. By contrast the USSR used it to reinforce top-down decision making. We can see the contrast in Ukraine today.

dang 4y ago

Related - one past thread with one comment: No Damned Computer Is Going to Tell Me What to Do - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580701 - June 2020 (1 comment)

deleted 4y ago

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hbarka 4y ago

You know you need a break from the interwebs when your brain sees Naval and thinks it’s about Ravikant. And I’ve lived on naval bases.