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He lost me when claiming entertainment is smaller than tech. That is a clearly self serving view that is laughably difficult to defend. To be clear, the other

by taeric 3y ago

He lost me when claiming entertainment is smaller than tech. That is a clearly self serving view that is laughably difficult to defend. To be clear, the other direction would also be hard to defend. And when was this magic period of interop? Even the cited examples are notable for how exceptional they are. This is almost literally an exception proving the rule. Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? Remember when you actually did have to know the signal capabilities of your video card? Ever buy a keyboard that didn't connect to your computer? Try watching that dvd your friend brought from Japan? Get sent a 8trak? Have a record, but not a variable speed turntable? For that matter, have a grandparent buy you sonic, but you only have a NES? Super Mario World, but again, you only have a NES? Then have you ever actually had fun replacing a car tire, only to find no store in town has any to fit? Heaven help if you were missing transmission parts. Or you thought you'd be forward looking and buy metric tools, and now none fit any of your mechanical parts at home anymore... Really, the list is rather impressive on how hard working together is.

smoldesu 3y ago
I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as it should. Everyone started with the same serial capabilities, and tried their own solutions to various degrees of success. Eventually, the industry settles on a particularly attractive and agreeable implementation and standardizes it for everyone. This happened with sound cards, video cards, keyboards and pretty much everything else. As the Bleem! lawsuits proved, even interoperability between game consoles was a legal concept. The incentive to engineer solutions for it just didn't really exist until we standardized computer architectures.
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? No, I don't remember that. If anything, I remember most games supporting nothing but adlib and practically every other device having either a literal OPL/adlib chip or some other type of hardware/software adlib emulation. There was no impediment whatsoever to creating an adlib-compatible card *, and in fact, many manufacturers did create clones. It perfectly illustrates Doctorow's point. * Patents being the glaring exception, which forced "creative" solutions (e.g. later Creative cards).
- taeric 3y ago
  Sound blaster was far and away better than adlib... if you had a sound canvas, you were showing off. :)
nonrandomstring 3y ago
There's a beautiful lecture given by Prof. Richard Buckland of NSW where he talks, in a Douglas Adams kinda way, about the near infinite improbability of the CD player ever playing the first CDs people bought. If you ever need an account of a supernova of industry growth built on deep, deep interoperability worked out by the cleverest bastards all around the world, the is a jolly good one.
giantrobot 3y ago
> And when was this magic period of interop? From about 2002 to whenever Google and Facebook killed XMPP federation. If you were among the computer nerd crowd you had a blog with an RSS feed rather than a homepage. Your Flickr galleries had RSS feeds. Many sites we'd call "social media" today had some type of feed. If you knew someone's account name on the service you could get a read-only feed of the content they chose to make public. You could "follow" someone by adding those public feeds to your RSS reader. They might even allow pingbacks/trackbacks that let you reply to them on your blog. You could fire up your Jabber supporting IM app and send messages to other Jabber users as well as any Facebook or Google user. The model was very interesting but was not workable for billions of normal people that didn't have blogs or Flickr accounts or whatever. I say these things were only available to computer nerds because to run a blog usually required you be your own sysadmin, moderator, and security. Pingbacks and trackbacks were ruined by spammers as were blog comments. WordPress was hilariously insecure and damn near every blog was hosting at least one piece of malware. Facebook et al worked for "normal" people because Facebook took on the roles of sysadmin, moderator, and security. Most of the services offering composable feeds were either going out of business or shutting down feeds because they realized (like Facebook) that they could monetize access to their users.
- taeric 3y ago
  That you are picking 2002 as a start kind of highlights the exceptional nature of that time. ICQ was already dead. AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, local BBSs. They were all dying in that time. Or dead. Don't get me wrong, there have been good interops. But there are more examples of otherwise. With early 2000s standing at a strong showing of things starting to work well.

by taeric 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago

I agree with your criticism overall. In defense of interoperability though, I think everything you mentioned is a great example of interoperability working as it should. Everyone started with the same serial capabilities, and tried their own solutions to various degrees of success. Eventually, the industry settles on a particularly attractive and agreeable implementation and standardizes it for everyone. This happened with sound cards, video cards, keyboards and pretty much everything else. As the Bleem! lawsuits proved, even interoperability between game consoles was a legal concept. The incentive to engineer solutions for it just didn't really exist until we standardized computer architectures.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

> Remember back when your adlib sound card couldn't play the sounds of your game? No, I don't remember that. If anything, I remember most games supporting nothing but adlib and practically every other device having either a literal OPL/adlib chip or some other type of hardware/software adlib emulation. There was no impediment whatsoever to creating an adlib-compatible card *, and in fact, many manufacturers did create clones. It perfectly illustrates Doctorow's point. * Patents being the glaring exception, which forced "creative" solutions (e.g. later Creative cards).

taeric 3y ago
Sound blaster was far and away better than adlib... if you had a sound canvas, you were showing off. :)

nonrandomstring 3y ago

There's a beautiful lecture given by Prof. Richard Buckland of NSW where he talks, in a Douglas Adams kinda way, about the near infinite improbability of the CD player ever playing the first CDs people bought. If you ever need an account of a supernova of industry growth built on deep, deep interoperability worked out by the cleverest bastards all around the world, the is a jolly good one.

giantrobot 3y ago

> And when was this magic period of interop? From about 2002 to whenever Google and Facebook killed XMPP federation. If you were among the computer nerd crowd you had a blog with an RSS feed rather than a homepage. Your Flickr galleries had RSS feeds. Many sites we'd call "social media" today had some type of feed. If you knew someone's account name on the service you could get a read-only feed of the content they chose to make public. You could "follow" someone by adding those public feeds to your RSS reader. They might even allow pingbacks/trackbacks that let you reply to them on your blog. You could fire up your Jabber supporting IM app and send messages to other Jabber users as well as any Facebook or Google user. The model was very interesting but was not workable for billions of normal people that didn't have blogs or Flickr accounts or whatever. I say these things were only available to computer nerds because to run a blog usually required you be your own sysadmin, moderator, and security. Pingbacks and trackbacks were ruined by spammers as were blog comments. WordPress was hilariously insecure and damn near every blog was hosting at least one piece of malware. Facebook et al worked for "normal" people because Facebook took on the roles of sysadmin, moderator, and security. Most of the services offering composable feeds were either going out of business or shutting down feeds because they realized (like Facebook) that they could monetize access to their users.

taeric 3y ago
That you are picking 2002 as a start kind of highlights the exceptional nature of that time. ICQ was already dead. AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, local BBSs. They were all dying in that time. Or dead. Don't get me wrong, there have been good interops. But there are more examples of otherwise. With early 2000s standing at a strong showing of things starting to work well.