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Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for just how manual everything was. It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings

Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for just how manual everything was. It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.

082349872349872 2y ago
don't forget punched cards: https://pattonhq.com/ibm.html https://pattonhq.com/ibm.html https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bureau-supplies-and-accounts-uses-help-manage-complex-tasks-it https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bu...
cen4 2y ago
Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world. Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  A frequently repeated excuse for WWI germany is that Wilhelm II had expressed desire not to invade the west, but had been told by his military that it was too late to recall the trains. Apparently the guy in charge of the german army's logistics in 1914 wrote a book after the war to explain that not only could he have turned everyone back before the border had he only received a command to do so, but also included appendices with the timetables for doing so. [my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg suggests it might have been Groener, Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg (1929)]
- mlyle 2y ago
  Note that we got a lot of half-baked outcomes and military disasters with manual processes, too.
- aftbit 2y ago
  >Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.
KineticLensman 2y ago
> All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets. Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-shooter kill chains we see today.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  If you've not read Most Secret War I highly recommend it. Dr R V Jones details some of the different systems involved in the Battle of Britain and it's a great book too.
  - KineticLensman 2y ago
    I read 'The Secret War' by Brian Johnson which was based on a 1970s BBC series. I think it's an earlier version of the same thing. Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.
    - thingification 2y ago
      > I think ['The Secret War' by Brian Johnson is] an earlier version of ['Most Secret War' by R V Jones] Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all. Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.

082349872349872 2y ago

don't forget punched cards: https://pattonhq.com/ibm.html https://pattonhq.com/ibm.html https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bureau-supplies-and-accounts-uses-help-manage-complex-tasks-it https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bu...

cen4 2y ago

Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world. Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.

082349872349872 2y ago
A frequently repeated excuse for WWI germany is that Wilhelm II had expressed desire not to invade the west, but had been told by his military that it was too late to recall the trains. Apparently the guy in charge of the german army's logistics in 1914 wrote a book after the war to explain that not only could he have turned everyone back before the border had he only received a command to do so, but also included appendices with the timetables for doing so. [my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg suggests it might have been Groener, Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg (1929)]
mlyle 2y ago
Note that we got a lot of half-baked outcomes and military disasters with manual processes, too.
aftbit 2y ago
>Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.

KineticLensman 2y ago

> All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets. Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-shooter kill chains we see today.

bloopernova 2y ago
If you've not read Most Secret War I highly recommend it. Dr R V Jones details some of the different systems involved in the Battle of Britain and it's a great book too.
- KineticLensman 2y ago
  I read 'The Secret War' by Brian Johnson which was based on a 1970s BBC series. I think it's an earlier version of the same thing. Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.
  - thingification 2y ago
    > I think ['The Secret War' by Brian Johnson is] an earlier version of ['Most Secret War' by R V Jones] Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all. Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.