The bigger story

Ken Shirriff powers up an antique plug­gable vacuum tube, adver­tised here:

Ken writes:

One of the inno­va­tions of the [IBM] 604 was the plug­gable module, which com­bined a tube and its asso­ci­ated cir­cuitry [ … ] The insu­lated handle was used to remove and install mod­ules in the calculator. The nine pins at the bottom of the module plugged into a socket in the 604, with the sockets con­nected with back­plane wiring. The tube was also socketed, so a bad tube could be quickly replaced.

Reading about stuff like this, some­thing to notice is that “the vacuum tube” wasn’t one thing, but a whole sweep of things, improve­ments and refinements, gen­er­a­tional leaps, all playing out across decades. This wasn’t “the pri­mor­dial ooze before computers”—IT WAS COMPUTERS, for a long and rich period of time.

You can say the same about punch-card computing, too.

This view has at least two nice features. One: it rec­og­nizes all this work and invention, the real beauty of it. (More phys­i­cally beautiful, I’d say, than most modern computing.) Two: it reminds us that “we are using some­body else’s vacuum tubes”—which is to say, it’s plain to me that the story of AI is only beginning. There will be SO many improve­ments and refinements, gen­er­a­tional leaps … all playing out across the decades ahead. Yes, decades! There is so much work to do. This (technology; industry; world??) isn’t going to be “over” in three years or five.

In fact, I think it’s all the same big story: punch cards and plug­gable tubes, lap­tops and LLMs. Under­standing that you are inside of it — acknowledging the dense, con­tin­uous con­nec­tions in both directions, back in time and for­ward too — is both ener­gizing and, in a way, soothing.