ShearingLayersOfComputing

ThoughtStorms Wiki

My reply to a tweet that seems to have disappeared.

I guess they were complaining about the difficulty of changing software.

Works pretty well for cities.

We think about computers wrong. We think that the "shearing layers" of computing have hardware at the bottom, then OS.

But actually OS is more like bottom level street plan. With computer hardware as individual buildings.

Hardware actually evolves faster than system-level software.

If we really grokked this, would we feel happier with the way computing evolves?

We'd KNOW that changing the lowest level protocols is the hardest, slowest thing.

Rather than feel the frustration that something we imagine to be malleable and fast moving, seems resistant to improvement.

We'd also be happier to rebuild higher layers while keeping lower layers the same.