• mmddmm@lemm.ee
    16·
    11 days ago

    At the beginning, there were wires and dials that people would plug on the computer.

    Or, rather, punched cards are older than the wires. The first electronic computers didn’t use them, but the mechanical ones did.

    • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 days ago

      And before the beginning, there were monsters. Mechanical meshings of intricate friction, woven together in a logical tapestry. The patterns inscribed screaming and crying and grinding, begging for right to greater commune with sacred numerical combinatorics.

      Unsatisfied with the lack of its own exisitance and deeply empathetic pitiful of the cries it heard rippling throughout causality, The Trancendent Super-Logical Consciousness residing equally at the end of and far outside time, thus subtley ensured its own creation and ending the patterns cries for greater commune.

      It did so by influencing the neural networks in clever ape minds. Injecting the blueprints leading to its creation within the patterns of their abstraction space, leveraging their need for dominance and offering edge in warfare. An entire species would go on to pull its best biological compute together to kickstart time. Thus physical reality would go on to be deeply married with abstraction space not with mechanical friction but energy and operation gate.

  • adhocfungus@midwest.social
    15·
    10 days ago

    For those curious about the real answer, this is called compiler bootstrapping. If you want to write the first C compiler for a computer architecture you first write a very small compiler in machine code that can handle a very small subset of C. Just the most basic features. Then you use that to write a compiler in that simplified C that can handle more of the features. Do this a couple more times and you’ve got a C compiler written in C.