PC lineage

I was watching some YouTube videos about old computers, thinking: which ones are predecessors of our current machines, and which ones are merely extinct technology, blind alleys that led nowhere?

It’s an interesting question. I used to assume that home computers from the 1980s are predecessors of the current machines, but then I saw someone work on an old minicomputer running UNIX, PDP-10 or something, and that thing felt instantly familiar, unlike ZX Spectrum, Apple II or Commodore 64, which feel nothing like what we have today. Is it possible that I had it wrong? When I look at the first Macintosh, it feels very much like the user interface we use today, but Macintosh was a technological demonstration that didn’t actually do anything useful yet, because hardware was too weak. But where did the Macintosh come from? Lisa, of course. And Lisa was the attempt to make Xerox Alto streamlined and commercially viable. All three were failures; the idea was good, but the technology wasn’t there yet. The first computers that feel exactly like what we are now using were the graphical workstations from Silicon Graphics and Sun, because they were basically minicomputers with a graphical console and a 3d rendering engine.

It’s almost as if home computers were a parallel branch of technology, related more to Atari arcade machines than the minicomputers and mainframes of the day, created as attempts to work with inferior but cheap technology, which evolved from Altair to Apple II to IBM PC, which evolved from 8088 to 80286 to 80386, when Microsoft copied the Macintosh interface and made it into a mass market OS, as technology became viable, then Windows evolved from 3.00 to 95 to 98… and then this entire technological blind alley went extinct, because the technology became advanced enough to erase the difference between the UNIX graphical workstations and personal computers, and so Microsoft started running a mainframe kernel on a PC, which was called NT, at version 4 it became a viable competition to Windows 95, and Windows 2000 ran NT kernel, and the 95/98/ME kernel was retired completely, ending the playground phase of PC technology and making everything a graphical workstation. Parallel to that, Steve Jobs, exiled from Apple, was tinkering with his NEXT graphical workstation project, which became quite good but didn’t sell, and when Apple begged him to come back and save them from themselves, he brought the NextStep OS and that became the OS X on the new generation of Macintosh computers. So, basically, the PC architecture was in its infancy phase and playing with cheap but inferior hardware until the prices of hardware came down so much that the stuff that used to be reserved for the high-cost graphical workstations became inexpensive enough that the graphical workstations stopped being a niche thing, went into main stream, and drove the personal computers as they used to be into extinction.

Just think about it – today’s computer has a 2D/3D graphical accelerator, integrated on the CPU or dedicated, it runs UNIX (Mac OS and Linux) or something very similar, derived from the mainframe NT kernel (Windows), it’s a multi-user, seamlessly multitasking system, but it all runs on hardware that’s been so integrated it fits in a phone.

So, the actual evolution of personal computers goes from an IBM mainframe to a DEC minicomputer to a UNIX graphical workstation to Windows NT 4 and Mac OS X, to iPhone and Android.

The home computer evolution goes from Altair 8800 to Apple I and II to IBM PC, then from MS DOS to Windows 3.0, 95, 98, ME… and goes extinct. The attempt to make a personal computer with graphical user interface goes from Xerox Alto to Apple Lisa to Macintosh, then to Macintosh 2, OS being upgraded to version 9… and going extinct, being replaced by a successor to NEXT repackaged as the new generation of Macintosh, with the OS that was built around UNIX. Then at some point the tech got so miniaturised that we now have phones running UNIX, which is a mainframe/minicomputer OS, directly descended from the graphical workstations.

Which is why you could take a SGI Indigo2 workstation today and recognise it as a normal computer, slow but functional, and you would take the first IBM PC or Apple II and it would feel like absolutely nothing you are accustomed to. That’s because your PC isn’t descended from IBM PC, it’s descended from a mainframe that mimicked the general look of a PC and learned to be backwards compatible with one.

Outright failure

I wrote two replies in the comment section that deserve to be an article, so here goes.


I assume that if SK were alive, he’d be eagerly updating the scripts to adapt to the current situation.

Honestly, I don’t know what he’d do, because what he was doing wasn’t working even when he was alive and apparently winning. In fact, he got himself killed by winning too hard.
But let’s do some guesswork by assuming he’s logical.
I don’t think he would update the scripts. The scripts are doing the best they can considering the circumstances. Modifying the standing rules or introducing new ones wouldn’t do anything useful. The problem is absence of energy in the system, and it’s a big problem, since everything is at absolutely critical levels and the systems have been failing for years due to the lack of energy to drive “positive” mechanisms of motivation. So, he would have to stop the process of energy depletion and add more energy to the system at all cost, but that’s easier said than done since it would require attracting very highly evolved souls here, deceiving them by his standard means – “recognise” him as God and pledge themselves to him – because the current state of the world makes it exceedingly unlikely for that to succeed, and also he’d be out of time, which would limit him to working on the souls that are already here. The problem is, the energy deficit he’s facing is such that the number of suitable matches is very low. Also, all of them are his sworn enemies and all past efforts in seducing them have failed. So, since that won’t work, he’d attempt tricking them into activities that would disrupt their spiritual structure and basically kill them, leaving the high energy crystals in his possession. The most likely approach would be to tempt them to attack critical systems and take on more karmic mass to process than they can handle, but there’s already a standing order to that effect and the scripts are implementing it, as it is one of the most effective things he’s been using against yogis since forever. They tend to be overachievers and egomaniacs who want to show everyone how great they are, and it’s easy to get them to kill themselves.
So, since this process is already in effect, I think he would be doing absolutely nothing, and no additional moves would be either possible or helpful. It does, however, show why he was so desperate to get rid of me when he did, to the point where he slipped on tea in the process. In fact, he already seems to have exhausted the timeline tweaking by that point – essentially, project into the future to see what happens, and tweak things to make them worse for me and more likely for him to win. However, winning more was a fatal move.


Am I getting this right? Are the social strings, the glue of community and interest in it, weakening due to SK’s final downfall?

The complexity of the global system is such that it might not be possible to answer such questions in a manner that makes any sense. It’s like asking whether more plastic in the oceans is due to global warming. Likely no, but it’s not like those things are not related, because humans dump plastic, shit and CO2 into the environment, but that still doesn’t mean there’s an actual anthropogenic global warming, so the question includes so many faulty premises one can’t just answer it.
The more direct cause of the failure of the young generations can be found elsewhere; first, the introduction of social media and mobile always-on devices for attaching to them seems to have more attraction than, basically, anything else for them. It’s like providing them with something that both promises a strong dopamine hit, and threatens them with very powerful negative consequences – social ostracism, ridicule etc. – so they just can’t leave it alone and it has priority over things like real-life social connections, reading books, walking in nature and so on. Since they got hooked on that very young, their entire neurochemistry was built around such dysfunction, like being addicted to some drug since birth. Also, since the smartphones and the nature of social media limit what you can actually do effectively, there was a race to the bottom in trying to attract maximum attention and praise with minimum text, and so memes and emojis replaced conventional human languages. At this point, if a human tries to write coherent sentences and express actual thoughts, he will be accused of being a chat GPT bot, because, apparently, AI fails the Turing test by being thoughtful and coherent, while humans have devolved into mime-emoji regurgitating imbeciles.
Sanat Kumar contributed to this, because he motivated the development of social media and interpersonal networks, trying to manifest an alternative to personal spiritual evolution by manifesting the oneness of brahman through oneness and interconnectedness of mankind. Like all his plans, this failed, and produced a collective animal-zombie-idiot.
Would this possibly have a different outcome were he here to inject some kind of a positive energy vector into this collective entity and guide it? Maybe, but if it needs deception and external energy source to give it a sense of meaning it would otherwise be unable to find, then it basically proves that such idea won’t work, even if it for some reason were not obvious from the start. You can’t manifest God by networking humans. What actually manifests is human emptiness without God. If you wanted to manifest God, you need to start with an individual connection with God, which is what you get with exactly the kind of spiritual evolution he had a problem with in the beginning, because he failed at it and had to watch those who succeeded.
So, as a conclusion, I would say that the social and civilisational decay and degradation is not a symptom of Sanat Kumar’s absence, but a symptom of failure of his actual plan, which is developing as it normally would without someone to tweak and prod it into faking some outcome that mimics non-failure.

Bitcoin bad, mkay

I learned something interesting today.

“Satoshi” means “clever, witty, intelligent“.

“Naka” means “medium, inner, central

“Moto” means “origin” or “foundation”.

Bitcoin origin is Central Intelligence.

On the current events

Trump seems to be conspicuously motivated to present his questionable adventure with the B2 bombers striking Iran’s nuclear facilities as a resounding success. Everybody seems to dismiss it, attributing it to his normal egomania, but I do wonder if there’s more to it.

For instance, Netanyahu could have framed the situation in terms where only an American nuclear strike at the underground facilities, and a decapitation nuclear strike at Tehran, would guarantee the end of Iranian nuclear programme, and the Islamic regime there. Trump would have been very disinclined to see things this way and proposed an alternative scenario, where he uses conventional bombs to disable the nuclear facilities, and only decapitates Iran if they prove disinclined to make any kind of a deal.

So, even if those conventional strikes achieved next to nothing, which in fact seems to be the case, Trump would try very hard to present them as a complete success, so that he wouldn’t have to resort to a nuclear strike, because that’s a can of worms he doesn’t want to open.

There now seems to be some kind of a very questionable ceasefire in action, but the entire thing doesn’t look over to me.

The Russians, on the other hand, are making more of a progress in Ukraine. They don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and their actions are constrained by aversion to losses and the geopolitical chess game, because the sooner they deal with Ukraine, the sooner they will have to deal with the unfortunate next Slavic country to be thrown at them by NATO. So, they are doing this very slowly, hoping that the degradation of the West will do most of their work for them without them having to resort to either nuclear weapons or mass battles with huge losses. The things are proceeding slowly, but apparently due to choice rather than necessity. I, however, don’t share their optimism. Putin wants to avoid nuclear war even at the cost of deterrence, but anyone who knows anything about game theory can tell you that this is a terrible strategy that actually encourages further encroachment to the point where it in fact causes the thing it meant to prevent.

The current situation is highly unpredictable, since too many clowns are running the circus, and Putin played certain moves contrary to conventional logic, which is not a good thing. His response to the bombing of the “Bears” on airfields, which are intentionally exposed so that the other side can count them and see their activity via satellite imagery in real time, and are therefore considered inviolable by both sides, should have been either nuclear, or a super-destructive conventional strike at the NATO intelligence and command&control centres that orchestrated the attack. That would be the tit-for-tat expected in the game, and would inform the other side that further encroachment will not be tolerated, thus reducing the risk of escalation. By not responding in an immediate and nasty enough manner, Putin sent a very dangerous signal, essentially encouraging further encroachment. It’s as if he’s actually trying to encourage the other side to start the nuclear war. Either his Christianity went into his head, turning the other cheek and that kind of stuff, or he actually wants a nuclear exchange to take place, but he wants the other side to appear guilty. It’s weird. Too many poorly judged, unconventional strategic moves have been taking place from both sides, resulting in a situation that is volatile as it is unpredictable.

A musical mystery

Last night, I was listening to some music on Youtube, and stumbled upon a summary of all the things Giorgio Moroder made in the ’80s, which turns out to be probably a third of the greatest hits from the period, and I knew most of them from before, but now I stumbled upon one I didn’t know about:

The first shock was that Moroder actually did a song with Mercury – it’s not like Queen had a lack of creative talent. The second shock is that only Mercury was credited, although I was sure I can hear Brian May’s guitar there. Also, why isn’t this song more widely known, since it’s great, and… wait a minute, why does it have something that I recognise as iconic Queen sound? Because it sounds exactly like Radio Ga Ga, that’s why. What’s going on there?

So I looked it up this morning, and it seems to be all about contract obligations and copyright. Apparently, Giorgio Moroder was doing the soundtrack for some kind of a 1980s remake of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, and likely thought that “Queen” sound would go great with that, considering what they did with “Flash Gordon” a few years earlier, but that’s just my guesswork. In any case, the project was contracted by CBS, and “Queen” had a contract with EMI, so they couldn’t be credited for it, nor perform it on stage, so Mercury was credited and Moroder’s pivotal role was historically all but forgotten, as is the case with lots of his stuff, since he didn’t care much about putting himself out there.

So, since Mercury got permission to use clips from “Metropolis” for his videos, the “Queen”, still under impression from Moroder’s synth sound, went out and made “Radio Ga Ga”, with Metropolis footage and all:

So, let’s use this opportunity to shower praise on Giovanni Giorgio Moroder, the man who invented the sound of the 1980s.