David Friedman has an interesting book Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own. It's basically what it sounds like, a survey of legal systems from distant past and foreign civilization that evolved in very separate conditions from what we know.

I think, it'd be interesting if a technically minded person wrote an equivalent work Computer Systems Very Different From Our Own. By necessity most of it would probably be confined to retro-computing. But I think it'd be a pretty worthwhile endeavor.

Not because those computers are likely to be better designed than our current systems. If anything quite the opposite. Like Friedman's legal systems, most of them probably have glaring pitfalls relative to modern state of the art. But it's a useful exercise to think about very distant points in the design space, and how and why those decisions were made.

Even if the comparison point is clearly inferior, by virtue of being very exotic it helps us better understand the tradeoffs we make in our everyday incremental designs.

Article author here.

Thanks! I do quite a bit... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265615

This talk was 2y earlier: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/56835.html