Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo

It’s possible to imagine their equivalent to a GUI is entirely unlike ours, flat screens work for us because of our visual cortex and narrow field of view/depth perception framework essentially been tricked.

A UI for a something intelligent with a compound eye or ten eyes or whatnot could be very different.

Not to mention if we give said aliens hundreds of years of computers, they would likely arrive at something akin to a neural interface, I mean a computer as a direct expansion of your cognitive ability has to be the end point in user interfaces, you don’t even have to think about how to translate what’s in your head into something the computer can understand parse, you manipulate it as easily as thinking of a pink elephant in a tutu, it is just there.

It would also likely be heavily influenced by their psychology.

What would be fun is trying to create a router between our systems and theirs down the line.

We’ve had electric computers for a blink in time compared to the wheel, lot of places to go between a Ryzen 3950X and computronium.

I mean, look at us now - we're kind of analogous to super-AIs created by cells, and we try to program cells, but we can't really understand every detail; we try to manage them instead.

At some point the aliens would just have their lowest levels of abstraction frozen due to losing the ability to manipulate them. And take it for granted, like we take our brain cells or muscle cells for granted.

Since we're dealing with fiction, from a Deepness in the Sky:

>The Qeng Ho's computer and timekeeping systems feature the advent of "programmer archaeologists":[1] the Qeng Ho are packrats of computer programs and systems, retaining them over millennia, even as far back to the era of Unix programs (as implied by one passage mentioning that the fundamental time-keeping system is the Unix epoch):

>>Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex - and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

>This massive accumulation of data implies that almost any useful program one could want already exists in the Qeng Ho fleet library, hence the need for computer archaeologists to dig up needed programs, work around their peculiarities and bugs, and assemble them into useful constructs.

So to answer your question, a mess of standards going back millennia with glue-code everywhere. I blame the separation of documentation and code for the coming dark age.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc&t=221

(I set the start time to skip Rheingold's introduction but feel free to go back and view.)

Yes please!