Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

This piece was well ahead of its time. I don't think I can claim with a straight face that it could be written today without change, of course, but I am comfortable saying that if someone told me this was written in the 1960s that I would have a hard time proving them wrong. And that's not something most stories from 1909 can say.

And the changes necessary to bring it up to date even today are not that great, honestly. For instance,

"By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book, and it told her which button to press. The Central Committee published it. In accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound."

would need some tweaking. Today we could be even lazier and simply ask for these things, in voice.

But all in all, well ahead of its time.

I have in my files a sci-fi novella written by my grandfather 100 years ago, in which by 1980 a megalomaniacal scientist has stopped up the Gulf Stream in order to plunge Europe into a new Ice Age in revenge for not respecting his genius. (I'll publish it once I get around to registering the copyright.)

It's remarkably prescient and timely now in its environmental concerns – but Pop didn't predict the success of the helicopter, so the villain is delivered to a Congressional hearing (in Washington, Missouri, whence the US capitol was moved in 1975) by a very weird VTOL hybrid airplane-balloon-helicopter:

"One by one the three retardiers ballooned above the plane like white puffs of smoke; now only the hissing of air around the struts was heard. Then the sudden whirr of the helicoptic blade and the LL-2X1 settled feather-light into her berth."

That novella sounds fun.

At the risk of nit-picking, if the work was written more that 100 years ago, then the copyright has almost certainly already expired (barring some quite rare circumstances).

Nothing preventing you from publishing it, and a useful forward or other newly written content would, of course, be automatically copyrighted (copyrights, at least in the US, only need to be "registered" if you want to sue someone :-)

If it's not been published, then why would it not be copyrightable now? I don't understand. Who knows when it was first written? Is that even important?

I would love the advice of a copyright attorney about this! It was never published, so under current US copyright law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/303 I think it is protected until 70 years after Pop's death in 1983. But I guess we'll find out for sure in a few months – I just submitted a registration application ツ

I'm a long way from a (copyright) attorney, so I really don't know what I'm talking about on the finer points.

In general, of course, the act of creating is what currently confers copyright. So if you write some code, for example, you automatically hold the copyright. No need to do anything official or call a lawyer.

But you're correct that there are exceptions for older works that were never published or formally registered under the old (pre-1978 system). So yup, my (pretty much worthless) opinion agrees with your reading that it would be 70 years after 1983. And who knows, the Mighty Mouse might might well rise up again as 2024 approaches (the current date when Mickey Mouse will otherwise enter the public domain).

But

PS. floathub.com is brilliant!

In a world where old graphic manuals are reissued on Kickstarter and people buy hardcover books or vinyl just to have a beautiful functional object, what needs updating even there? I think it correctly notes that we tend to make new physical artifacts to retain experiences that have become disembodied and abstracted away from us.

Actually, it was the "button press" that I think is out of date, for much the same reason the original Enterprise bridge looks very silly nowadays. We don't need huge arrays of buttons like that anymore. We may still want a few physical ones, of course, just as we like physical volume and climate controls in our cars, but our 21st century Machine rooms would not have hundreds of buttons in them, but a touchscreen and voice interface. Even if we had a physical manual for it, which I'm totally comfortable with as a story choice.

You may have simply automatically upgraded the interface in your head, but I'm pretty sure the author was envisioning something more like the Enterprise bridge.

> We don't need huge arrays of buttons like that anymore.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Here's the bridge of a modern cruise ship (Quantum Of The Seas):

https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Wartsila-i...

Quite a few buttons; that keyboard in the front right alone has at least 104 keys.

Another image of rows of buttons inside the control room of a nuclear submarine:

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/21/13/306D657A000005...

If anything, the number of buttons has gone up, not down over the course of the last century.

Airplane cockpit 100 years ago:

https://cdn.virily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4F5A8778_M...

Airplane cockpit today:

https://airbus-h.assetsadobe2.com/is/image/content/dam/produ...

Granted half of the buttons are for redundancy, that's still quite a lot of buttons.

For aircraft, Peak Button was reached at the end of the large propeller aircraft era. Here's the B-36 flight engineer's station. [1] The B-36 had 6 propellers and 4 jet engines. Most of those controls are for engine management of the reciprocating engines.

[1] http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-7.html

Touch screens simply suck if you need to interact with a device in rough conditions - high seas or turbulence.

That's a big reason why most serious transportation vessels still have lots of buttons. It's far easier to stabilize your hand on a panel and use a button or knob interface than to try and hit the right button while going from 0.5G to +1.5G and +/- 30 degrees of bank.

I was not making a generalized argument that everything should be touch screens. I was making the point that a Machine denizen if written in modern times would be using a touchscreen or voice interface. Or perhaps a keyboard, though that starts to get a bit more open ended than I think the idea is here.

Evidence, if not outright proof, is that is exactly what we have today in the prototype Machine we're living in. We do not interact with our Machine environments via an array of bespoke, single-purpose buttons.

You can also step up the sci-fi a bit and assert a brain-reading device.

However, as I was saying, it definitely dates the work to write as if a big array of buttons is how one would interact with the Machine. But I reiterate, all things considered, only a little. It still holds up brilliantly.

> We do not interact with our Machine environments via an array of bespoke, single-purpose buttons.

We don't? Every single light source in my house is controlled by a bespoke button or switch. I have buttons to control the burners on my stove, the temperature in my room, the music, etc. I have two buttons on my toilet and I select the appropriate flush mode based on context. I have a button I carry in my pocket to open my car which is full of buttons. At the parking garage a button raises the gate and gives me a ticket. Even the coke machine with a touchscreen has a dedicated button to dispense liquid.

I had read this awhile back. I was taken aback by the 1909 date in the title - I had assumed it was ‘30s or ‘40s. So I verified it in Wikipedia.

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