Are We Losing the Secrets of the Masters?
eetimes.com
eetimes.com
I contribute with some time and money to a local maker movement, and we guide young people to make things.
What this article does not say is that in the past manufacturing was a pain in the ass. Drills or rivets had to be done by hand only 60 years ago, with automatic machines extremely expensive and inconvenient (big, noisy and poisonous to you).
Metal workers will have health problems with the fumes, and lose one or two fingers over their life when they put their hand when they should not.
Artisans were also very secretive about their knowledge.
Now, the 507 movements book is online, and animated so it is way easier to understand, we have computers that let us simulate or do the most complex operation.
You can get any book, ever written, in the world, online!! (Impossible just 10 years ago!!)
Not only that but you can see videos showing you actually how they do what they do.
We have 3d design on computers, we have 3d printing on plastic, metal or ceramic(with EDM, FMD, STA, sintering incredible machines). We have cartesian, delta robots, we have powerful and cheap automatic tools like dremel or drills, or lathes. We have laser and plasma cutters that cut 20mm steel like butter.
We have $100 webcam microscopes and spectrometers.
We have the Internet and we could collaborate designs over the world just sending a file.
Sorry but the "any past was better" makes me sick.
The whole point of the article was nobody can feel that pain even if deliberately, not pointless nostalgia. He's not telling you to start from stone age. He's telling lack of popularity threatens the existence much of the history which was just recently available for the interested parties. Let me put is this way:
> On the other hand, some things do tend to niggle at me. One of these things is the sneaking suspicion that we are in danger of losing track of how to do things at the most fundamental levels. If you go back to 1970, for example, there were legions of programmers who could create the most wondrous software out of 8 bit assembler by hand. These days, by comparison, we have incredibly sophisticated compilers, editing environments and runtimes that can do a lot of the "thinking" and the code generation for us -- the downside is that it's becoming almost impossible to find anyone who is capable of doing this sort of thing without having access to these tools and machines.
We are poised to lose the experience, history and other trivia that makes us what we are now if not preserved and is easily accessible.
No, first of all he describes what we called writing machine code and calls it "assembler by hand" which is kind of funny. Trust me, on CP/M and TRSDOS and all that on microcomputers we had perfectly good advanced multipass macro assemblers, even (K+R) C compilers, pascal, forth, basic, even some fortran and cobol implementations. In the 60s there were people toggling in the RIM boot loader on their PDP-8 in machine language but not understanding any of it other than an exercise in manual dexterity, to use RIM to load BASIC to actually do stuff in BASIC. For actual machine coders I think you have to go a step or two earlier... IBMs peculiar BCD mainframes in the transistor era and stuff like that. Of course even they had autocoder and RPG for "real" work...
Secondly he calls them legions as a turn of phrase but even that is unlikely. Tens of thousands sounds about an order of magnitude too high for the 70s and early 80s. A thousand is probably about right and most of them were debugging assemblers and/or debugging debuggers and symbolic disassemblers and/or cracking copy protection, hand machine coding as an annoyance rather than by choice as the best tool for the job.
Finally to this very day you can find people perfectly content to toggle in PDP-8 machine language on a real front panel or 1802 or 8080 code in octal on a H-8 or look at and understand a hex dump about to be slipstreamed into a FPGA's memory for a soft core processor. And guess how many of us there are today... maybe ten thousand... The fact that the percentage has dropped because since then there were added 1M ruby programming CRUD app writing devs in the denominator of the percentage means very little WRT the quantity of the numerator of the percentage or even its growth rate.
And we know each other, and we talk with each other, and work on projects together. Not on HN. You want to talk about manual metal lathes and milling machines you go to the HSM BBS online not reddit. You want to look at a repo of FPGA code you go to opencores.org not github. You want to build a machine language front panel for a 1802 in late 2013 you google for lee harts 1802 membership card kit (I have one and it works quite well) not by searching at best buy. The inability of outsiders to successfully very casually google a group does not in any way imply a problem inside a group.
"becoming almost impossible to find anyone who is capable"
This is an echo of the H1B argument / STEM crisis claiming we are in immanent danger because we can't find any capable coders (willing to work for $7.25/hr or equivalent less on salary). You want someone to write a BIOS or write an ethernet driver, we're here. Its not our problem that you can't find anyone to work for $25K/yr, put up a reasonable offer and we'll come out of the woodwork. Some MBA's inability to provide a reasonable salary hardly proves our non-existence. It would be hilarious to settle religious arguments about the existence or non-existence of ... that way. I find there is an extreme shortage of MBAs willing to work for $7.25/hr in the mail room, so we need to import a couple million to maintain economic dominance, otherwise we'll run out of MBAs and have no one left to screw stuff up or whatever.
I would imagine for an english speaker its pretty hard to google for people speaking German. That does not imply no one speaks German anymore or German is dying out and in immediate short term danger of disappearing.
Its sort of a dystopian anti-nostalgia which clouds accurate observation.
You went on a tangent and were overly pedantic for some reason. I won't address every single thing I think you are wrong about but I agree with your depiction of our tech bubble and I disagree with your sentiment that nobody who is not american and willing to work for 25K can write BIOS/driver level software.
Your bubble is a threat itself. Pop it or face irrelevance by extinction.
Ah that is a good point. The problem is businessmen wanting to import H1Bs to maltreat them because they want to pay locals non-local (low) salaries.
If I could live somewhere that $25K was a reasonable local wage, I wouldn't mind writing code for $25K. I don't, so I'm not amused at the argument that there are no coders available because there are none willing to live far below the local poverty level.
I sure wish I'd taken more time to learn non-computerized fabrication from my grandfather. As a "fix it yourself" farmer, that man could build / repair damn near any mechanical apparatus. There's a lot of hard-won experience in those old artisans, so we shouldn't be so quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The more we can learn from the past, the better. Knowledge and skills aren't mutually exclusive.
Romanticising the past is certainly an issue, but just because we have fancy tools in the present doesn't make us masters-by-default. We can clearly do more than previously - just look at the inside of a computer. But not only is the answer to 'who are the masters?' changing, we need fewer masters overall, thanks to modern manufacturing process. Only one designer can make thousands of articles that are shipped all over the world.
As for lathes, they go back at least hundreds of years by way of English bodgers, and likely much further back than that. And the lathe made by a bodger is going to be cheaper in terms of how long you have to work to get one that a machine lathe purchased in a shop.
Take one of the most well regarded users on the site and an aging craftsman (almost 40 years of experience):
http://www.pinheadlounge.com/photos/0/644/12032/lg_DSC02868....
And compare it with a upcoming novice, who's just doing killer work (and is a woman, I might add):
http://www.pinheadlounge.com/photos/2000/2793/170630/lg_1233...
I've also worked with metal smiths, letterheads, prepress/letterpress/typesetting/lead pros, hot rod enthusiasts and all kinds of other "lost arts" that are readily being passed to anyone who wants to learn.
There's still demand and still a market for this stuff even among younger people (I'm fascinated by it and I'm in my 30s) and it's not going to be digital any time soon.
I'm convinced the internet is a huge boon to traditional arts and crafts - the more "niche" a topic becomes, the bigger the risk of the communities fragmenting and dying off in isolation. The internet fixes that, because it's easier to maintain a core of enthusiasts, even if they are spread out over long distances.
It's not unlike how the internet has done amazing things for programming. Maybe you need a bit of extra help for other crafts, like adding video tutorials for the things that require a more "monkey see, monkey do" than a written approach. However, I'd say that in general it's easier than ever to keep a core community of masters of a craft alive, or revive it for that matter.
The internet also fixes the problem of sourcing supplies for a niche craft. It wasn't that long ago that you had to use giant mail order catalogs to get stuff shipped to you, and it'd be rare to get stuff sent internationally unless you happened to know a friend in the desired country who'd act as a middleman.
When machines are expensive, power is scarce (or unreliable) and much more difficult to transport - cheap labour will win.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post though. It may not be as common in the western countries as it used to be, but it is not lost.
How long would it take for the world to come back from that without access to our current electronic tools and online repo of limitless knowledge? Many fundamental things would have to be re-learned.
The A.R.K. Project (Apocalypse Reboot Kit)
The basic idea is to categorize different apocalyptic scenarios (zombies, ww3, comet, biohazard wipe-out, etc) and develop 'kits' to bring back civilization. Some kits could be quite small, maybe a collection of books on how to get power stations back up and running, etc (for scenarios where basically only people got wiped out)to full on room sized kits which may have to go back to the very basics, - teaching people how to read, how to extract ore from the ground and so on.
I thought it could make for an interesting forum based site, with discussions about what would go into each kit, finding old books like the one mentioned in the fine article all the way up to philosophical discussions regarding would you want to reintroduce religion to a primitive society, if not, how would you deal with man's instinct to inquire to the unknown?
I may still try to get it up and running one day...
I've always loved the idea. If you could somehow finance it with Bitcoin, it would be a perfect homage to Stephenson :)
The bitcoin idea is great, may have to add that
Anyone got a link?
While it's surely not wholly accurate, everything related to the material science and technology level is at least plausible.
http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-...
The world gets destroyed as we know it, how to use a lathe is the least of your problems.
Open your fridge, pick anything from it. Think of the supply chain and layers upon layers of society that was needed to get that to you. You can now be, fearful that in an apocalypse event all that wouldn't be there and you'd be stuffed (which is perfectly correct reasoning) or you can appreciate the world as it is now and how it probably will be tomorrow.
Even if you abstract out segments (I'll just buy screws from a screwmaker) that doesn't mean the screwmaker doesn't avoid doing the work. Someone got to make the machine that made the screws. Or the machine that made the machine that made the screws.
Eventually you start thinking about mining engineering problems which is also fun, in conventional definition and DF.
More importantly this is exactly how a design engineer thinks. Exactly. I want a IC fabrication thingy. Well that would need X, Y, and Z, each of which need... and you quit designing small parts when mass production makes it impractical to make your own SHCS to assemble the parts. And if the math shows you're better off bolting a COTS subassembly on, you do it instead of making the parts, or you're better off making your own leadscrew threads you do that. But fundamentally for the first steps its the same.
The other thing is supply chains rarely fail completely but partially fail every day. You may need to replace the ball bearing in the headstock of your lathe and the replacement may no longer be COTS. Turn out bodging a different bearing might be a wise idea. You just never know in advance if you'll be rigging up your own babbit bearing or creating your own half-nut, so what not think about the whole thing.
As an OCD fixation it could get annoying, but for bored daydreams it beats watching Oprah reruns on TV.
In the initial post-collapse scenario there'd be a massive die-off. Cities would be impossible to live in, only those with access to water supplies and crop packages would get to live. Those in the third world would, ironically, be much better placed than those in developed countries from the perspective of not noticing things going sideways.
The common theme, regression to more local form of government, i.e. feudalism, would probably play out.
To build back up from there would take hundreds of years. You'd have to be in a position to re-establish supply chains. Which would require both the ability to organise on a significant level and the ability to have a crop surplus to support non farming specialists.
The saving grace would be the existence of certain select bits of knowledge; the idea of levers, basic mathematics entrenched in a very efficient number system, simple bits of tech like heliographs and one time pads, the printing press. Stuff that, if you're aware it's possible, you can make with relatively little effort. And social themes, like the idea of loans and relatively free trade that allow innovation to happen, the scientific methods - stuff like that.
I don't think that having books about how to make a machine shop would honestly make that much difference. We could work that stuff out for ourselves by the time we were in a position to operationalise it.
Hundreds of years, most of which would be things like getting agriculture in place, waiting for the population to grow to a decent size - things like that - rather than reinventing stuff.
I lack the knowledge to build a high performance modern internal combustion engine, for example. But the idea is enough to start someone on figuring out the basics much faster than the initial invention even if all other knowledge of it was lost. And in the meantime, a steam engine is "trivial" and easy to fuel. Heck, you'd be able to find even school children with a sufficient if basic understanding of old iron making processes to kickstart metal-making processes if need be. And understanding even something as basic as how a bicycle dynamo works allows you to bootstrap an electricity supply.
I wouldn't be able to build an advanced chip fab, but I vaguely remember enough beginning electronics that I'd know roughly what to experiment with to figure out how to get to working transistors, diodes and resistors. And I know enough to start looking at the right things to be able to etch basic circuit boards. And just knowing the idea of photo-litography and scaling down a mask gets you far towards figuring out how to create basic circuits. It'd still take a lot of work and a long time, but nowhere near as long as it took to get there initially.
And so on. Even if we did not just lose all the technology, but also "lost" all the experts who could otherwise fill in vastly more details than people with the pop-sci version of the knowledge of the fields, there are so many areas like this where understanding the basics and knowing the principles if not the implementation of what has been proven to work can massively short-circuit the process.
We would certainly face massive setbacks, but there is also another issue here: The resources required.
Even if we had the knowledge to continue to make high end CPUs, if we lose the fabs, we don't want to go straight back to trying to build a high end chip fab for the simple reason that it would take an immense amount of other technology and resources, while we could stand up the pre-requisites for producing simple, 1970's level boards, components and even chips in a tiny fraction of the time and with far more manageable resources and already start to reap a massive amount of benefits, including tools to help substantially speed up the effort of bringing up the next iteration.
There exists formally proved knowledge that pretty much the ideal liquid coolant for your internal combustion engine is 50:50 ethylene glycol and water. If all that formal knowledge is lost it'll make future progress difficult, but at least gut knowledge that it works would save a lot of time bootstrapping.
This is the origin during warfare of stealing the oppositions machinery and reverse engineering it. If it was faster and easier to work from first principles, the winners of wars would tend to do that instead of reverse engineering.
But still, I can't shake the feeling like this is one of those "kids these days...get off my lawn" moments.
If enough of these kinds of "masters" die, some if not most of that knowledge will be lost forever.
Also "irrelevant" isn't really the right word as much as "lost". Examining the word completely myopically, things like ability to play piano might seem relatively useless. However, science has recently been revealing that music is a lot more important — to the brain, moods, and the body, even — than we would have guessed it was 50 years ago.
If we allow our knowledge of music to be lost in between the era of musicians and some future rebirth of classical music, then what good have we done?
A good example of the waste that can occur is that of Roman formulations for concrete. Because the information about how the concrete was formulated has been lost, we have spent a tremendous amount of effort just trying to reverse engineer Roman structures like the Colosseum to figure out how they achieve the unique properties that they do. Also consider that the Romans had no way of imagining how important concrete formulations would be in the future. To them, after the fall of Rome, concrete formulations were probably just as "irrelevant" in their minds as well.
I am not so much afraid of my own death as I am that we'll lose knowledge and skill that we as a species have spent so long refining.
This second generation of tools allows for quicker development cycles, leading to even better tools. For instance, the C language led to Unix[1] which led to the Internet which led to a combinatorial explosion of software. It works the same way in physical reality - with each generation of development, the act of creation inches closer to pure thought. It's called progress. If you can't keep up, I don't care.
A similar phenomenon happens to human beings. Societal developments insulate us from the hardship of actually being self-sufficient. It's easier to be prosperous now than ever before in history, and it's made us all incredibly soft. Grab a kitchen knife and try to kill a squirrel before you start planning your post-apocalyptic charcoal forge.
1. I realize that Unix sort of begat C, but that doesn't really change anything.
There are innumerable resources available today that just wasn't back then so this information will be preserved by and large. We just need to ensure it's carefully curated for young minds to absorb well into the future.
Every time I go to a swap meet or a tag sale, the first thing I look for are books. Even old magazines, trade publications and catalogs can reveal a great deal of ingenuity and fascinating technical knowhow. I don't have the time to scan and digitize these (besides, I don't know what the copyright implications would be), but I try to see what learn from these as much as possible. Many of these were limited print to begin with and were summarily discarded once the next seasons' gadgets/appliances came about so they need preservation.
I can see prime real-estate for a startup doing something similar. It's a massive job to rebuild a library, but I'll gladly pay a subscription fee to get access to all these treasures.
Building it is only a fraction of the effort. Maintaining it is where it gets exceptionally hard. Until very recently we had a system in the US - most worthwhile ideas made it into print and as part of registering for copyright, at least one copy of the book was sent to the Library of Congress for archiving.
But the internet has made knowledge ephemeral and there isn't any formal system for preserving knowledge anymore. We've got places like the wayback machine, which is great, but isn't anywhere near the kind of capacity we need AND it is fragile too. Unlike books, the media we use rapidly becomes obsolete. Most storage formats from 30 years ago are extremely difficult to read today because the hardware is so rare.
The guys at the wayback machine, project gutenberg and others are working on the problem but the scope is just so absolutely enormous that its basically impossible. It is a certainty that this start of "internet age" is going to be a black hole in history a couple of centuries down the line. Nearly everything we do and say online is going to be forgotten at unprecedented levels.
We need an NSA - National Storage Agency - dedicated to archiving the knowledge and culture expressed on the internet instead of practically meaningless "metadata."
From the wikipedia page: "Some advanced technical knowledge was maintained by the means of the preservation of the book The Way Things Work, which had been wrapped in impermeable plastic and submerged in a septic tank prior to Hammerfall and later retrieved by a resourceful character who realized its potential value and likely scarcity in a post-Hammer world."
I found myself inspired by this book — now I often think about what I could build all by myself in a post-apocalyptic world.
Vacuum device engineering is alive and well. It's just that a top radio power designer or particle accelerator designer won't throw away his career to become a handbook engineer designing antique reproductions at a what amounts to a toy company.