McPherson argued, \u201c\u2026given that competing modes of computation were still quite viable until the 1960s\u201d (151). Misses the point. Perhaps they were, but the point is the idea of modularity and simplicity was clearly superior to what came before it. It\u2019s easy to forget that computers in this time were severely resource constrained. RAM was typically measured in bytes, and storage was in kilobytes. The ideas of modularity and reuse formed from the limitations of computing of its time. When considering the public knowledge of how mainframe computing systems worked and the limited availability of them probably didn\u2019t lead to someone in politics or city planning to read an ACM article on UNIX and say \u201chey we can use these ideas to keep those troublemaking black people in place. \u201c<\/p>\n
I had a hard time following the logic of how race and UNIX are deeply intertwined. Perhaps it\u2019s because my major is computer science, not the humanities. I can see the parallels that McPherson points out on p. 141 but I have a hard time seeing any causality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
McPherson argued, \u201c\u2026given that competing modes of computation were still quite viable until the 1960s\u201d (151). Misses the point. Perhaps they were, but the point is the idea of modularity and simplicity was clearly superior to what came before it. It\u2019s easy to forget that computers in this time were severely resource constrained. RAM was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":756,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions\/756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}