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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

The philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford argued that the origin of modern industrial machines goes back further than the Industrial Revolution and Renaissance, all the way back to the regimented and time-based lives of medieval monks. Knocker uppers seem like a direct obvious example of this phenomenon of humans as proto machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford

https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/f/153578/fi...

As a funny personal note: one of my ancestors actually had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which I assume means they had a similar sort of job as knocker uppers. I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.

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Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for just how manual everything was.

It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.

don't forget punched cards:

https://pattonhq.com/ibm.html

https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bu...

Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world.

Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.

A frequently repeated excuse for WWI germany is that Wilhelm II had expressed desire not to invade the west, but had been told by his military that it was too late to recall the trains. Apparently the guy in charge of the german army's logistics in 1914 wrote a book after the war to explain that not only could he have turned everyone back before the border had he only received a command to do so, but also included appendices with the timetables for doing so.

[my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg suggests it might have been Groener, Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg (1929)]

Note that we got a lot of half-baked outcomes and military disasters with manual processes, too.

>Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down.

This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.

> All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.

Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-shooter kill chains we see today.

If you've not read Most Secret War I highly recommend it. Dr R V Jones details some of the different systems involved in the Battle of Britain and it's a great book too.

I read 'The Secret War' by Brian Johnson which was based on a 1970s BBC series. I think it's an earlier version of the same thing.

Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.

> I think ['The Secret War' by Brian Johnson is] an earlier version of ['Most Secret War' by R V Jones]

Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all.

Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.

Everyone reading this right now needs to check out this 1950s naval training video on the mechanical fire control computers of battleships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4 For fun, before you watch, think for yourself how you'd implement addition, multiplication, squaring, etc. with only gears and other mechanisms.

It's amazing what you can do with just gears, cams, and levers. Project-Rho provides a quick survey of mechanisms. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astrodeck.php#...

>had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which

To add to your personal note, this is the modern translation, etymologically this is more like "the one doing the waking" (similarly to how English "computer" used to describe a person).

Yeah I assumed it was more of a description for a person, not a reference to the device. I'm not sure there were even alarm clocks in rural Poland at the time.

IIRC a lot of words in French also work this way: simple translations today, but with more elaborate historical etymologies.

A common surname in South Africa is Klopper, literally Knocker. Probably similar origin.

Following that train of thought back one can go all the way to the Roman Empire which used slaves as proto machines as you call them.

>As a funny personal note: one of my ancestors actually had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as “alarm clock,” which I assume means they had a similar sort of job as knocker uppers. I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.

Surnames are funny, I always thought we had a cool one, but apparently it just means someone that lives next to a hedge.

> Following that train of thought back one can go all the way to the Roman Empire which used slaves as proto machines as you call them.

All the way to the deepest depth of history actually: Sumer and Elam left behind records of slavery and later on in Ur we find laws seting up a framework for slavery.

The "alarm clock" surname is pretty cool though if you know this factoid: the word for waking up in Slavic languages is the same as the Sanskrit root "budh", which also means "to wake". So Buddha is "the one who has awakened".

That is super cool. Thanks for the factoid!

> I couldn’t find any equivalent last names in English though.

Since this is somehow 'anglosaxon' I'm pulling thing out of thin air.

In German that would be Wecker as in the thing that is waking you.

So I'd guess in English that would be anything written like Wake.. or derivative from that.

Edit: maybe Whacko ;>

I thought of Wake, too, but those seem to be related to keeping watch rather than waking someone.

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