Awesome, but invisible depth

You have just visited Google.

Simple, isn't it?
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What really happened?

Well, if you understand a little how browsers work, then everything is not so simple. You have just used HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. In reality, these are such incredibly complex technologies that any engineer will dizzy from them, one has only to try to penetrate deeper into them. And there is not a single company that could handle them alone.

Let's simplify.

You have just connected to www.google.com .

Simple, isn't it?

What really happened?

Well, if you understand a little how networks work, then things are not so simple. You have just used DNS, TCP, UDP, IP, Wifi, Ethernet, DOCSIS, OC, SONET, and more. In reality, these are such incredibly complex technologies that any engineer will dizzy from them, one has only to try to penetrate deeper into them. And there is not a single company that could handle them alone.

Let's simplify.

You have just typed www.google.com in your browser’s address bar.

Simple, isn't it?

What really happened?

Well, if you understand a little how operating systems work, then everything is not so simple. You have just used the core, USB stack, I / O manager, event handler, font subsystem, sub-pixel rasterizer, window system, video card driver, and more. All this is created using high-level programming languages, processed by compilers, linkers, optimizers, interpreters, and so on. In reality, these are such incredibly complex technologies that any engineer will dizzy from them, one has only to try to penetrate deeper into them. And there is not a single company that could handle them alone.

Let's simplify.

You have just pressed a key on the keyboard.

Simple, isn't it?

What really happened?

Well, if you understand a little how I / O devices work, then things are not that simple. You have just used a voltage regulator, a debouncer, an I / O multiplexer, a stack of USB devices, all of which is done in the form of a single microchip. This microchip consists of the thinnest substrates of highly purified monocrystalline silicon doped with an insignificant amount of other atoms introduced into the crystal structure by the diffusion method. Substrates are metallized with layers of aluminum or copper. In the process of photolithography, the substrates are illuminated with ultraviolet rays, the positioning accuracy of which is a fraction of a micron. All this is connected by thin gold wires, packed in a case and sealed with resin.

Alloyed and metallized areas are used to create transistors, which in turn are grouped into logic gates. In some parts of the microchip, logic gates are connected to implement arithmetic and bit functions. These functions are used to create arithmetic logic units. In the other part of the microchip, logic gates are combined into bistable loops, lined up in rows and supplemented with selectors to create a bank of registers. In another part of the microchip, logic gates are grouped into bus controllers, instruction decoders, and microcode to create a command scheduler. In another part of the microchip, the gates are grouped into address and data multiplexers and timings to create a memory controller. And that is not all. In reality, these are such incredibly complex technologies that any engineer will dizzy from them, one has only to try to penetrate deeper into them. And there is not a single company that could handle them alone.

Can we still simplify?

In fact, it's terrible to realize this, but no, we can't. We can hardly understand the complexity of a single chip in the keyboard, and this is not the easiest level. Then we have to talk about the software that was used to develop the logic of the microchip. And this software is so complex that it will need to be simplified again.

Modern computers are so complex that they can only be designed and manufactured using less sophisticated computers. In turn, computers that were used to design and manufacture modern computers can only be made using the previous generation of computers. We will have to go through many such return cycles before we return to a level where you can do something without computers.

Once you begin to understand how our modern devices work and how they were created, it becomes impossible not to experience shock from the depths of all this. And it is impossible not to be in awe of the fact that they work at all, although according to Murphy's law, they probably should not.

For non-technical people, it's all a black box. This is one of the greatest successes of technology: all these levels of complexity are completely hidden and people can use them without even knowing about the existence of these levels. This is also the cause of discontent experienced by some when using computers. So many things can go wrong, that something will definitely go wrong. And the complexity of everything goes to such a depth that for most users there is not the slightest opportunity to fix the problem.

Therefore, people of technical and non-technical specialties are so hard to explain to each other. The former know so much about so many levels, and the latter so little about so few levels that effective direct communication does not work. The gap is so great that there is not one such person who could be an intermediary between these two groups. And, by the way, that's why we have such strange multi-level technical support services. Without such deep support structures, you can easily find yourself in an unpleasant situation like the one that happens when end users have access to the base of defects directly used by engineers: in this case, neither users nor engineers get the information they need.

That is why the mass media and the general public talked so much about the death of Steve Jobs and relatively little about the death of Dennis Ritchie . Steve's influence was on a level that most can see and understand, and Dennis worked on a much deeper level. I can imagine what the world of computers would be without what Jobs and those he inspired did. The world of computers would be a little less bright, a little more beige, a little more square. But internally, our computers and devices would work in the same way, and would do the same thing as now. In this case, I literally can not imagine what would be the world of computers without what Ritchie did and those whom he inspired. By the mid-1980s, Ritchie’s influence was overwhelming, and even then little existed from the world as he was before Ritchie.

And finally, about the important: all of the above - the reason why our patent system does not work as it should. The technology has so amazingly successfully concealed all the difficulties that the people who manage the patent system barely know the complexity of what they manage. This is nothing more than a discussion of a bike shed. Like a bike, where the city hall of a certain city began to discuss the nuclear power plant, and finished with a discussion of what color to paint the bike shed next to it. Patent discussions about modern computer systems end up talking about the size of the screens and the location of icons because, as in the bike, this is the only aspect of the system that is available for understanding by those participating in the discussion. Although this aspect has nothing to do with the functioning of the entire system under discussion.