This is one of two ambitious pieces of writing I hope to complete in the next year. For now, only a table of contents exists.
My primary goal is this: what parts of a modern digital computer, to which we are accustomed, can we interchange with a different implementation and preserve functionality? What arbitrary abstractions, particularly anthropological artifacts, lay on top of the core essence of what it is to be a computer? Can we change the peripherals, the protocols, the hardware, the software, or even the very physical laws on which we rely?
Computational Bible: Chapters of Verses (quotes) from great computer scientists
- Old Testament: Pre Turing Award
- New Testament: Turing Award Winners
Meta-Machines (Malleable + Immalleable Parts):
Theoretical Models of Computation irrespective of physical medium as a Platonic Form in mathematical space and time (only anthropologically limited in conception and physically limited insofar as mathematics and thought itself is physical)
- Physical Syntax and Semantics Infrastructure: Analog and Digital Computer Architectures on Various Physical Mediums
- Twin Spirits of Information: Reification/Marshalization, Data/Signals, Syntax/Semantics, Mass/Energy
- Reification: Trapping addressable operable syntax/memory/data representing sampled signals from the external world
- Marshalization: Communicating R/W semantic protocols transductively with peripherals
- Physical Bases: Electromagnetic, Chemical, Quantum, Photonic, Mechanical, Biological, Spintronics, Gravitational, FPGAs
Idiomatic Configurability and Observability:
- Human Computer Interaction: History and Alternative Past/Future Possibilities (Human Physiological and Neurological Constraints on Sensors, Actuators, Protocols)
- Operating Systems and Runtimes (File Systems and Hardware Resource Abstraction, Libraries and Frameworks, Time Sharing on a singular device with Shells and Bounded Contexts of PC FDE)
- Malleable Software Tools for High-Level State Molding (Compilers and Language Translations, Event and Display Spaces, Virtualizing Frameworks, GUI Continuity)