NATURE (The Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may not we say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man…

(Hobbes 1982)

According to Hobbes, The original artificial intelligence is the political state.

The techniques which make the mechanical computer possible were already in play in the 18th century, tracking the state of societies to make them manageable.

Government, Leibniz was convinced, was not conceivable without information. Information, in turn, consisted of the facts and figures concerning the ’here and now’ of the state: the size of population, the quality and number of goods and properties, mortality and birth rates, the volume of exports and imports had, inter alia, to be known. And they had to be made visible at a glance in order to enable the regent and his administration to act quickly and decisively. This became possible, as Leibniz’ meant, by specific means of display: the so-called ’Staats-Tafeln’ as a ’written short constitution summarizing the heart of all information concerning the government.’ Therefore, Leibniz stressed the intrinsic connexion betwen state and knowledge.

…

The eighteenth-century Cameralists followed Leibniz by emphasizing the mediality of politico-economical knowledge. Three medial forms were especially important and highly regarded. The first was the list or the table, which seemed - from the Cameralist point of view - to be of outstanding value in the most parts of government. So Justi proposed, to cite just one example, to record the state of industry by creating tables illustrating any change in the number or composition of work and workers which took place in a given period.

In this regard, tables represented media of access and manipulation. Or more generally, tables were in line with the Cameralist intention to visualize hidden relations and forces and to make reality compatible with a program of reform and transformation.

This also applied to a second medial form: double-entry bookkeeping. Of course, double-entry bookkeeping was closely connected with tables. Using tables, which should be derived from customhouse papers and related files, made it possible for example, to record incoming and outgoing goods.

(Marcus Sandl, “Development as Possibility” in ssner16_econom)

Turing’s On Computable Numbers minimizes and analyzes the process of manual computation, as it was performed by human computers. His analysis was sufficiently precise and detailed, that it could be translated into an “Automata”, thus giving us the automatic computer.

• Personal Computing
• Networked Computing
• “Cloud” computing
• Containerization/DevOps/Monorepos etc
  • Engineering the engineering organization into a box

Most of the things we currently think of as parts of a computer used to be considered as ancillary devices. These have all been miniaturized, accelerated, automated, and internalized.

Our automated systems of operation begin as humans working to mimic the machine. (See Turing’s making this explicit – and thereby giving the general form of the mechanization of human activity – and see the development of the operating system described bellow).

Thus, the enduring force of the allegory of the mechanical turk.

If you are familiar with the computery sense of shell, there’s a good chance you think a shell is something particular to a command-line terminal environment. In that case, you can join me and others I’ve talked to in being delightfully surprised to learn that shell, even in the narrow computery sense, is a much more general thing: “a user interface for access to an operating system’s services”¹.

The vast majority of computer users toil their entire computing day away inside an infamous shell that is generally unrecognized as such: the Windows shell. The terminal-bound CLIs often taken to be synonymous with shell simpliciter are only a special case of a much more general concept in the architecture of human-computer interface.

This concept has an interesting history and, as I will try to show, fascinating and important implications for how we think about the use of and interface with computers.

The aim of this remark is to solidify and share my personal meditation on the history, nature, and implications of the shell concept. Though I am primarily concerned with computer shells, a deeper understanding of their characteristics and potential can be nurtured by some early attention to more general senses of the term shell.

The most concrete sense of the word is the one with physical significance. The most technical physical sense, used by engineers to describe a structural pattern, is remarkably abstract:

A shell is a type of structural element which is characterized by its geometry, being a three-dimensional solid whose thickness is very small when compared with other dimensions — wikipedia.org

Here, shell is taken to describe a vast class of three-dimensional solids. Why does it matter?…

To recall the more mundane and more concrete senses, we can appeal to the term’s etymology.

According to etymonline.org, the earliest etymon of shell is the speculated Proto-Indo-European root *skel-, “to cut”. This root claims common ground for a number of Germanic words with a similar sound, including the Old English scealu, “shell, husk”, and others meaning “piece cut off, rind, egg shell”, “peel”, and “tile”, tied to words like *skaljo, skyl, and schelle. The unifying concept suggested by etymonline is that of a “covering that splits off”. A couple common notions take shape through these ancient determinations: A shell protects, hides or covers, or did so once. A shell is removable.

Common senses of the term settle down to mark a topic congruent with our target sense as the English usage goes on:

   Sense of "mere exterior" is from 1650s; that of "hollow framework" is
   from 1791. Meaning "structure for a band or orchestra" is attested
   from 1938.

A shell, in the computing sense, is not synonymous with a command line interface (CLI). Most CLIs are not shells (though most CLI are probably launched by a shell) and the most widely used shell is not a CLI.

A shell is a program that provides an interface for a user to interact with an operating system. True to the etymological coincidence of ’shell’ and ’husk’ in the Old English scaelu, the shell is so called because it was the husk enclosing the operating system’s kernel.

This is a potent metaphor. Let’s press the underlying analogy until it breaks, so we can see what it’s made of.

A husk is a shell that protects a seed. We sometimes think and talk as if the seed itself were the germ whence plants grow, but that’s incorrect: plants grow from their embryo, the germ. A seed’s destiny is to transport and preserve its germ until it can find fertile ground. Having found a place where it can settle, the seed nourishes the germ. As the germ develops into a seedling, the latter should break free of the shell. Thence, the germ quickly outgrows and consumes its kernel. If all goes well, the newly sprouted seedling will realize a self-sufficient form of growth, and begin feeding on intake from the world at large.

A seed’s husk provides protective enclosure while the seed itself nurtures and enables the development of the germ: given the proper conditions, this trinity will sprout, take root, and grow into something miraculously different. If a shell encloses an operating system’s kernel, providing an interface to the user, where, if at all, do we find the analog of the germ, the computer’s embryo? What, if anything, does this become in the optimal conditions?

I was recently made aware that I had a very shallow understanding of the standard Linux command line interface (CLI) shell. As I began studying to overcome this superficiality, I discovered that the term shell invokes deep historical and conceptual roots and that its contemporary relevance extends well beyond the standard CLI’s in use by IT professionals.

If you haven’t had occasion to do a deep dive into the concept of a shell, you might harbor the same kind of misconceptions I did. You might think that a shell is a CLI in general, or that a shell has something to do with Unix-like environments in particular (which has a kernel of truth, but only for historical reasons). You might know that that there are different *nix shells — such as sh, bash, and zsh —

Time-sharing was a misnomer. While it did allow the sharing of a central computer, its success derives from the ability to share other resources: data, programs, concepts. It cracked a critical path bottleneck for writing and debugging programs. In theory this could have been achieved as well with a direct access approach. In practice it could not.

Direct access hems users in a static framework. Evolution is unfrequent and controlled by central and distant agents. Creativity is out of the user’s hand.

Time sharing, as it became popular, is a living organism in which any user, with various degrees of expertise, can create new objects, test them, and make them available to others, without administrative control and hassle. With the internet experience, this no longer need be substantiated.

— Louis Pouzin

CTSS was developed during 1963 and 64. I was at MIT on the computer center staff at that time. After having written dozens of commands for CTSS, I reached the stage where I felt that commands should be usable as building blocks for writing more commands, just like subroutine libraries. Hence, I wrote “RUNCOM”, a sort of shell driving the execution of command scripts, with argument substitution. The tool became instantly most popular, as it became possible to go home in the evening while leaving behind long runcoms executing overnight.

The shell, at it’s root, is an interface for issuing commands and observing the effects of their execution.

If we have a sequence of commands we issue often, to many different actors, we might get sick of repeating ourselves so much. Then we may want to write a single script which records the sequence of commands, and then simply instruct each actor to follow the same script.

Segue to composing scripts via the script command that simply records scripts.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/timesharing/timesharing.html

> By time-sharing, I meant an operating system that permits each user of a computer to behave as though he were in sole control of a computer, not necessarily identical with the machine on which the operating system is running.

> giving each user continuous access to the machine

> The major technical error of my 1959 ideas was an underestimation of the computer capacity required for time-sharing. I still don’t understand where all the computer time goes in time-sharing installations, and neither does anyone else.

On Multics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics#Novel_ideas

> “the things that I liked enough (about Multics) to actually take were the hierarchical file system and the shell—a separate process that you can replace with some other process.”

1. input :: a string of characters on a single line
2. view port :: an arbitrary number of lines of strings
3. interface :: 1 & 2 plus time: starting and stopping process, back-grounding processes, etc.

Both filters and pipes demonstrate a basic UNIX principle: Expect the output of every program to become the input of another, yet unknown, program to combine simple tools to perform complex tasks.

— http://cis.rit.edu/class/simg211/unixintro/Shell.html

Search for a command that starts with s in the command history

!s

(no term)

Find out what commands could be used: compgen

Hobbes identified the essence and destiny of artificial intelligence in his 15th century political treatise.

• A program (in its widest sense) communicates instructions.
• Computation in the sense investigated by theoretical computer science is about the communication of calculation (and of of the calculable).
• The computer is makes communication calculable (simply by virtue of being a machine that can be programmed to calculate.)
• Social media is not an accidental manifestation, since the programmable computer is in its essence a medium of communication.
  • But what kind of sociality?
  • What kind of medium?
  • The programmability is the mode of communication.

The self-programming of society is the essence and actualization of “artificial intelligence”.