unload / reload shwasher
some toolbox-area clutter closer to dispositioned; wrangled power strip for Mrs
7:23 ofc open
Last night we puzzled over how Oct 31 is All Hallows Eve if Nov 2 is All Souls Day. Turns out "All Saints" and "All Souls" are not the same thing. Nov 1 is All Hallows ("Saints") Day. Despite the singular "Dia", Dia de (los) Muertos is not a single day. Depending on local tradition, it encompasses Nov 1 and 2, and for some, also Oct 31. It originally aligned specifically with All Souls Day (Nov 2) and expanded over centuries due to the adjacent Roman Catholic colonial ritual days intersecting with indigenous harvest festivals.
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Persistent data storage devices are called "drives" because early magnetic tape and platter designs required a literal mechanical "drive shaft" to move the physical media past the read-write head. If solid-state non-volatile digital memory tech had kept pace with needs, i.e. if we had skipped over the tape-and-platter storage era, that part of a computer wouldn't be called a "drive" at all. All the terminology around "drive letters", "thumbdrives", "cloud drives" etc. would be different.
Maybe we'd have called them "data crystals": analogous to how ice and other crystal-able materials can be melted down to an information-devoid state, and then re-formed to bear data again. Or maybe we'd call them "tablets" as a nod to the clay and wax sheets that ancient scribes carved data into, scraped or melted to blank data-less void again when the carvings were no longer needed, reused again and again. The literal origin of the idiom tabula rasa, "blank slate". Thinking of slate, maybe the terminology would have drawn on an analogy to (chalk)boards. Data boards? data sticks? Maybe we'd call it a "drawer", ala the analog filing cabinet.
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IBM filed a patent claim for its spinning-platter digital storage "drive" design 1954-12-24. For a complex of reasons, the patent wasn't actually granted until 1970-03-24. Patent law gives the claimant 17 years after grant to block competitors from copying the design. So, IBM in theory should have had a lock on the non-volatile digital storage industry all the way into 1987.
BUT also in 1969-01, the DOJ filed a "massive" antitrust suit against IBM with the goal of breaking up its monopoly in the computer industry. For the next 13 years, IBM's product-development strategy was encumbered with legal vetting to avoid triggering more antitrust claims, profit margin gnawed at by legal expenses, and executive time consumed in answering to legal process. They were in a tough position to also fend off storage-drive competitors' suits over predatory price manipulation (eating losses on accessories to starve competition) and changing up accessory interface configurations for the sole purpose of rendering competitors' devices incompatible.
The pressure of the 13-year antitrust case was instrumental in IBM's decision to open up PC architecture to third-party development, to keep pace in the emerging personal-computer market. They couldn't afford their usual 5-to-7 year internal development cycle when Apple and Commodore were poised to lock up that market. It proved IBM's undoing: Compaq reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS, the only uniquely IBM part of the PC ecosystem, by 1982. The DOJ also dropped the antitrust case in 1982, as the computing industry had fundamentally evolved past IBM lock-in.
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Interesting contrast, the vigor of 1969's DOJ in antitrust proceedings against an industry giant, compared to its utter complacency in today's food, automotive, fuel and tech markets dominated by small covens of globally anticompetitive oligarchs