LAYERING UP THE ITEMIZED USER ENVIRONMENT December 3 In this lab report, we consider one way to look at the architecture for the itemized user environment: a layering that has been happening since the dawn of time. Some harbor an inclination toward a “grand design” in the construction of a new operating system’s user environment; a sort of “turtles all the way down” architecture that features one substance, or one core primitive, which defines the mechanics of an entire computing system deep under the hood and up into userland. I’m more inclined toward the “layers” which we’ve been stacking up since we first made the jump from hard-coded circuits to programmable, general ones (and on which we have built many new layers — machine code, assembly, low- and high-level programming languages, and so on). Each layer adheres to the contract of the one below, and offers a new way to think about things to the layers which will be built above. This is how we’ve bootstrapped into all of modern computing starting from simple logic gates, in a slow, evolutionary construction. This isn’t just the way modern computing came to be; it’s the way our physical world came to be, too! This “layering” is how our world has evolved into the one we know. But it comes with some important consequences.

Our evolutionary construction, the layering, neatly reflects how we do this kind of creative, exploratory work, and how the mind engages with ideas. Ted Nelson, in Literary Machines: Complicated ideas evolve slowly. People who do not work endlessly with ideas may not easily imagine how many are the steps that intensive work with ideas entails; how many are the guesses, postulations, reconsiderations, shifts of thought, confusions, resyntheses, reintegrations; how much is the rework of dearly-held insights in clouds of confusion. The swirl of needed changes never seems to end. […] This could not have been done with schedules and deadlines. When a project requires both exhaustive exploration and unusual inspiration, it is going to take however long it takes.