I’m always aware of the long history of computing, algorithms and data webs. I’ve made dozens of tech history pieces exploring the history and emphasizing that our “new innovations” are permanent parts of all such systems. This blog could be titled No, it’s not new.
Here’s a not new I hadn’t noticed before!
This 1977 IBM movie introduces the concept of software to the public using player pianos as a metaphor. Along the way they mention that developers visited software libraries to examine samples of existing code. The film doesn’t show us the libraries. For sure they weren’t public buildings!
They must have resembled the record library of a radio station: a large room of carefully catalogued tapes and card decks.
The modern equivalent is Libraries in C and Modules in Python, purely in software and generally part of the compiler package. There’s one big difference. We don’t just examine the library code to see if we can learn a useful trick; we directly incorporate it in our own compilation, more like editing a mixtape or an anthology.
Polistra's Mill 