Friedrich Kittler - There is No Software

An interesting article from 1995. A bit ponderous, but a good excuse to think about what computers are philosophically.

Software, if it existed, would just be a billion dollar deal based on the cheapest elements on earth. For, in their combination on chip, silicon and its oxide provide for perfect hardware architectures. That is to say that the millions of basic elements work under almost the same physical conditions, especially as regards the most critical, namely temperature dependent degradations, and yet, electrically, all of them are highly isolated from each other. Only this paradoxical relation between two physical parameters, thermal continuity and electrical discretization on chip, allows integrated circuits to be not only finite state machines like so many other devices on earth, but to approximate that Universal Discrete Machine into which its inventor’s name has long disappeared.

There’s a sense in which we think of computer code as “being” the computer. But of course, a computer isn’t a high-level code or even machine code. A computer is a physical device inside of which the channels of wires (理) specify electrons (氣?) to move in a very precisely specified ways. It’s incredible that it works at all.