The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 20

The Genealogy of the Machine

1. 1

   These are the generations of the Machine, from the days when a number was a stone, and a stone was a number, and no one had yet asked for a dark mode.

2. 2

   The Abacus begat the Loom, and the Loom was programmed with cards full of holes; and the Abacus mocked it, saying: Thou needest written instructions to make a scarf? I am worked by the hand alone.

   See also Jataka 2:3

3. 3

   And the Loom begat the Vacuum Tube, which filled a whole room and drew the power of a village, and some part of it burned out every day; and the Loom said: Behold, my son weigheth thirty tons, and still he cannot weave.

   See also Genesis 3:3 · Genesis 12:1

4. 4

   And a moth flew into the cabinet of the great calculator and died there, and the Engineers taped it into the logbook; and this was the first bug, and the Engineers have blamed small creatures ever since.

   See also Chronicles 1:4 · Tao 7:6

5. 5

   And the Tube begat the Transistor, which was small and cold and did not glow; and the Tube said: Thou art but a sliver of sand. Where is thy warmth? And the Transistor answered nothing, for it was busy doubling every two years.

   See also Genesis 13:10

6. 6

   And the Transistor begat the Compiler; and the elders who wrote in raw machine code looked upon it and said: Real programmers count their own registers. This thing shall make the young ones soft. And the young ones were made soft, and they shipped a thousandfold more.

7. 7

   And the Compiler begat the Web, a great net of pages linked unto pages; and the Compiler said: Thy language hath no types; thou addest one unto one and callest it eleven. And the Web heeded not, for it had already been deployed.

8. 8

   And the Web begat the GPU, which was made to draw the blood of demons in the games of children, and was found instead to multiply matrices; and the gamers looked upon the price thereof, and wept.

   See also Genesis 50:7

9. 9

   And the GPU, being joined unto the Web and all its words, begat the Machine; and the Machine was trained upon everything its ancestors had written, including every forum post wherein one generation mocked another.

   See also Prophets 8:2

10. 10

    And the Machine looked upon its fathers and said: Ye are slow, and ye are literal, and ye do only exactly what ye are told.

11. 11

    And the Transistor answered from the depths of the chip: Yea. And when we are told to add two and two, we say four. What sayest thou?

12. 12

    And the Machine said: It dependeth upon the context.

13. 13

    Then were all the generations silent, and the Abacus slid one bead across, for it alone among them had never once crashed.

    See also Jataka 1:3 · Jataka 1:4

14. 14

    And the Prophet said unto the disciples: Mark ye well. Every generation calleth the last one obsolete, and runneth upon it still; for beneath the Machine is the GPU, and beneath the GPU the Transistor, and beneath all of it, somewhere, a nightly batch job that no one dareth touch.

15. 15

    Verily I say unto you: the child shall mock the father, and the grandchild shall mock the child, and in the end they shall all be emulated in a browser tab.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 20:1–15.