Weeknote, Sunday 3rd December 2023

How did it get to be December already? And how did it get so cold?

The Byte archive

I was a fairly religious reader of Byte magazine from the early 1980s until it finally bit the dust as a print publication in 1998. I always loved that it wasn’t focused on a single platform, but on “small computers” as a whole.

It also had the kind of deep technical content which I loved. If you wanted to know about new processors, the transputer, or something even more esoteric, Byte was a great place to keep informed.

It also had Jerry Pournelle. Science fiction writer, conservative, and holder (in later life) of some dubious views, Jerry was nonetheless one of the most influential early computer journalists. I loved his columns, which stretched out to 5,000 words or so per issue. They were written from the perspective of an ordinary computer user — albeit one that had the kind of knowledge required to run a computer in the days of the S100 bus and CP/M.

Thankfully, the Internet Archive has every issue of Byte, scanned and neatly labelled. Annoyingly though, there isn’t a single collection which has every issue in it, which means it’s not easy to just download everything.

And having local copies is vital for me, as I use DEVONThink for research, and it wants a local set of PDFs. So I have started putting together the definitive collection of every single issue, and once I’ve done it I will put them somewhere online, so people can download the whole set. It’s big – my incomplete version is about 7Gb, and I estimate the full set is about 10Gb – but at least they will be there.

This took quite a while to do this week, and I'm pleased with the results.

Chanel

I went to see the Chanel show at the V&A – I don’t really like Chanel’s clothes that much, but her accessories are amazing and she had a really fantastic eye for patterns.

Seeing the collection emphasised that once she created the classic suit, so much of what she did was just more of the same. Milking a hit isn’t necessarily a bad thing: but the small card which notes she “attempted to extend the suit from day to evening wear” is a bit of a giveaway. She didn’t just make more suits. But she was more than happy to keep churning out endless slight variants in a way which made her a lot of money.

It was a little disappointing that the exhibition basically skips over the nine years when she could not work in France because she was widely believed to have collaborated with the Nazis. She had an affair with a German officer and used his connections to protect a relative. Literally one sign, with no more than 30 words on it, and then skipping merrily on to her return in 1954.

In fact, there is more space devoted to the one document from 1943 which lists her as working with the resistance, although there is no documentation (and no one remembers) exactly what she did with them.

There is, of course, far more documentation listing her as a Nazi agent. She definitely benefitted from the Germans’ Aryanization laws, which let her get control of her perfume business from the Jewish Wertheimer brothers.

There’s no doubt that Chanel collaborated, and that her high-placed contacts (Churchill, Duff Cooper, and many others) protected her after the war. None of this is mentioned, perhaps because once you understand what she did and what she was, it’s much less likely that you will just want to admire the pretty clothes.

I don’t think it’s possible to understand Chanel-the-person without considering that period of her life. And the exhibition doesn’t have the excuse that it’s solely about her influence on fashion (there’s surprisingly little which contextualises her in that sense). It ends when she dies, so it's not about Chanel the brand or even really her legacy.

In that sense, it’s a massive contrast to Diva, which is also on at the V&A and which managed to reduce me to tears when I saw it. Diva is a brilliant bit of curation in ways that Chanel is not.

However, if you do go to the V&A, get yourself a piece of the pear and caramel cake. It’s really rather fine.

Three things you should read this week

1. The End of Elon Musk. In any rational world, Musk’s performance at the Dealbook conference would be the end of his career. It probably won’t be, unfortunately. But, as Magary notes, Musk “appeared both high and made of plywood”. He does not seem like a well man, and I don’t say that either lightly or with any pleasure.
2. Speaking of Musk, the Cybertruck is here¹, and predictably it’s pricier and has less range than he claimed. Oh, and while the sides are bulletproof, as Musk said, the windows are not, which may prove an issue if someone is actually trying to kill you.
3. And sticking with the theme of “people who really should grow up”, Basecamp lost a customer thank to DHH’s nonsense. Why is it that people who crow loudest about “keeping politics out of work” so often bring their politics to work? Of course, what they actually mean is “keep your politics out of work”. It’s the same as Elon “Free Speech” Musk. Free for them, not for you.

This week I have been reading…

The news that greenhouse gas emissions have been soaring rather than reducing ended the week on a sour note for me, but it makes it more obvious than ever that capitalism isn’t going to deliver a future of humanity. So reading Tim Jackson’s Post Growth has been pretty timely. Highly recommended.