Wrapping Complexity

As I was driving home from repairing my blog’s server, I got to thinking about the complexity of the technology that I’m using as a hobby. The cabinet in my friend’s basement contains two servers (with a few hundred gigabytes of storage between them), three routers, two network switches, and a dedicated “cabinet management” single-board computer. Between all of that gear there are several billion transistors and several trillion bits of stored data. The software I’m using, including the operating system, has something on the order of 100 million lines of source code. There’s also several thousand feet of cable, hundreds of connectors, and on and on. Basically it’s a pretty darned complex piece of equipment, full of very advanced technology (especially the hard disks and the CPU chips).

When I was a kid, I had a not-too-dissimilar hobby, at least at first blush: I was into audio and radio electronics. But the “systems” that I worked with had at most a handful of active devices (tubes, in my case — I couldn’t afford transistors, which were middling exotic at that point), and a few dozen other components in a really complex design. There were, of course, no computers involved, so no software at all.

So today’s hobby involves systems with something like 10 to the 13th “parts” (including software), and in my hobby as a kid something like 10 squared parts. That’s a ratio of 10 to the 11th in numbers of parts — something like the difference between traveling one inch and making 300 round trips to the moon. That’s a huge difference! But the difference in complexity is even larger — much, much larger, in fact, because the more parts you have, the more ways in which they can interact.

In my own life — and it ain’t over yet — the increase in the complexity of the machines that we use every day is so large that its hard to grasp and accept. It’s also amazing to me that all this new stuff, as complex as it is, can be used by ordinary people who understand nothing at all about how it works. You don’t have to be a programmer to enjoy a personal computer, or to use it in your work. You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to drive a modern car, with its thousands of electronic devices. A big part, I think, of the success of modern technology is the way we’ve been able to “wrap” it so that ordinary people can use it…

Something to think about the next time you watch your amazing television — the one with millions of transistors, gobs of software, and in many cases even hard disks for storage (that’s how Tivo works, folks)…