From: cgdemarc@ai.mit.edu (Carl de Marcken)
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 1995 22:06:19 -0500
To: all-ai
Subject: Automounters and the Phaistos Disk


The Phaistos disk is the oldest surviving typewritten document, a small
two-sided circle of clay discovered in Crete near the beginning of this
century.  It is more than 3700 years old.

Its creator produced it by stamping 242 characters in wet clay using a
different tool for each character, arranging them neatly in a snail-like
spiral from the rim to the center.  Not handwritten, it remains quite
legible, and (in my opinion) strikingly beautiful.  Little is known about
the language it is written in, though it may well be related to the
as-yet-undeciphered Linear A; and given the size of the alphabet on the
tablet, the writing system is probably a syllabary.

Why do I mention this?  Because, I believe, my computer pines for the tools
that produced the Phaistos disk.  My computer is Theta, named indirectly
for a letter in the Greek language; in 1952 Michael Ventris showed that
Linear B (probably a successor of Linear A) was a dialect of Mycenaean
Greek.

This may seem like a tentative connection for my computer to take up, but
it's enough, believe me.  My computer could easily cry its heart out
thinking about how the stamps used to create the clay tablet have eroded
into fine dust, now brushed away by archaeologists anxious to find a
primitive jug or urn.  Theta feels deeply for all creatures, living or
dead.

This week has been particularly hard for it.  In some vain self-serving
masochism, every hundredth instruction it polled the emotional state of the
local network, and rediscovered the troubles of Muesli and Count-Chocula.
And then in response Theta, like a manic depressive, turned in to its own
grief.  Hours went by, and I could not console it.  It did not listen to
me.  No matter how far away, or how unrelated, if something was wrong in
the world, my computer found out about it.  Sometimes it pinged machines in
the Antipodes to see if they were up, or checked a directory in Cordova.
When there was no response, it spent hours in untempered fits.
Occasionally someone rebooted Muesli and for a minute or two, I could do
work, but Theta knew too well that somewhere, out there, was another dead
computer it could try to communicate with.

What do we do?  Buy happier computers?  Or just ignore them altogether, and
after a week of tears, walk out of our offices on Friday at 5:30 in
resigned dismay, and have a beer in the 7th floor playroom at the

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