My weekly Claude Fable limit resets every Tuesday. I usually work through it in a day or two, then I have to wait again. So I’ve noticed myself saving up more ambitious asks the rest of the week, waiting until I have time with the model again. It reminds me of computing history accounts of time-sharing mainframes.
[O]ne person at a time could use the computer, and so you tended to use punch cards, and you tended to set up test runs to get the most out of your turn on the computer, and then you were off again and trying to figure out what your results were, and then put in another set of runs. So it was hardly what you’d call interactive: very batch-oriented and very scheduled and very measured, in terms of when you could get on.
[W]e’d travel to some other building where the computers were, and feed those cards into a machine and they would print out some answers internally, and a new set of cards would be punched out, with our answers on that new set of cards. And then we’d physically take those cards over to another machine that would print out the answers on great big huge sheets.
To avoid racking up charges, I’d write out as much of my program as I could with pen and paper before elbowing into my place at the machine […] Typically there was a gaggle of other kids waiting for the computer, so if my program didn’t work, I’d have to log off and find a spot to sort through where I went wrong, then wait my turn to get back on the teletype.
You had to really reason through your solution, because you’d submit it and maybe you’d wait 24 hours [for the results]. There’s a certain kind of experimentation you can do when you don’t have to worry about turnaround, but there’s also a certain amount of sloppiness you get into, and we went through a stage in which that was the issue.
[W]hen you scheduled time days—if not a week—in advance, you didn’t go down and see what happens; you made pretty sure it was [correct].
[T]here was a big notice over the computer—I think it was [a play on the one] devised by IBM— which said, “Think—but not here!”
I always thought of it as something like a factory. You have this very large thing, and there are raw ingredients going in the front, and there are some very complex processes that have to be coordinated. Then sometime later, you get what you were hoping for on the out of the rear end. […] You can think of them also as like a railroad. Somebody else is deciding the schedules. I can certainly remember having maybe one run a day, or two runs a day, and you could only get your results then, and you had to work around it and so forth. It was very much of an institutional way of thinking about computing.
Many of these are oral histories from the Engineering and Technology History Wiki (what an archive!). I also think regularly about the descriptions, in Rudy Rucker’s novel, Postsingular, of “suckling the Big Pig”:
[H]e took a quick hit off the Big Pig at the apex of the virtual world, the outrageously rich and intricate like a birthday piñata stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory—aha! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig made Jayjay feel like more than a genius.
The Big Pig was absorbing, mirroring, and amplifying their exchange, layering on further sounds, clips, and links from the simmering matrix of global info. Intoxicated by the heady mix, Jayjay soon forgot about Thuy per se—that is, she became an archetype, a thought form, a pattern in the cosmic stew. Knowing Jayjay’s particular likes, the Big Pig began displaying a fundamental secret-of-life construction of reality: branes and strings, an underlying graph-rewriting system, a transfinite stack of “turtles all the way down.” Although the ideas felt familiar from Jayjay’s last trip into the Pig, he knew the details wouldn’t stay with him for long. So what. Pig trips were all about relaxing and enjoying the show. Aha!
With, perhaps, a warning:
One thing for sure, suckling on the Big Pig seemed a crippling drain on Thuy’s creative energies.