Process Safety, Technological Security
I was futzing with my cheapo 2U rackmount case last night, installing a motherboard and firing things up. I was connecting the onboard headers to the lights, switches, and USB ports, and I noticed the old COM serial port header on the board. Even on an ultra-small, ultra-cheap mini-ITX board like this one, there’s a COM header behind the VGA and HDMI back panel connectors. In a somewhat interesting contrast, it’s nestled in between the antenna wires on the onboard Wifi of this far better board.
That COM port is kind of a humbling little peripheral organ at this point, maybe something between an appendix and a belly button: remember from whence you came, dust to dust, and the like. It also does a lot to cut through all the layers of abstraction upon which we compute these days. Communicating with a computer via serial port is almost like implementing a Morse Code protocol by banging on trash can lids with sticks – in an era when it’s easier to use five layers of network protocols to communicate with a device that’s right next to you, rather than just running some kind of cord.
As an aside on control and compatibility, I think about the time I was running YouTube audio on my patio through a Chromecast controlled by my cell phone, hooked up to my living room receiver, which outputted line level audio to a Sonos amp and then routed the audio back to the patio. Atrocious and beautiful at the same time.
This all led me to think of robustness and reliability in all this stuff. Looking at the YouTube case, while this was quite cool at the time, just think of all the failure points in this scheme. The phone is running Android, the Chromecast is running some demi-Android, the receiver is running something (probably a BSD but just guessing), the Sonos is running some kind of BSD or Linux, the WAPs are running some kind of operating system, and the router is running some kind of operating system. The Chromecast has to contact YouTube to get the video, and this is all going on with Wifi signals primarily passing back and forth and talking via fat protocols through brick, stone, insulation, drywall, wood, and air. The only reliable cog in the whole machine was the speaker wire from the Sonos to the patio ceiling.
I wonder if there will be a point in time where we saturate the capacity of current technology profiles, and then start working to make all this more robust. Imagine 10 to 100 Gbps wired networking, wireless in the 1 Gbps range, Bluetooth with ultra-low power requirements and a 100 ft range. And then basically start making these more complicated things more like serial ports and less like fine-tuned magic.