
On periodisation: or, what’s the best way to chop history into bits? (2016) - diodorus
https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/on-periodisation-or-whats-the-best-way-to-chop-history-into-bits/
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Animats
The engineer's view: The Iron Age, with iron, stonework, brasswork,
woodworking, weaving, and agriculture, ran until the 1600s or so. Then there
was a period of tinkering and one-offs, but not much happened until 1830.

Then, in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened. That was the
moment when the industrial revolution got out of beta. The Liverpool and
Manchester had passenger tickets, double track, schedules, and all steam
locomotives - no horses, no cable hauling. (There's a great documentary for
which I lack the link, for which replicas, or even the originals, of early
locomotives were taken out and run. Everything before the Liverpool and
Manchester was clunky and didn't run smoothly. The narrator rides the
Liverpool and Manchester train, which is smoothly running at about 30MPH, and
drinks from a glass.)

And then the modern world began.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I'd add another step with the Electric Age. Maybe at 1882 (the opening of the
Pearl Street Station).

And maybe another with the Computer Age. Maybe at 1945, with ENIAC.

~~~
labster
It's hard to overstate how much of advantage the computers in Bletchley Park
gave the allies in WWII. At least bump the Computer Age back one year so you
can get D-Day in there.

~~~
Animats
Bletchley Park did not have general-purpose computers as we understand them.
They had special-purpose hardware key-testers - the electromechanical bombe,
and the electronic Colossus. Their successor today is a Bitcoin miner.

Although it gets less publicity today, Friedman's cryptanalysis operation in
the US did much more number-crunching. Friedman turned cryptanalysis from
guessing and testing into a statistical problem.[1] He and his organizations
made heavy use of modified IBM tabulators during WWII.[2] Those were much more
general purpose machines, somewhat programmable.

[1] [https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-
features/decla...](https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-
features/declassified-documents/friedman-
documents/publications/FOLDER_231/41760429079956.pdf)

[2] p. 183ff, [https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-
features/decla...](https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-
features/declassified-documents/friedman-
documents/publications/ACC15281/41785109082412.pdf)

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labster
Huh, I was expecting a discussion of a language problem about how you take
historical texts from the early days and add punctuation to it. I know things
can be "period"-ized different ways because I've read Bibles where the there's
new verse numbers starting in the middle of a sentence.

Dividing history into epochs seems like a much more intractable problem,
because the future was already then, it was just unevenly distributed. Taking
the names to be more meaningful than conventions is a little silly.

------
jedberg
My high school history books always used watershed moments. The beginning of a
chapter was a big event, then some explanation of the fallout of the event,
and then some context on the buildup to the next big event and then.... next
chapter!

