AC/DC is the most awesome rock band of All Time.
“…but what about The Stones? Pink Floyd? etc. etc.” Well, yes, those are all excellent bands - certainly in the running for Greatest of All Time. …but I wasn’t talking about greatness or or influence or the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, now, was I? “Most Awesome” needn’t have anything to do with those things.
This differentiation between “awesomeness” and “bestness” was introduced to me by a buddy of mine who, upon seeing Alien vs. Predator - when it was released in actual-ass movie theaters (do they still have those? if they do: why?) - declared that it was “The most awesome movie he’d ever seen.” I hit him with all the Led Zep Fury I’d have expected from my initial sentence - “What about Casablanca? The Godfather? Terminator 2 - despite its 90s-era Cameron/Schwarzenneger predilection for violence - is a cinematic…”
He shut me down with “I didn’t say it was the ‘best’. I said it was the most awesome.”
That stuck with me.
…and so, I present to you a candidate for what is perhaps the most awesome computer of all time:
Jesus. Just look at it.
Many precise. Much gear. Wow.
Reading through TFA only increases my level of awe. This son of a bitch has cams that can compute square roots? ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!
It also makes me feel a certain brand of melancholy, in the realm of Skills Lost By Mankind. If you’re of a certain age you’ve probably been cornered at a party by some dork with an anecdote about how the Romans had a knack for concrete technology that has been lost to time. “Them fellers made concrete that can last - and has lasted! - for millennia, and now we have cracks in our sidewalks after a year, and ain’t that some shit?” (That dork may have been me. I am truly sorry.)
^ This is that. Most all of this glorious mechanical preciseitude (no, spellcheck, “precision” is not what the fuck I mean to say) has been replaced with sophisticated sensors and silicon that are no doubt lighter, cheaper, faster, more accurate, and objectively “better” in all ways.
But harder/better/faster/stronger absolutely does not imply More Awesome.