It’s almost midnight and I just watched a video about C++ and now I can’t stop thinking about the Apollo guidance computer.

4KB of RAM. 4. They ran a real-time operating system on it. They wrote the software by hand — literally, women in a factory weaving copper wire through magnetic cores to store the program permanently. That’s not a metaphor. That’s how it worked. They threaded a rope and called it memory and then they put two men on the moon with it.

And I’m looking at this C++ video and someone in the comments is proud of themselves for getting a button to animate smoothly with an AI assistant.

I sound like my dad. I know that. But hear me out.

The people who built the early internet, who designed the first compilers, who figured out how to make rocks talk to each other with electricity — those people were working on problems that had never been solved before. Not “never solved by them.” Never solved by anyone. They were operating at the edge of what was physically possible and they kept pushing anyway because the alternative was not knowing.

Now the edge is still there. It’s just harder to see. It’s in the labs doing things with protein folding and quantum coherence and materials that don’t exist yet. It’s in the people actually pushing the boundary of what compilers can do, what CPUs can do, what networks can do at scale.

But the culture shifted. The thing that gets celebrated now is the wrapper, not the engine. The interface, not the protocol. The app that uses the API, not the people who built the API.

I don’t know when the next genuinely insane thing happens. The kind of thing where you explain it to someone and they just stare at you because the gap between what they thought was possible and what you’re describing is too wide to cross comfortably.

Maybe it’s whatever they’re doing with Artemis. Maybe it’s something nobody’s announced yet. Maybe it’s already happening in a lab somewhere and we won’t know about it for a decade.

I just hope whoever’s doing it is doing it because they have to know. Not because there’s a market for it.

The dreamers who built the rope memory weren’t thinking about the exit strategy.