Lilahaa

Note: this page is a holdover from my childhood writing, which I cannot fit into my current storyline even metaphorically. However, it represents the political attitudes of various Political parties of Teppala quite well.

Computing on planet Tebbala in the 3900s was dominated by the two OS's Lilahaa and Kulapila , used by the rival empires of Camia (Lilahaa) and Wamia (Kulapila).

Operating system as programming language

Computers in this era merged their operating system (OS) with an inbuilt programming language, and generally supported no other programming languages. Yet, the OS itself was stored as binary code and thus could not be edited later on except by people who could read binary code. Thus, any bugs that happened to be included in any release of either of the two major operating systems would remain there unless someone was able to hit on the exact spot in the binary code where the problem manifested itself. This severe defect affected both OS's, as it was common to the shared nature of their computer hardware, but there were more bugs in Kulapila than in Lilahaa.

For example, since Kulapila could not read files larger than about 11 MB, when it became necessary to allow larger files to be created, the programmers came up with the idea of splitting files up into 11 MB chunks and creating a new type of file manager that displayed the groups as if they were a single file. The Kulapila of the 20’s had been a mostly textual interface, but GUI features were added throughout the 30’s to make it easier to use. But the programmers were never able to remove the underlying layers, so much like Windows 95/8 a lot of seemingly graphical programs would launch with a console in the upper left corner of the screen that was quickly hidden as if to pretend it were not real.

Divergence and early development

Lilahaa was much more powerful than Kulapila. Kulapila incorporated many user-friendly design principles, aimed at making computers easier to use for casual users, but soon these decisions made Kulapila worse for everyone, including casual users.

By contrast, Lilahaa was a raw-mode OS aimed only at experts, and was far superior in performance to Kulapila in every way. It was very difficult to learn, and even experts sometimes had difficulty using it, but the people of Camia were patriotic enough to learn how to use Lilahaa the expert way, even if they had no general interest in computers. Thus all the groups in Camian society that one would stereotypically expect to be unfamiliar with computers were at a level beyond even the best of the Wamians, since Wamia's Kulapila essentially made it impossible to be a computer expert by controlling everything from the top down at the highest level.

Lilahaa's difficult UI was a handicap early on. In the 3920's, Kulapila's easy-to-use approach actually succeeded. Lilahaa expected to win in the long run, but knew that to win they would need to slowly catch up from a starting point far behind Wamia's. Camian programmers were up front with their citizens about the fact that they were using (for now) inferior technology, whereas Wamia's Kulapila programmers tried to hide the truths about those few things in Lilahaa that were superior even in the 20's, such as greater power for individual users.

As Kulapila forged ahead unchallenged, their programmers soon became unbearably perverse. Conflict arose within the company about which direction to take the operating system, with one side sabotaging the efforts of the other at no gain to themselves and increasing costs to the customer. Because all OS's were written in binary, there was no way to undo these acts of sabotage. Even though Kulapila still had vastly superior resources, they began to fall behind Lilahaa in certain areas and again tried to hide this from their customers. Kulapila sent advertisements over its network extolling the few strengths of their operating system, and then charged the customers for the money they had spent sending the ads.

Soon, backdoors were built into the OS allowing the government to take full control of any citizen’s computer, even to the point of having them buy things online to raise more money for the government. A clock-like device with a numeric currency display was provided to each citizen to show how much money the Wamian government had cost them so far each day. The computers were also made to be easy to destroy, so that if the government wanted people to buy more computers they would send out a virus that would cause the computers to physically self-destruct. However the debt meter was not possible to destroy, and would continue to add up more money owed even when it wasn’t attached to a working computer.

Helpless citizens try to adapt

By the middle of the 30’s, Kulapila was so bad that citizens were secretly buying up old computers from the 20’s since they were easier to use even though they had to keep on buying the new computers as well to satisfy the government’s insistence that everyone own a modern computer. Meanwhile, the Kulapila government ran itself mostly on computers from Lilahaa, since they were unable to produce anything of their own that was capable of running such a large nationwide network.

Cybernetic warfare

Lilahaa programmers knew this, and periodically sent out viruses and other attacks to the Wamian government's few working Kulapila computers in order to cripple the Wamian government, as well as exploiting a few secret backdoors in Lilahaa. Computer skills were widely distributed throughout the entire Camian population, and these hackers were both male and female, young and old. And some of the young were very young indeed, as Kulapila was so vulnerable that Lilahaa users could break in with little effort.

Wamia hired an army of programmers to write antivirus programs to head off the Camian programmers, but only distributed them to government employees. The common people were still helpless, and the government used these virus attacks as an excuse to their citizens for why the new computers ran so poorly. Antivirus programs were illegal for common citizens in Wamia because the government had no way of designing one that could not also be used to keep out the government spies. (Generally viruses written by Camians disguised themselves as the Wamian government, so any antivirus program designed by the Wamian government would have to allow such viruses access anyway.) Thus the citizens of Wamia were attacked by viruses both from Camians playing around and their own government deliberately targeting them in order to spy. Despite this wide-open vulnerability, Wamia's government refused to protect its citizens from Camian viruses. They realized that, in order to spy on their citizens, they needed to require that all Wamian computers allow the Wamian government unrestricted access.

By contrast, Camia did not allow its government to spy on its citizens, and therefore Camian computers generally could not be hacked even by Camians, let alone by Wamians. Some Camians did hack other Camians to prove it could be done, and were considered heroes for doing so, but even the most successful among them accomplished far less than the typical hacker who went after Wamians. Camian hackers typically chose to present themselves as the Wamian government in order to gain access to private citizens' computers. However, the best among the hackers could hack the Wamian government itself.

The hacking holiday

Camia even had a national holiday, April 12, set aside specifically to allow anyone to sit down and hack into Wamian computers, particularly those of the Wamian government, while remaining entirely invincible to Wamian revenge because of their own network's much better security. On this day each year, Camians in each town visited a local computer lab, which was then connected to the Wamian government's network. Then they competed to see which of them could hurt Wamia the most. Because the hacking was on the same day every year, Wamian citizens prepared themselves for it by turning off their computers. However, Wamia still needed some computers to stay on at all times in order for the country to run properly; when Wamia's government once tried turning them off, the Camians stayed in their chairs all night, eating meals donated by local restaurants, and then when the sun came up the next morning and the Wamians figured it was safe to turn everything back on the Camians began the hacking. From that point on, Wamia agreed not to attempt to evade the hacking holiday, and left its essential computers turned on.

However, the very fact that fewer computers than normal were operating every April 12 meant that those computers were more likely than ever to get hacked. Wamia's government tried to encourage its citizens to leave their home computers turned on, hoping that some of the Camians would pick easy victims and leave the government alone, but Camia responded by promising higher rewards for hackers who attacked the generally better-protected Wamian government computers. During one competition, 41 Camians simultaneously hacked into the Wamian central government network from 41 different entry points. Even though they were competing with each other, the 41 Camian hackers cooperated with each other and hid each other from the Wamian government so they could chat with each other. These conversations were broadcast live on electric billboards all over Wamia, but yet remained hidden from the Wamian government officials trying to stop the hackers.

With so many illegal outsiders roaming around their network, the Wamian computer security team was forced to admit defeat and try to make compromises with the hackers in order to lessen the amount of damage they were causing. The winner of the competition that year was a teenage girl named Ginger who managed to get into the Wamian government's tax collection service and raise everyone's taxes by an enormous amount. Because Wamia used instant electronic debt collection to collect its taxes, the government computer believed that the entire nation owed the government money and withdrew large sums of money from the bank accounts of every citizen instantly, putting many into bankruptcy. Then, she transferred the money into her own bank account and realized that she had become one of the richest people in Camia. Wamia tried to reverse the transaction, but found that Ginger had immediately spent much of her money on tangible goods and therefore ensured that the money could not be recovered.

Endogenous viruses

Bugs in Kulapila were much more dangerous than those in Lilahaa because of the infighting and general aimlessness of the Kulapila programmers, such that most of the computer’s resources were spent on fighting different programs in the OS that were trying to delete each other. Sometimes a programmer being fired would deliberately add a virus to the OS that would only activate much later on, long after he was gone. Often a computer user would encounter an error that required the user to press a certain key to bypass, only to discover that the modern Kulapila keyboards no longer had that key. Then the person would have to call a technician who would come by with a special keyboard that had that key on it, press the key, and hand the customer a bill.

Wamia takes action

Wamia realized now its product was vastly inferior, even without the government spying on its citizens, but continued to spend ever more money advertising to its people about how superior it supposedly was. In the early 3940s, the Camian government made a list of ways in which the Kulapila software was still arguably superior: for example, all Kulapila computers ran at a fixed resolution of 640x480, and therefore all graphical programs could fit on the screen; by contrast, display size had always been optional in Lilahaa, and some customers with otherwise modern computers were still running on 320x240 because they had never needed to upgrade. Thus, these programmers were forced to write multiple versions of their programs, and some customers had better UI's than others. In the next release of Lilahaa, Camia solved the problem by offering free upgrades to 1920x1536, giving each customer room to accommodate nine windows the size of Kulapila's maximum window size. Each other remaining weakness was also solved with this update, some at great cost to the Camian government. Wamia's response to losing its few remaining advantages was to charge its customers for an ad campaign explaining how Kulapila at its best was almost as good as Lilahaa at its worst.

People of the Meteors

Eventually the situation got so bad that Kulapila realized they needed to start from scratch on a new OS that would work properly for everyone, even if it meant giving up total control. All of their code was contaminated now, so they made a new OS called People of the Meteors (Testapta). They were 30 years behind on programming, but still had roughly comparable hardware resources. At first the new OS was given to only a few people, since giving it to everyone would put the government’s hold on power at risk. In order to keep old software running properly, the programmers decided that every Testapta computer would come with a fully working Kulapila computer running its own OS, and to keep developing Kulapila as a side project even though it would only run within a window attached to the side of the Testapta monitor.

Many people predicted that Testapta would soon become as bad as Kulapila, but because the Kulapila hardware was isolated, the Testapta code never became contaminated. Wamia still spied on its citizens through the Kulapila devices, but was forced to surrender control of its citizens' new Testapta computers. Therefore, the Wamian government was able to track certain user activities that were routed through the Kulapila device, but for the first time in fifteen years, Wamian citizens were able to perform most of their online activity anonymously.

Camia was scared that they might have a real enemy for the first time in thirty years, so they obtained illicit copies of the Testapta binaries and adopted some Testapta features into Lilahaa order to keep their own OS ahead in the race. Perversity was beginning to creep out from within the ranks of the Camian programmers, as well, and for the same familiar reasons; Lilahaa had been so much more successful than its competitor that the programmers realized nothing they did wrong would hurt them at all and they gave up trying to make anything more than incremental improvements to keep their bosses happy. A war of purity erupted in Lilahaa, with the pro-adoption programmers fighting against the Lilahaa purists. Eventually the pro-Testapta people won out, and even Wamia's Testapta developers took this as a sign that cooperation might be the best way forward, even though the two empires were still at war.

Scratchpad

Usually I put my scratchpads at the top of the page, but here I put it at the bottom because it is less important.

Many of the ideas here are childish because my parents exposed me to computers at a very young age. I may have been tapping away on an Apple //c at the age of three, and there is a photo of me with a friend at a computer where I look not much older than that. I have a distinct memory of being driven to a room lined with computers, seated (or maybe even being lifted) up onto a chair. The man teaching the class, if that's what it was, told us not to press the ESC key, and immediately I decided to type ESC letter by letter on the screen. The man came to me and said, "What did you do?" Now, as an adult, I suspect he knew exactly what I had done, but was humoring me to make me feel smart. On the other hand, this was the mid-1980s, so maybe I really did fool him.

Exploding computers

Possibly the earliest idea I can remember ... in perhaps first grade (third grade at the latest) I decided that Camian computers would explode at the slightest unexpected user error, but that this was okay because Camians were such experts that they simply never made errors of any kind. Thus, effectively, Camian computers only exploded when "Wamians" used them. I put this word in quotes because Wamia did not exist in my mind until I was in fifth grade ... the "Wamians" here were simply the misfits of Camian society. Camia did not consider this to be a defect in their computers' design, but rather blamed the user, and therefore the users would have to pay $10,000 whenever a computer exploded in front of them. This high figure I came up with might even have been an attempt to portray the Camians as forgiving of their lesser fellow citizens, as at the time, I believed that a typical computer cost around ten times that price. (I did not come up with a private currency for Camia until several years after this.)

By contrast, in my later writing, Wamian computers exploded on purpose whenever the Wamian government decided it was time to force their consumers to buy a newer model. In one scene, fifteen office workers crammed together saw their fifteen computers go blank, then spell out a message letter by letter, and then explode in the users' faces in the same order.

In both situations, I apparently thought of the monitor as the main body of the computer, perhaps because it was the part right in front of the user's face.

Keyboard design

The first Halloween memory ... Camian keyboards have extra control keys, meaning that they can do things that Wamian keyboards cannot. This idea would make more sense if both computers ran the same operating system, which again shows that this is a very early idea, perhaps even earlier than the exploding computer idea above, when I did not know that such a thing as an operating system even existed.

BIOS and bootup sequence

When I was young, I thought that the OS in BIOS stood for "operating system" and was a rudimentary operating system. Technically, it is. I dont know if I want to use this idea or not, but I was sure when I was young that Camian computers would have a "BIOS". I also associated this word with the scientific word βίος "life", and thought of the bootup process as the computer becoming aware of its body.

Even "in the fifties", beyond the scope of this writeup, Lilahaa still used a text-mode boot sequence. It is very similar to modern Linux in that the superficial appearance is the same whether a computer has one megabyte or one terabyte of RAM, and likewise for the other parts of the computer. It could be that Lilahaa retained its primitive bootup sequence for the same reason that the child superheros of Camia had animal-like powers ... the primitive model was the strongest model, whereas the prettified Kulapila bootup sequence was weak and soft in the same way humans without such powers had become. But this is adult speculation on a childhood idea.

Reflections of situations on Earth

As a child, I had no concept of operating systems. The #Exploding computers idea represented my thought process well ... Camian computers worked well because Camian users worked well. These computers used a command line interface because that was all I had ever seen at the time.

When I made some computers more powerful than others, I was familiar with the MacOS interface of the day, and therefore both the strong and the weak computers were GUI-based. Not until the mid-90s ... that is, my early teen years ... was I aware that an operating system similar to the ProDOS i had used as a child was still around. I still didnt know the difference between Windows and Unix ... I thought Unix was "what you use to connect" to the Internet, perhaps confusing it with telnet.

Text mode interaction

At some point, I decided that Lilahaa (from Camia) was text-based and Kulapila (from Wamia) was entirely based on GUI. I'm not sure if this was before or after I had first seen Linux computers up close in 1999, when I was just turning 18. I know that for at least a few years prior to that, I had similar feelings for the DOS/Mac split, seeing that DOS was superficially more primitive but in fact more powerful beneath the hood. Also in 1999, I remember using Windows NT and realizing that (on that PC installation) there was no full-screen command prompt, as if Windows was ashamed of its text mode and tried to hide it.

It was not all about the text for me, though ... I fondly remember that my first experience using Linux was with the icewm interface, which was a very space-efficient GUI. That is, it had titlebars and buttons like any other, but they were small, and the keyboard could be used to operate them. Terminal windows within icewm thus had most of their space available for the text within them, and were easily resizable. Thus, Lilahaa was not a text mode operating system, but merely an operating system that provided a text mode interface openly and without shame.

Another animal metaphor is appropriate here .... humans are "prettier" but less powerful than animals because humans have lost claws, sharp teeth, and many basic animal abilities unrelated to combat. Or perhaps, the child superheros won their battles because, although they were small and weak when measured on human abilities, they had animal abilities where their enemies had none. Thus, e.g. one could say

             ABILITY SCORE
             ANIMAL     HUMAN
Lilahaa      50         50
Kulapila     0          200

Superficially, Kulapila appears more powerful because it has a higher total ability score, but it turns out the key variable here is not the sum but the product: survival requires both human and animal abilities, so Kulapila will win battles against Lilahaa on evenly matched human terms, but when the battle shifts to the natural world, Lilahaa will always win even when Kulapila vastly outnumbers them.

This is similar to the situations the Camian superheros faced on the battlefield. They were young children and none of them had powers that enhanced their basic human abilities such as muscular lifting power. Camians who knew this could frustrate the kids by simply standing in front of a door, knowing the kids could not push past them, and that they were not allowed to use their superpowers against fellow Camians even when a mission was being obstructed. However, when the Camians encountered their actual enemies, size meant little, since even a mutant weighing 20 tons could be set on fire just as if it were human-sized.

This is a nice metaphor, but I didnt think this way at the time.

Unrealistic expectations

When Wamians called helplines for tech support, they were given unhelpful instructions. The Wamian government distributed a program called BINEDIT that allowed the user to modify the binary code of the operating system, screen by screen, and would instruct users with difficult issues to open the binary editor and scroll through the OS's executable file until they reached the place where the bug was so they could fix it.

Dialog boxes

Some dialog box error messages could be ignored. this behavior may have been common to both OS's. At the time, MacOS was such that the entire OS would freeze whenever it displayed a dialog box "Please insert the disk: _____", and if the user did not have that disk on hand, the computer would need to be rebooted, losing all work in all open applications. This sounds like an idea that would make perfect sense for Kulapila, but perhaps I thought it might be too perverse even for them.

If dismissible dialogs are normal even in Kulapila, then those situations above where the whole computer freezes until the user presses a certain key would be due to bugs in the code, and not the intended behavior. But the government profited from the resulting tech help fees, and therefore showed little interest in fixing these bugs.

The Internet

A nationwide social network for computer users existed in my writing as early as 1993. It was in text mode, but that may be because that was all I was familiar with at the time (we had a Macintosh, but even Macs at the time still had text mode programs). I may not have fully differentiated it from television, which I imagined as being partly text mode as well.

Internet first

One idea I had was that ALL Camian computers were on the Internet, whether they were accessible from outside or not. Thus people saw their equivalent of an IP address when they booted up and that was their computer's name.

Domain names and addresses

I had two conflicting ideas for how Camia's Internet domain setup worked.

One idea was that they were very humble, with even important websites carrying long and unassuming URL's like

camia/government/taxes/pay-online

Camians could bookmark these addresses or assign shortcuts, but the URLs themselves were always this long, and website owners, even those working for the Camian government that ran the Internet, could not ask for shorter ones. Thus small websites stood on an equal footing with larger ones and were not forced to use longer domains or subdomains of more established sites.

The other idea was essentially the opposite, and stated that Camia had decided to monopolize the best domain names for itself, meaning that a popular website could just be o or another single-letter address, while less popular websites and foreign (particularly Wamian) sites were accessible only with very long and circuitous URLs, such as running the entire Wamian network through an "international" subdomain of the local network of just one particular Camian border city. Or else running it through their equivalent of wamia.com meaning that Wamians were forced to use a commercial website rather than a government website because their network depended on a Camian backbone.

Neither of these ideas were ever set in stone, however, and it's possible that I would have decided that Wamia and Camia used incompatible URL systems, so that Wamians had access to convenient URLs at least from inside their own network.

I did not know about local hosts when I came up with these ideas, so it didnt occur to me that allowing domains like "o" would make it difficult for Camians to access computers on their local networks.

Wamia's vulnerability

Most of Wamia's network vulnerabilities could have been easily fixed, but were there on purpose. Sometimes Camians would log onto a Wamian website, and type a command such as

make ./intro 'q'

Which would replace the entire website with a single page containing only the letter q. Because Wamians stored their websites as single files, this command would replace the entire website rather than just a single page.

Video games

Video games existed in my early writing. Later on, I decided that Camia was a "business" empire, where even young children chose work over play. But if video games exist in some form, they will be the sort that give the players power over the machine, be very open-ended, and have no "unlockables" or other things that cost additional money to access.

Happy ending

I end the writeup above with a situation where, against the course of history, the Kulapila programmers decide to admit their perversity and release a new OS which performs almost as well as their rival. I know that I carried the story beyond this, and perhaps Lilahaa pulled ahead again, or perhaps the two OS's merged. I don't remember my plans because even this writeup is quite old now and I wanted to end it on a high note.