Jim’s Rant For The Day. Pipes and the Deep State – A Walk Down “Memory” Lane.

My first programming was done on IBM and Burroughs mainframe computers. These were the large systems in the glass rooms. They could only run one program at a time. I became the Financial Controller for a company that had just purchased a smaller system that ran Unix operating system. Because of the new language I took a three day seminar on programming it.

The instructor about lost her mind trying to get me to comprehend “pipes” as it was such a radical concept to me. IBM machines were responsible for its entire memory system (tape or hard drive). Thus it could only run a single job at a time. Unix changed this by creating pipes.

To use a file in IBM you had to write out its long name, spelling out all the layers of directories and sub-directories to finally reach that file. This could take two or three lines of valuable code and be devastating if you misspelled it just once out of all the times you referred to it.

Unix made you “declare” pipes at the beginning of your program. It was the long name pointing to the final sub-directory your file(s) resided in. Thereafter you only had to type “pipe1.filename” instead of the three lines of coded address. For some reason I couldn’t visualize this. But here is the beauty of pipes. Once you declared them, you told the computer that you were unconcerned about the rest of the hard drive, thus allowing many other programs to run simultaneously as long as they did not conflict with your pipes. Now we had a small computer with twenty wires running from it to desktop monitors!

So what does all this have to do with the Deep State? In Civics class we were taught that each department of the government had a Secretary leading it, who in turn had deputies, assistant secretaries, group leaders, project managers, etc. to give us a modern Organizational Chart. But now we learn that isn’t so. They have more of a Pipe System. Somehow a pipe drills down deep into an organization and runs a program independent of the earlier flowchart. That program may take orders from the Secretary or may not obey some orders – its independent and oblivious of the other programs, remember?

And that is where Trump is today. He can’t just cut off the head (Rod Rosenstein for starters). Trump must locate all of the pipes, extract all of its personnel and go back to a traditional organizational chart, all while those pipes fight back. My god, what a daunting task!