Knitting Doom

I'm knitting Doom, the game.

[knittingdoom]

Well, there's Doom. All 550+ pages. It is more than a ream of paper, printed double sided, full of 1s and 0s.

I haven't figured out how I'm gonna store it yet. While a binder makes some sense, hole punching all of that is daunting and I feel like I would end up destroying them little by little. I might put a few pages at a time in a small binder and tear them out as they're finished. That would make it portable, which is ideal for me, since I commute on the train.

I knew the prep on this project would be significant, but there was a lot I did not consider. I'm excited to get started!

[definitely-not-an-alias]

Can get one or more big giant binders with plastic page-holder dealios that you then put the sheets of paper in. Dunno how best to describe this, but if you go to an office supply store, the folks there can prolly help you out. Wishing you the best on this project.

[knittingdoom]

I love this idea, but I don't have the spoons to put all of those individual pages in those sleeve things right now. Maybe if I get to a point when I'm traveling more with it again and need something more sturdy. Thank you for the suggestion!

[eldritchscholar]

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

[benegesserwitch]

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

[darkersolstice]

@we-are-threadmage

[systlin]

Someone port Doom to a blanket

[rolypolywardrobe]

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

[dollsahoy]

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

[butts-for-days]

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

[costumersupportdept]

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

[synebluetoo]

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level. 

[moiraecrochet]

I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory. Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet. Here are the looms:

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.  Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many:

Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.

[the-fibre-stuff]

I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.

[swords-n-spindles]

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

[commodorebuzzkill]

BUT HAS ANYONE KNITTED DOOM?

[stabbedinthenameofscience]

@commodorebuzzkill, yes, darling, they actually have.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110200-knitting-doom/

And they are also on Tumblr as @knittingdoom.

[knittingdoom]

I am still very early in the project but I’m making slow progress.

Thank you for the tag!

[ankoku-teion]

I demand an update. What does it look like?

[some-bug]

@knittingdoom the people demand and update

[knittingdoom]

Well, I was just talking about this last night. I dropped off of this during the pandemic. I'm not a good knitter yet and it took too much brain power. And then I moved out of state, moved within state, started divorce proceedings, moved out of state, moved within state, and started 6 new jobs in between all that. But now! Now I am ready to get back to it! As soon as I finish some other important, time sensitive projects. In fact, I am *craving* this project. Nothing is as motivating as craving a different project.

This will be a lifelong endeavor. There is over a ream of paper, front and back, of code and I have finished side 1 of page 1 so far. This hellsite will probably be long gone and erased from the memory of all but the stalwart few before I finish it. I will do my best to update it as I resume progress until that day.

[eldritchscholar]

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

[benegesserwitch]

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

[darkersolstice]

@we-are-threadmage

[systlin]

Someone port Doom to a blanket

[rolypolywardrobe]

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

[dollsahoy]

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

[butts-for-days]

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

[costumersupportdept]

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

[synebluetoo]

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level. 

[moiraecrochet]

I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory. Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet. Here are the looms:

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.  Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many:

Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.

[the-fibre-stuff]

I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.

[swords-n-spindles]

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

[commodorebuzzkill]

BUT HAS ANYONE KNITTED DOOM?

[stabbedinthenameofscience]

@commodorebuzzkill, yes, darling, they actually have.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110200-knitting-doom/

And they are also on Tumblr as @knittingdoom.

[knittingdoom]

I am still very early in the project but I'm making slow progress.

Thank you for the tag!

[shinosarna]

Unpopular opinion

“Skyrim runs on everything” meme is just a shitty knockoff of “Doom runs on everything”. But less funny because people DO genuinely actually get Doom running on toasters and ATMs in real life.

All those pictures are 100% real and unedited.

[socialistexan]

Here are some more of my favorites:

And of course, playing Doom inside of Doom

[splodey-goat]

“Skyrim is being ported to X” is funny because the implication that Bethesda is trying to squeeze blood from a stone by somehow convincing you you should buy it a 20th time on a ridiculous device

“Hey I got X to run Doom!” is funny because it’s just how computer science majors be and they actually fucking did it, y’all.

[lesbianralzarek]

capitalism vs passion

[underwaterlookingupatyou]

@knittingdoom

[knittingdoom]

Side 1 of page 1 is done!

[knittingdoom]

There is an imminent snowstorm and we are cozied in on the couch. I with my Doom knit, she with her Switch, and Eowyn between, begging for chocolate chip cookies.

Not pictured, my husband playing his war games.

[knittingdoom]

Best part about this project so far?

"What are you making?"

Doom

[knittingdoom]

One of the things I like about my job is the mindless data entry. It lets me listen to podcasts (Parcast's Serial Killers right now) and craft since I spend a lot of time waiting for webpages to load. I'm over halfway done with side 1 of page 1! I'm also only 2 rows through a 12 row slog of only purl stitches. Hopefully I can get through that before I go home.

[knittingdoom]

A whole 25 rows done!

[knittingdoom]

24 hours in and I've finished 9 whole rows!

Even though I'm only 9 rows in, I can already tell that the texture is going to be really interesting. Gotta say though, I feel like I'm knitting with toothpicks. I know that I'm going to get used to it but my grip is super tight and my right middle finger is sore right now. I do really like that it's such a small project right now. It's easy to carry in my purse during my commute.

[knittingdoom]

I would be massively remiss if I didn't thank the lovely folks on the Doom World forums. They helped me track down the .exe file in binary and also were delightfully supportive and excited (except for Gustavo, who was delightully condescending).

I want to specifically thank DavidN for putting me on to the binary file. I couldn't have started this project so quickly without your help.

I also want to shout out these folks:

Y'all win all of the internets for these comments.

[knittingdoom]

And So It Begins

I have finished my other massive knitting project so I can finally begin Doom!

I'm using size 2 circular needles, mostly because I couldn't find a pair of straight ones that weren't nearly 2 feet long. I'm also using sock yarn. Each row will be 96 stitches wide, 12 groupings of 1 byte or 8 bits. All 1s will be a knit (kn1t if you will) and 0s will be a purl (p0rl). I am so excited to finally get this started.

[knittingdoom]

Well, there's Doom. All 550+ pages. It is more than a ream of paper, printed double sided, full of 1s and 0s.

I haven't figured out how I'm gonna store it yet. While a binder makes some sense, hole punching all of that is daunting and I feel like I would end up destroying them little by little. I might put a few pages at a time in a small binder and tear them out as they're finished. That would make it portable, which is ideal for me, since I commute on the train.

I knew the prep on this project would be significant, but there was a lot I did not consider. I'm excited to get started!

[eldritchscholar]

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

[knittingdoom]

I’m doing it. I’m gonna knit Doom.

I have purchased yarn and needles and I have printed out the .exe file.