Why Kittler is Wrong

I strongly disagree with Kittler's argument that software doesn't exist without its hardware counterpart. Programming has existed since before hardware to run it on has (consider the mathematician Ada Lovelace, known as the 'first programmer'.) I argue that computer programs are simply a completely logical description of an algorithm, or a set of tasks. A piece of software written to be executed on computer hardware could just as easily be followed by a human. The fact that the 'tower of languages' exists and 'hides information' from users is inconsequential-- code can be written, interpreted, and by humans at any of the 'levels'. I will give examples of averaging three numbers in both assembly language and Java (Assembly is all the way at the bottom of the tower and Java is way up high):

Assembly Example for Averaging 3 Integers

         .data
avg:     .word    #integer average
i1:      .word 20 # first input
i2:      .word 13 # second input
i3:      .word 10 # third input
num      =     3  # nb of nums

         .text
__start: 
lw $s1,i1
lw $s2,i2
lw $s3,i3
add $s0,$s1,$s2
add $s0,$s0,$s3
div $s0,$s0,num
sw $s0,avg
done

Java Example for Averaging 3 Integers

public class AveragingNumbers
{ 
     public static void main(String [] args)
     {
          double average = (20 + 13 + 10)/3;
     }
}

Whether or not you understood these examples doesn't matter -- you could learn how to read and execute these simple programs in your mind in 15 minutes.

So then if a human can read and execute the instructions given above, then why doesn't the software exist?

Florian Cramer has perhaps a more elegant (though very much related) argument against Kittler's:

The Perl code of the Dada poem can be read and executed even without running it on machines. So my argument is quite contrary to Friedrich Kittler's media theory according to which there is either no software at all or at least no software without the hardware it runs on:4 If any algorithm can be executed mentally, as it was common before computers were invented, then of course software can exist and run without hardware. - A good example are programming handbooks. Although they chiefly consist of printed computer code, this code gets rarely ever executed on machines, but provides examples which readers follow intellectually, following the code listings step by step and computing them in their minds.

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