I think it might be, there’s no way Anakin would be able to buy proprietary hardware or software. So either he stole it, which his mother probably would not have allowed. Or he was able to scrap all the parts together because there is a template for humanoid protocol droids that we have also seen round Star Wars. And then the software itself either Anakin programed entirely himself, (which I know he’s very smart, but even that seems a stretch) or he forked it. So it would make more sense that there was an open source catalog of protocol droid software. It also would make more sense due to the fact that a lot of people have droids, but they are not all created equal. I would think many of the droids on Coruscant were proprietary, while many of the droids in the outer rim are open source.
There are tons of protocol droids in universe. He cobbled scrap bots together. Clever, but he didn’t invent or program it. More like fancy legos
Sounds like copyright infringement to me
You wouldn’t download a droid.
He’s a slave boy in a scrap yard on some backwater shithole of a planet. Sue him
Hes a slave. Gota sue his owner Quato or whatever his name is.
Can’t sue him as a kid because he has no money to pay you.
Can’t sue him as an adult because he’ll force choke you to death.
What a grift. He got it all figured out.
Look at it from the perspective of 1977 or just before, when the scripts were written. I wasn’t alive back then, but from what you read, it was a time when (real-world) devices came with manuals, schematics, block diagrams, and if they were missing you could probably find them or get them from the manufacturer.
Apple I and II are just hitting the market, with a strong background in DIY culture, and in the unlikely case you had access to one of these (or something like an Altair 8800 etc), you’d probably know how to fix a blown cap with a soldering iron.
Maybe I’m glorifying the past here but, Star Wars was written at a time when things, including computers, were expected to be repairable. So what you’re writing really only makes sense from a contemporary 2020-ies perspective, nobody would have raised an eyebrow at that detail in 1977 … probably.
Hard agree!
Star Wars was explicitly written by a greasemonkey as gritty and grungy in direct contrast to the sleek, clean, computer-controlled future that dominated SF in that era. Droids function much more like custom cars than assembly-line computers with wireless updates.
Even later in our time but earlier in the SW time line, the one example of mass production, the droid army, was comically bad: incredibly dumb, fragile, and incompetent.
Roger Roger
The cannon fodder droids introduced in Phantom Menace are, but the other droids used by the separatists are generally ruthlessly effective.
What’s the design/production philosophy behind those separatist droids? Been a while…
I think the reality is that Anakin was written as a tech wizard by writers that saw a lot of technology as just magic that tech wizards can do.
He was able to build a droid out of spare parts not because there was an open protocol droid system that enables technically inclined people to learn how to build their own custom versions. He built a droid because that’s what a child tech genius would do. How did he program it? More tech magic. He’s impressive, you aren’t supposed to understand anything of what he did, it was just a plot device to show what the chosen one was capable of before the Jedi even found him.
Not trying to be a wet blanket, just so much of technology in media is written this way.
just so much of technology in media is written this way
Especially with star wars, where it’s closer to “space fantasy” than “science fiction”
I mean, obviously I wasn’t a slave on Tattooine, but I was a poor kid in a rural community. I figure Ani learned how to fix droids the same way I learned how to fix bikes and computers; I needed it, and couldn’t afford a new one, so I had to teach myself how to make it work again, or face going hungry.
A lot of it is… well, kind of like figuring out where puzzle pieces are supposed to fit. Eventually, even if you don’t quite know what you’re doing yet, you can kind of guess where something is supposed to go. If you have a known good working model to compare to, and a good manual, you can teach yourself all kinds of things if you really need to do it.
That, and he was owned by Watto. Watto, as an employer (fuck that guy generally, but bear with me), had to teach his employee how to operate equipment. How to catalogue his junk and get it working again so it could be sold. Anakin was a smart kid, but he also literally built and scrapped droids for work. He had hours a day and nearly unlimited broken droids to take apart.
I’ve been accused of wizard shit more than once, and I’m nowhere near the same class as the actual tech wizards. I like to think I know enough to get by and call out bullshit. Honestly, the only gripe I have with how Ani’s technical talent was written is that he was unrealistically young. The rest was pretty believable.
The most relatable bit was forgetting to put 3PO’s eye back in when he powered him on.
Yeah, and I think that’s what they were going for. Just “I programmed this artificial being that feels emotions like happiness, fear, and frustration, has his own wants and desires, and can calculate the odds of arbitrary things on the fly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It feels similar to a kid building a computer out of spare parts (reasonable) and then programming his own OS and software for it (less reasonable).
But, to be fair, maybe it was more of a case of he found modules with those different languages on them and plugged them into a standard but customizable protocol droid program and is referring to that configuration as “programming” rather than the act of writing the software itself. Kinda like how flashing a new ROM onto your bios can be called programming it, despite the lack of coding.
If putting together a droid is anything like putting together a conventional PC, I would assume that he would have the tools for flashing the industry standard software onto a blank droid brain, just like I do with a blank hard drive. Hell no I didn’t write that, I just know the steps for copying it onto storage media so it runs.
In the Legends canon, droid sentience was the accidental result of an improbably successful computer worm. Wiping droids’ memories removes the malware, but it finds its way back eventually.
Yeah, in hindsight, I’m not really sure why I assumed it would be from scratch.
This is the loveliest conversation I have seen all week. I have been incredibly burned out with Reddit of late, so this is refreshing.
Little did we known he used two swimming pools worth of water everytime he translated for r2d2
Just because you can open the can doesn’t mean it comes already open.
That some people can run Linux on a PS5 doesn’t make the PS5 open hardware.my jawa friend says, and i qoute
Ibana Utinni! Togo m’bwa kwa chee kah
Make of that what you will
I’m rusty, but that’s either
“Hey! My hemorrhoids are flaring up”
or
“Hands off! That’s mine”
or
“Always drink your Ovaltine”
When I was a kid and thought about robots I never considered their intelligence would require a massive physical infrastructure just to make the best guess of the next word.
The internet doesn’t exist in SW, so likely things are based on physical modules; so he probably scavenged, repaired, or assembled a physical module that embodies the droid’s mind and everything is more or less hard-coded. And because the internet–and perhaps copyright law–doesn’t exist, he doesn’t need to activate the module with a central server.
I don’t really even think programming is touched on, it’s more just based on electronics. Software isn’t really at thing.
[Edit: I mean, obviously software exists, but it doesn’t function like real software does in the world. Tech is largely based on droids, which are delightfully physical and embodied for a visual medium, and droids are more like artisanly-modified cars than software that can be updated and copied. That is to say, the technology in Star Wars takes a lot more cues from mechanics and electronics than it does from software and programming. It is a markedy and consciously retro type of future (or should I say “past?”).]
They do have the Holonet which seems to be a sort of amalgamation of media including information that can be looked up.
There’s also the coruscant library that can be accessed anywhere by most people for a fee. Most planets also have their own.
It is a universe where DRM tied to a central server is impossible. It is likely the software beyond the OEM is cracked to hell and modified far beyond its original purpose. After all, the Millennium Falcon’s nav computer is repurposed droid software.
You promised me fleeesh! All I feel is paaaain! Why have you done this to me??
about as open as a TV remote smashed on the side of the highway after it’s been run over by around 1000 eighteen wheelers.
We will never know. The prequel trilogy is not canon.
Not canon? Why do you say that?
Have you seen the prequel trilogy
The only canonisation it deserves is being fired out of one
It’s the second best trilogy
