“The Sifraniyah Code” jumped out at me. “Sifr” or “zifr” is zero in Urdu and Arabic.
So the Zero code?
Turns out “Sifraniyah” has exactly two hits on Google, this article and this listing here on HN.
LLM generated.
hangsi 2 days ago [-]
This is excellent. I wonder how deep the roots of pre-20th century computing systems go. Babbage, Lovelace and the Difference engine are well catalogued, and I have seen a Jaccard loom in a museum with my own eyes.
What comes before this that isn't a history of mathematics, aside from the abacus? If this search is broad enough to include the topic of this article and Luca Pacioli's briefly mentioned double-entry ledgers from Italy, then I can imagine systems from all over the world where commerce flowed or administration ruled: similar systems must have existed in China and India, and I have heard of the Quipu system in the Andes that functioned as a digital storage medium for thousands of years.
How many modern components of information systems are reinventions of past ideas, rather than upgrades?
steve_gh 2 days ago [-]
This is the most interesting thing I have seen on HN in a while. If I could up vote it harder, I would.
TL;DR. Medieval North African merchants had a formal language for encoding and communicating trade instructions and decisions
hillac 11 hours ago [-]
I think the whole thing is a made up ai hallucination. I was suspicious because it sounded llm'ish, and after googling I can't find any other sources on Al-Khatt al-Tujjari or Sifraniyah.
So the Zero code?
Turns out “Sifraniyah” has exactly two hits on Google, this article and this listing here on HN.
LLM generated.
What comes before this that isn't a history of mathematics, aside from the abacus? If this search is broad enough to include the topic of this article and Luca Pacioli's briefly mentioned double-entry ledgers from Italy, then I can imagine systems from all over the world where commerce flowed or administration ruled: similar systems must have existed in China and India, and I have heard of the Quipu system in the Andes that functioned as a digital storage medium for thousands of years.
How many modern components of information systems are reinventions of past ideas, rather than upgrades?
TL;DR. Medieval North African merchants had a formal language for encoding and communicating trade instructions and decisions