concurrent.day
AN ALMANAC OF THINGS
DONE AT THE SAME TIME.
oncurrency, the modern programmer's word for two errands at one moment, is in truth the very oldest human habit. The mother stirs the pot and watches the child; the harvester reaps and sings; the foundry- man pours and times; the printer sets and reads; the watchman walks and listens. Every culture, every century, every craft has run its errands in parallel — only the substrate changes. Today the substrate is the central processing unit; yesterday it was the kiln, the loom, the kitchen, the printing-house, the watchtower, the fishing-fleet. This almanac is one issue, dated today, listing many of those errands at once. It is meant to be read in the same spirit it was composed — as a clatter of compositors at deadline, every leaf turning, every column setting, all hands, all hours, all places.
II. The Tide Table
A literal almanac tide-list, but the tides are processes — the things in motion at this very instant. Read across; the row marked NOW is the spring tide.
| Mk. | Process | Begun | Lat. | Concurrent With | Spring | Neap | Remarks |
|---|
Marginalia — on the figure of the tide.
Tide, from Old English tīd, means simply time. Concurrency, then, is the tide of doings: a coast indented by errands, a clock divided by labours. The Victorian almanac printed twelve tides per page; we print twelve processes. Spring tide is the loudest; neap, the quietest. Both run at once.
- Spring tide — loud process, on the rise
- Neap tide — quiet process, on the wane
- Now — this instant, in vermilion
The day, like the sea, has tides. Each row is a doing. Each doing is concurrent with every other doing. The almanac merely lists them.
III. The Wheel of Hours
Twenty-four sectors. Twenty-four crafts. The hands run at your local hour. Before the spread came on, they held at twelve.
IV. The Specimen Sheet
V. The Pattern Book
Twenty-four ornamental traditions, drawn at a single line-weight, on a single paper, in a single ink. Concurrency is not Western, not modern, not new. The substrate is universal.
Colophon
concurrent.day is a single-day broadside — one issue of an almanac about the act of doing many things at once. It was set, by hand, on a Wednesday in April, in cream & press-black with a sparing seven-instance use of vermilion. The display face is Big Shoulders Display, after Renner's geometric Futura of 1927. The body is Jost. The running heads, page-numbers, and table headings are set in IM Fell English SC, after John Fell's 17th-c. punches. The mono is JetBrains Mono Light. The illustration is engraved — flat black line, grey cross-hatch, on aged-cream stock. The argument: concurrency is not a software invention; it is a printing invention, perfected in the high Victorian era and merely rediscovered by computers. Every culture has always done many things at once; the substrate alone has changed.
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