> Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

> —Alan Kay, from A Conversation with Alan Kay

Mr Kay got every detail of his simile wrong: "The Egyptian pyramids" have a very diverse internal structure, but assuming he's having "the" pyramids in mind, the three big ones on the Giza plateau, those are definitely not built from bricks, but from limestone blocks that weigh one to several tonnes apiece, and much of their inside volume can be assumed to be made from 'rubble' (of a rather coarse variety, basically the leftover material from cutting the slabs out of the quarries) with a little mortar. Their structural integrity is such that four and a half millennia of visitors, weather, earthquakes, tomb robbers and stone-pilfering have not managed to bring them anywhere close to collapse. Brute force you will need for such a project, but closer inspection reveals an incredible amount of planning, preparation and logistics, from precise measurements, millimeter-accurate dressing of uncounted limestone blocks, timely delivery from quarries—some of them hundreds of kilometers up the Nile river—and so on and so forth. Also, it is not known whether slaves were forced to take part in the construction of the pyramids; evidence seems to point to this being an effort more akin to the United State's Apollo program where hundreds of thousands of people worked together to achieve a singular (and some will say: equally vain, symbolic) goal.