Hi Borsky - as ever Wikipedia will tell you more than you probably want to know about Hex.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(Discworld)

Hex has its origins in a device that briefly appeared in Soul Music, created by Ponder Stibbons and some student Wizards in the High Energy Magic building. In this form it was simply a complex network of glass tubes, containing ants. The wizards could then use punch cards to control which tubes the ants could crawl through, enabling it to perform simple mathematical functions.

By the time of the novel, Interesting Times, Hex had become a lot more complex, and was constantly reinventing itself. Part of it is now clockwork, which interfaces with the ant-farm via a paternoster the ants can ride on that turns a significant cogwheel. Its main purposes were to analyse spells, to see if there were simpler "meta-spells" underlying them, and to help Stibbons with his study of "invisible writings", by running the spells used to bring the writings into existence (these spells must be cast rapidly, and each one can only be used once before the universe notices they shouldn't work). In other words, data compression and information retrieval.

In Hogfather Hex contained several things that nobody remembered installing, and was asking about electricity. It was at around this time that the wizards become concerned that it may be trying to become something they didn't understand.

By The Science of Discworld Hex was capable of "once and future computing"; increasing its abilities simply by deducing that the required processing power would exist eventually. Presumably this requires a high expenditure of magic, as it has not been mentioned again (at the time, there was a massive excess of magic available due to a near catastrophic overload of the university's experimental thaumic reactor). This virtual memory appeared as translucent silver towers superimposed onto the real Hex. Hex was sufficiently intelligent by this time not to tell the wizards what it was doing, in case it worried them.

I keep trying to read and post over there but it just refuses to load.

I gained so much from those years at the MLA but a part of me keeps saying that those days are behind me and it feels like this latest upgrade just reinforces that. My Mind's just not interested in words these days either. I start writing only to find it impossible to squeeze recent experiences and thoughts into english.

Anyway, hi to all my favorite people on the planet!