19 May
2024
19 May
'24
4:59 p.m.
But, Bill, maybe you did influence at least one student or more when you showed them the
PDP or VAX. Perhaps we don't know who, but we have to keep believing that we are
influencing someone somewhere. The fact that you are 73 (Jon also said he is in his 70s)
and your passion is rock solid is an excellent attestation that those who love computers
are unique and will always do so. We don't need every techie to be involved, only the
passionate ones. Josh is deep into classic computers in his thirties, as he said. Sellam
joined the group in his twenties, thirty years ago. Many of us are of different ages. I
am in my fifty and touched the first computer key on a keyboard in 78. This group maybe
one of the last mailing lists standing about classical computer. To be specific: I saw a
lot of Discord channels on retro computers but they all lack true experienced folks who
actually worked on such machines. I guess the most important thing is for that special
geek out there is to be aware of this distribution and make sure to keep it running
Regards,
Tarek Hoteit
AI Consultant, PhD
+1 360-838-3675
On May 19, 2024, at 09:31, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 5/19/2024 11:14 AM, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk wrote:
A friend of a friend had a birthday gathering.
Everyone there was in their thirties, except for myself, my wife, and our friend. Anyway,
I met a Google engineer, a Microsoft data scientist, an Amazon AWS recruiter (I think she
was a recruiter), and a few others in tech who are friends with the party host. I had
several conversations about computer origins, the early days of computing, its importance
in what we have today, and so on. What I found disappointing and saddening at the same
time is their utmost ignorance about computing history or even early computers. Except for
their recall of the 3.5 floppy or early 2000’s Windows, there was absolutely nothing else
that they were familiar with. That made me wonder if this is a sign that our living
version of classical personal computing, in which many of us here in this group witnessed
the invention of personal computing in the 70s, will stop with our generation. I assume
that the most engaging folks in this newsgroup are in their fifties and beyond. (No
offense to anyone. I am turning fifty myself) I sense that no other generation following
this user group's generation will ever talk about Altairs, CP/M s, PDPs, S100 buses,
Pascal, or anything deemed exciting in computing. Is there hope, or is this the end of the
line for the most exciting era of personal computers? Thoughts?
I'm 73. How do you think I feel. I worked for 25 years in a Computer
Science Department of a University and not only did they not teach any
of the history. They mostly didn't know it themselves anyway. I kept
PDP-11's and Vaxen in the department for the students to see and, if
they wished, use but eventually I was told it was wasting space and
when they moved the department to the new science building there was
no space allocated for anything but the bare minimum of equipment.
bill