19 May
2024
19 May
'24
5:38 p.m.
On May 19, 2024, at 11:14 AM, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> 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. ...
I don't find this very surprising. It's just a special case of the fact that few
young people know much about history. And the fact that they know so little about the
country's history is a far more serious matter than that they know so little about the
history of computing.
That said, I've run into a number of young people who definitely are interested. On
the PLATO system at Cyber1.org there are a number of them. One is a CS professor who
teaches a course about computer games, and has brought the PLATO multi-user games that
date back to the 1970s into that class. Another is a small business tech owner/engineer
who has made himself into one of the world's top experts on the PLATO plasma terminals
-- which are older than he is.
paul