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?
Regards,
Tarek Hoteit