Hearing about the technology from the people who built it, is amazing, and it's an opportunity we won't have much longer in the case of these original systems. The guy who built the first computer game (Space War), and helped restore the PDP/1 on which it runs, presented it on a couple of the occasions when I went there. They have docents that can tell you, with deep personal experience, about the Cray supercomputer, the PDP/1, PDP/8, UNIX, IBM mainframes, etc. But, they're all getting up there in age, and many of the founders of our field have passed away in the past couple of decades.
As for being spoonfed, I don't believe that's true. The depth of knowledge required to truly innovate is much higher than ever. Making the early steps of learning about technology easier doesn't make working with the vastly more complex systems any easier. I feel overwhelmed pretty much every day, when I try to stay ahead of the curve in my field and try to stay at least abreast of what's happening in other fields. Things are moving faster than ever, and it's always going to require being at the front edge of that to actually innovate.
The people building the future today don't have it any easier than the people who built the future we're living in now.
That's not to say we shouldn't teach kids about what came before. I believe the Computer History Museum is really important in that regard. This is the most amazing time in history to be alive, and it's because of the things a few hundred people built 30-50 years ago. I just watched the American Experience film on Silicon Valley (which chronicles the earliest days of the integrated circuit). It's really incredible how far we've come in such a short time. Seeing people who are still alive today telling the stories of the inventions that have re-shaped our entire world in unbelievable ways is inspiring and intimidating.
I concur. I was in college during the 90's and the changes just in the five years I was there was pretty amazing. Several of my EEE roommates were tried and true hackers, cyberpunks and phreakers. The stuff they showed me just blew me away.
So many incredible things happened in the 90's. In just three years, I went from using BBS's, to scanning newsgroups on distant colleges and downloading entire research papers, to seeing the internet in full bloom. It never occurred to me at the time how fast things were changing, or how so many of us were standing at the threshold of a brave new world.
You're not getting old and crotchety, you want the same thing I do. For people to recognize our contributions to what is now completely taken for granted. Even hearing stories from my Dad, I have to tell myself, "And you have to remember, there was no internet, no Google back in the 60's, information got around in a totally different manner." And those stories seem all the more fantastic when you take it into account. To a degree, it's the same with our generation, we saw how information flowed before, and then after the Internet.
I do often get saudade about those times. Such an amazing amazing few decades, and went by so fast.
I get a sense from your post that we're most likely roughly the same age and grew up in very similar circumstances. If you do get around to reading this comment, can I just ask;
Do you feel a sense of marvel at where things have ended up, or disappointment?
Thanks for a good read, as comments go.
Both. But, mostly marvel.
I'd certainly hoped we would have made more progress on health and life extension by now (I started reading about it when I was maybe 15), but the progress that has been made is also wonderful. Hell, we're on the verge of an effective vaccine for malaria. That alone would be a miracle that saves about a million lives each year.
And, I'd hoped space exploration would have gotten further. We seem to have lost vision on that front. The space shuttle was a bad idea, and I think it cost a lot of momentum only now being re-gained.
And, flying cars. Where are the flying cars? I guess electric cars are almost as good. Maybe better in terms of reducing the harm humans do the earth.
Which brings me to the disastrous behavior of humanity toward the environment. I was much more optimistic about humanity's willingness and ability to stave off climate change. We have only accelerated the destruction in my lifetime. That's a serious disappointment.
I also think I'm just now beginning to understand some things about the global economy that aren't so flattering to humanity. My lavish developed-nation lifestyle is built on the suffering of people in poorer nations. My computer, phone, shoes, appliances, clothes, etc. are all made by near-slave labor in horrific conditions. Even if I try to minimize my impact in that regard (and I do), it's impossible not to be part of a pretty horrific system. That's disappointing, and not something I knew to think about (because the access to information needed to begin to understand it wasn't within my reach back then).
It's both amazing and terrible (in the "extreme in extent or degree; intense" sense) to think about. In 1980, that was a pretty impressive piece of machinery, but it was not even in the same league as a smart watch today. But, raw numbers (32k, 1.5MB disks) don't begin to express how different the world we live in today is. At the time this BBS was almost unique. A few thousand people in the entire world used an online messaging system like this. Today about 3 billion people are online somehow, and the majority of people under 30 in the developed world use some sort of online messaging every day. Long distance telephone calls were expensive enough that few people made them more than occasionally. International communication was an extreme rarity except for the richest and most powerful. (And, 12 year old me had to break the law to communicate across the country, using stolen calling cards to call BBSes in other states.)
The 8BBS software, unique and impressive for its time, was positively simplistic by today's standards. The BBS I ran back then operated on a similar system (BASIC plus an assembly communications core) called Color 64, and some little games and tweaks were the first real independent programming I ever did. Thinking back, I'm struck by how simple the system was--I printed out the entire BASIC source code on a small stack of paper, to study it--compared to the codebase I'm working on now (500,000 lines of code spanning four programming languages and 15 years of development).
The world of computing was so small back then, and it is now probably the single most important industry in the world, touching billions of people's lives daily, in both good and bad ways (mostly good). I carry multiple supercomputers with me almost everywhere I go; my phone dwarfs the power of the first dozen, or more, computers I owned. And, equally importantly, it is connected to the world via satellite and cell tower at speeds beyond imagining in 1980. The first modem I used was 300 baud, and I could read the words as they came down the line. Now I can download a 1080p movie in 30 minutes, and when Google Fiber arrives, the same download will be almost instant.
All of this change has happened in my lifetime; heck, I was old enough to participate in BBS culture a few short years after these archives began. And I don't even feel that old. I've got a few grey hairs in my beard, but I'm not a grey beard, yet.
Moore's law predicted (and maybe even drove) the increasing transistor count, but couldn't have predicted the vast difference in what computers would become and where they would reach. 12 year old me wouldn't have believed in the stuff we have today.
It's not jet packs or personal space ships, but it's pretty neat. And, despite the general silliness that seems to pervade our industry lately (so many toy web apps consuming so much effort and brain power and investment), I suspect the general trend is accelerating rather than decelerating. We are constantly on the cusp of revolutionary change, and have been since most of us have been alive.
It was suggested by some in the 19th (and 20th) century that invention had peaked and that it would only be a process of improvement from then on. I suspect people are still suggesting that, or thinking it. I even find myself in that mindset now and then, and I know better.
I know I'm rambling here...but, the history in this archive is fascinating. I probably won't read more than a couple dozen more pages, as I feel vaguely like the best thing I can be doing is getting back to figuring out what the future is going to look like and figuring out how I can best be a part of it. I may not have as many years left ahead of me as I have behind me...it would be easy to let nostalgia win my mental bandwidth.