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
