I enjoy learning things from before my time.
When I stop and think about how much history I've seen, I'm kind of in awe.
Then, I think about my grandparents who saw horses change to cars, radio, flight, television, electricity, etc...
I've been closely involved in a field tangentially related to, and tied to, computational advancements. My first use of a programmable computer was in something like 1971. Before that decade was out, I'd use a networked computer.
From there until now... Holy crap! It's been awesome to witness.
I can only imagine, I have often wished I could have seen the birth of the personal computer and the internet(even though I kind of did see that one) I remember being amazed at Timbuktu(remote access software from the 90s) Thinking my god this changes everything and it has. I cannot imagine what I will see before my time is up.
LOL One of my favorite threads on the entire 'net is when VMware first announced, and demoed, their virtual machines.
(Never mind that such had been an element in HPC/mainframes for ages.)
They decried it as impossible, a waste of time, declared they'd just reboot from Windows 95 and select booting to their Linux partition.
My first MODEM (MOdulate and DEModulate) was an acoustic coupler - a cradle modem. It was 300 baud, as I recall. It was a Hayes MODEM and was a few thousand dollars. My computer, with the stuff I had with it, was more expensive than my brand new car was.
I used the "Internet" before it was World Wide or open to the public. It was restricted to academia and government and sure as hell wasn't world-wide. In fact, there were a number of competing networks and they couldn't talk to each other. (Which is how we ended up with HTTP.)
At the same time, you could also dial into other computers - that weren't part of a larger network. There were things like BBSes that we could dial into. Then, there were service providers such as CompuServe but those were like $12/hour to dial into the 1200 baud MODEM pool. You could dial in at like 900 baud and it was only like $4/hour. It was something insane like that.
It has been awesome to witness. I'm sometimes afraid it was a horrible mistake - but that's okay. We're humans. We're harder to extinct than cockroaches. We'll be fine, from a biological viewpoint. Granted, there's some risk that we'll cause our own extinction but we'll probably be okay. Meh... In the end, the universe doesn't actually care.
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