On 4/14/17 11:55 AM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
A lot of people would like to see advanced forms of what we used to call client-server technology do away with the traditional idea of a stand alone personal computer.
Funny for this old guy to read this. In MY generation, the "traditional" idea of computing, was mainframe. The company and the government, owned ALL the computers, all the data, all the programs. Most people were powerless and computer-illiterate, and could not control or access their own data.
"A lot of people" - real people, not corporations - in that era, saw personal computing (even time-share terminals) as a way to gain economic and personal power, access to tools and knowledge, building of communities. MOst 1970's microcomputing was about empowering people and freeing information for personal and small business use. It started from the bottom-up; IBM was late to the game.
Now, who benefits when all the data is "on the server"? And access is limited not just by person, but by content? Not you and I! I'm not ignorant of the power of big algorithms across big data. But I'm not ignorant of my own previous experience, when personal computers enabled so many people to do so many things, for themselves.
And that's *another* reason to preserve 1970's vintage computing. To remember when that was true.
Reminds me of Stardock CEO Brad Wardell telling me that when in 1993 they released the then OS/2 only based game Galactic Civilization and it not only sold a large number of copies but got a lot of people to buy IBM's OS/2 Warp operating system to play it. Enough to get IBM's attention. IBM then paid several game companies to port games to OS/2 to tap the pc game market. IBM never followed through and cancelled or just never released any of the games they contracted for. They just flat out gave up. All OS/2 users got at the time was a beta version of Doom that somehow leaked out. Not much of a big deal as it was the same as the native DOS version which also played already on OS/2's DOS box. Stardock released a few minor games on OS/2 then they moved to Microsoft. Mark