"We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours." John of Salisbury - 1159 On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 1:07 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 09/15/2016 12:24 PM, Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
You have a much better idea of where you are going if you know where you've been. This is why I encourage my kids to explore it in order to obtain a deeper understanding of modern technology.
This is the main reason I'm so strongly interested in old technology.
I started out with PDP-11 systems when they were more or less current; I had no particular affinity for "classic computing" other than the simple fact that, as a teenager, older computers were available more affordably than current ones.
Later, as my professional activities grew, I began to see that there was a lot of wheel reinventing going on around me. I started studying very old books on algorithms for software, and found them to be a treasure trove of fantastic information and techniques that are so fundamental as to be completely timeless, yet most "modern" programmers dismissed them as being "obsolete". They were, of course, fools.
Today, it seems half the people on the planet write software. Many of them are better suited to flipping burgers, and a lot of the stuff they churn out is trash. But back in the 1950s and 1960s, only the very best and brightest had any sort of access to computers. Their relative unavailability and the narrowness of the field were barriers to entry. There were very few drooling morons producing stuff like the mounds of garbage that we see today like "systemd" in the Linux world, or, well, pretty much all of Microsoft Windows.
I believe that understanding the engineering techniques of the past makes me a more effective engineer in the present. I don't take the "passenger" approach that is so popular with today's lazy people. "Let's see where technology takes us!" No thanks, I see where I can take technology. As someone participating in guiding where we're going, I want to understand, as you stated above Dean, where we've been.
One of my favorite quotes, written 110 years ago by Spanish poet George Santayana:
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA