[clue] Tonights meeting

[dennisjperkins at comcast.net]

I'm glad I was able to hear him speak last night. He's a very good and interesting speaker. Thank you, Maddog, for your talk yesterday. 

He's a few years older than me, but I remember how computing was. The first Apple II and the TRS-80. Working on tape drives, disk drives and tape controllers at Storage Tech in 1981-1982. Seeing the Cray I (a supercomputer) at Cray Research's headquarters. IBM mainframes. Univac's water-cooled mainframe. Core memory. Loading programs from punch tape. Bubble memory. Seeing my first 5 MB Seagate hard drive and feeling underwhelmed because I was used to 650 MB hard drives for mainframes. I never did see an Altair, but I remember seeing the Commodore Pet, the Sol I, the Osborne, and other computers before the IBM PC came out. Saving programs on cassettes. Entering data via hex keypads or toggle switches. I remember seeing the first Mac and thinking it had too little memory and was overpriced, but that that GUI is going to change things. 

In some ways we've come a long ways since then. But we also reinvented or reimplemented some of the same technology 3 times... VM on mainframes, then minicomputers, then microcomputers. As for the newest toys, smartphones and tablets won't replace desktops; they will supplement them. 




----- Original Message -----
From: "daryl kuchay" <daryl.kuchay at gmail.com> 
To: "CLUE's mailing list" <clue at cluedenver.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2011 10:29:30 PM 
Subject: [clue] Tonights meeting 

Hi All, 


I would like to take a moment to do a 180 from my usual and say something positive. Thank you to John "maddog" Hall and those involved with inviting him in to speak for us. I found his presentation to be one of the more interesting I have seen. 


I came in to computers at the 286 days, took a break and reentered at the release of Windows 95. maddog on the other hand has been involved with the computer industry since 1969. It was very interesting to learn about how the industry worked during that period as well as many of the politics involved. 


This was at the level of intricate details and from a person who managed teams of engineers working on digital unix among other projects that he oversaw. Computers back then took a tractor trailer to move and a 200 ton air conditioning system to keep at proper temperature. He highlighted how software used to be open and an interested person had to build the software on their computer due to a lack of support for the hardware in question. 


One of the more memorable slides he presented from was a statement that he quoted. "Unless one is familiar with history one is doomed to repeat it." I am sure that is not word for word however it is great wisdom. Please take a moment to visit the sponsors page, a project that Mr. Hall is personally involved with: http://www.projectcaua.org/ 


Thanks again, 


Daryl Kuchay 
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