Poignant, thought provoking blog post about what many of us (myself included) look upon as the golden years of technology: The early 80's. Movies like Tron, The Last Starfighter, and even the opening credits of Disney's The Black Hole displayed the then-nascent use of computer graphics as special effects. This deeply moved us geeks, and helped us to find each other through these surprisingly popular movies. Do you remember being blown away by the genesis torpedo simulation in Star Trek II?
Coming of age in the 80s was an amazing experience. Technology was very new, and not very well understood by parents or corporations. As a consequence, they pretty much let us run amok with it, I mean, what harm could it do?
I remember touching my first computer. It was an Apple I that my grade 6 science teacher brought in to class for use to check out. He was an amazing guy, showed me how to use a telescope, showed me how to use a microscope, and let me play with his computer at a time when they were very rare and very expensive. This must have been in '81. He brought it in to school in the guise of using it to compute your caloric intake for the week for a biology lesson, but I knew the truth: he was enamored with the machine and wanted to see us play with it to bring it alive. Like most science that he taught, he wanted us to fall in love with it like he did. And I did.
I remember writing my first line of code. It was the next year ('82), in grade 7. God, that means I've been writing code for almost 25 years. We were the first school in Alberta to get a computer lab, filled with about a dozen Apple IIs. It was your stereotypical '10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"'. I was smitten. I wrote hand-designed graphics scripts of Saturn IV rockets blasting off, text games where you wandered from room to room dying gruesome deaths, and playing games like Lode Runner. We were a tiny band of guys, typically good in math and science, typically into sci-fi and typically socially inept. We were geeks, and here in the lab we could be safe and proud of our geekyness. They even gave us fancy transparent cards that we had to show to be allowed in the lab.
I remember my dad coming home with a Tandy 100 -- the first computer we had in our home. It ran off 6 AA batteries, had a 40 x 8 character screen and ran Basic. But most importantly it had an internal 300 baud modem at a time when most modems used acoustic couplers. This one you jacked right into the wall. We dialed into all sorts of places, including making lots of long distance calls into compuserve to play games and wander around. BBSs were mind-blowing.
Now here I sit, typing this into a laptop with several orders of magnitude more power than that model 100 updating my blog across a broadband internet connection to my home server. In front of me I have my ipod holding thousands of songs. At my side is my trusty blackberry that gives me my email and internet connection just about anywhere - I've updated this blog from a taxi leaving the Vegas airport. I do a job that didn't exist when I first walked into that lab. I manage a heterogeneous agile application development team. I've been flown all the way around the world to deploy globe-spanning corporate networks. I've spoken in front of hundreds of people at conferences about the implications and effective use of technology. Geeks have arrived.
But, damn it, I miss those days. We're victims of our own success. We've matured and matured the technology along with us, but along the way the tech has become commodotized and rationalized. And we geeks have gone down the same path. We've become a part of business culture. Which is a good in some ways, we've helped drive up the efficiency of our companies and provide competitive advantages unheard of 20 years ago. But I've lost something along the way. My innocence, my simple joy of making new things out of the nothingness of code. I've become jaded and a bit burnt out. Is this the world we wanted to create? Where nothing mattered but the meritocracy of our imagination, where we could see past our social limitations? Somehow it got twisted, somehow we sold out... but at least we can feed our families doing some of the things we love. We changed the world, and the world changed us.
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http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/the_tron_effect
