
The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing - daddy_drank
https://medium.com/message/networks-without-networks-7644933a3100/
======
japhyr
My dad passed away three years ago. He began his career in the 60's and 70's,
programming on punch cards. I remember him taking my brother and I to his
cubicle at DEC in the 70's, letting us play a space invaders clone on a
terminal. He taught me to program at 5 or 6 years old; I'll always remember my
parents playing a simple number-guessing game I wrote in BASIC.

When my dad passed away, I went through his computer to help my mom figure out
what to do with it. I say it was to help my mom, but really it was one last
conversation about computers with my dad. I pored over the projects he was
working on, and the books he had open on his desk. I remember thinking that
this was the last language he'd use, the last modern framework he'd be working
with. I remember feeling sad that no one would get to use this last project he
was building.

So I see the old OS's popping up in the virtual machines described in the
article, and all I can see is my dad. It starts to feel like grief, but then
that feeling mixes with appreciation for everything my dad shared with me over
the years. I didn't go into programming professionally out of college, but my
dad's passing is pulling me back into it. I wish for one more day's
conversation with him, to share what I'm doing these days.

We all love programming for many reasons, but at the end of the day it's
really about how our work with computers and programming brings us into close
circles with some of the best people we'll know.

~~~
kingrolo
I can relate to this. My Dad loved computer hardware. He grew up in Mauritius
with not much, and I think the concept of getting rid of things which weren't
broken was alien to him.

He lived alone, and when he passed away a couple of years ago I went through
the process of clearing his house and I really got to see the extent of it.
Two BBCs, two Amigas, a ZX81, a dragon32 and it seemed like every floppy disk
from my childhood. So much of it reignited memories I didn't realise were
still in there. Old floppy disks with my handwriting on, some for games which
I recognised from the disk even if I didn't remember the title, 3.5 inch
floppies with a hole punched in the corner to make them high density
(remembers that?)

Despite always trying to encourage him to clean up his house I was so glad he
kept it all. This time I took lots of pictures, donated the computers to a
charity who takes old one, and most of the floppies are now in my loft. I tell
myself I'll look through them at some imaginary point in the future. I also
recovered over 40 hard disks from the various PCs in different states of
repair. I went through about half soon after he died, and will go on with more
of them when I feel the need. Like you say, it feels a bit like checking in
with him.

I must have been 5 or 6 years old and I vividly remember staring as a screen
of BASIC of some sort on a computer he'd brought home from a car boot sale or
somewhere. I was trying to figure out how to assign a number to a variable. B
= 1. Got that. B is now 1. But how do I add one to it? B + 1? Hmmmm, why
doesn't B change? etc etc. I went straight from school to code, and I have no
idea what I'd be doing now if it wasn't for having computers around as a kid.

It makes me think about the footprint I'd leave for my kids to discover now.
It'd be pretty much all digital, but with storage being so plentiful these
days, and with gmail's archive and things like Dropbox and cloud storage,
you'd think it would stretch right back to their birth. I'm not deleting
emails which I think might one day tell something about who I am, and am
dumping the occasional thing in a Dropbox dir, so if I got hit by a bus
there's be plenty of info to tell my kids about me.

~~~
JadeNB
> I tell myself I'll look through them at some imaginary point in the future.

I'm sure you already know this, but, if you're serious about looking through
them, please don't wait! I found an old cache of floppies myself a while back,
and looked forward to a nostalgic stroll through their contents, but after
less than 10 years almost half the content was corrupted.

It probably won't make a huge difference after all this time anyway, but
please at least archive to a more durable medium while you wait!

(Of course, maybe I've missed the point and just the pleasure of having them
is worth more than any data you might get off them—in which case, don't mind
me.)

~~~
kingrolo
Good point - it did cross my mind but not sure why I didn't think about it
recently. Thanks.

------
kraig911
This really got to me and made me want to make an account just to comment that
I am finding myself doing the same. I run the same old SNES emulator of
FFVI(FF3) on SNES to play a hacked saved rom file I made to try and feel that
energy I felt when I was just a boy with my best friend. Now I'm just a man
that is caught up in habits of telling my wife I love her and pays the bills
and all.

I feel no amount of planning an getaway vacation or getting a great project at
work etc can bring me back that feeling of just kicking back with my friend
jacking around with HIMEM.SYS to play Falcon 3.0 while we waited for duck
tales to come on...

I miss you Nick - I wish you never found that gun.

~~~
morganvachon
This tears at me. I lost my little brother to suicide just over nine years
ago. We grew up in the late 80s/early 90s playing NES/SNES and Genesis games
together. He was always the more competitive one, kicking my ass at fighting
games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, and beating me to the ending of
Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior titles by several weeks. He was always the
jokester, the "Loki" of our gang of friends, and he would make up silly or
perverted names for RPG characters whenever possible.

Later, after he got home from serving six years in the Air Force, he would
still come by my place and want to play Final Fantasy VII and Soul Calibur
together. Those were some of our strongest bonding periods in all those years
of dealing with opposite personalities. We never got along one hundred percent
of the time, but we loved each other the way all brothers should just the
same, and enjoyed that time spent on our favorite pastime.

We still don't know why he took is life; he never left a note or any clues
that anything was wrong. But he left a hole in our hearts that will never be
filled.

~~~
kraig911
I'm sorry to hear about your brother. My relationship with my brother should
be better - I should work on it.

As for Nick - In the summer before starting high school we were playing with
some other friends and he found his dad's handgun. He thought it wasn't
loaded.

I think if it hadn't happened I'd be working in the oil field like the rest of
my classmates. When that happened I was very reclusive in high school. Never
went to prom, dropped out of band. After writing all this though it made me
realize I should appreciate the now moreso than live in my mind's past.

~~~
morganvachon
You always think you have enough time. "I'll call him next week." "I'll drop
in and see them next month." After he died, my sister and I drew closer for a
while, then spent a few years barely talking. Today we work for the same small
business and I get to see her every day, and for that I'm thankful. We've
grown a lot closer as a result, and that is a precious thing that can't be
measured or quantified.

Seriously, call your brother. Today. Right now. I don't know the nature of
your relationship with him, but I have a feeling that even if he acts awkward
or annoyed by it, deep down he'll realize that you took a moment out of your
day just to think about him.

------
jackgill
The writing in this post is superb. One of my favorite lines:

"Windows is the Superbowl Halftime Show of operating systems. Given what
everyone got paid, and how many people were involved, you’d think it would be
a lot more memorable."

As someone who spends a lot of time with Windows...yeah. But the post is
really an amazing blend of technology and sentiment, kind of reminiscent of
Neal Stephenson at his best. Makes me want to dust off my PDP-11 emulator and
take another crack at Unix V6.

~~~
hollerith
My favorite paragraph, about LISP machines:

>It is a very weird experience. It feels like a machine for monks or nuns.
Baffling. But there is this weird sense of raw power . . .

~~~
fsck--off
The author deliberately used the term "LISP Machine", with all of the letters
of Lisp capitalized, but that's an anachronism (and a fairly good shibboleth).
When they were developed they ran Lisp Machine Lisp, not LISP. And as far as I
know they never used the specific appellation "LISP Machines", where the word
Lisp was written in all capitals but the word machines was not.

Edit: It's hard to distinguish someone's tone on the internet, but I did not
intend to be captious or mean spirited. My point is that there are enough
differences between LISP and Lisp Machine Lisp, a descendent of Maclisp, that
the two are not interchangeable.

~~~
lispm
I have a printed Lisp Machine Manual from 1981. It's always Lisp, never LISP.
Also: Zetalisp.

Only the frontpage says:

LISP

CHINE

NUAL

------
Yhippa
This is one of the best pieces of literature I've read in a long time.

I have had a relationship with computing like many of the commenters here. I
remember our kindergarten teacher letting us take turns grounding ourselves
under the keyboard of an Apple IIe. I can't explain it but I could tell from
that moment that I had a thing for computing technology.

I remember playing games at a friend's house on an IBM PC. Her dad worked
there and we would just mess around and had no idea what we were doing in the
game. I just loved interacting with the thing.

I remember long nights playing games on my cousin's C64. Playing Archon and
some racing game. Doing basic programming.

I begged my parents for a computer and we eventually got one in 1993. It cost
around $2,000 back then and was 33 MHz, had 8 MB RAM, and had a 207 MB hard
drive. No sound card, CD ROM, or printer at the time. Game over from that
point on. I knew I had to do something in computing technology for a living.

Things seem so figured out these days. I wonder if kids get that same feeling
of novelty we got back then?

~~~
krupan
"I wonder if kids get that same feeling of novelty we got back then?"

My question exactly. My son recently saved up his lawnmowing money and bought
himself a couple-year old HTC phone. We put cyanogenmod on it and he's
figuring out which games will run on it and how to extend the battery life and
I think, maybe, he's having a similar sort of experience. I don't know though,
it doesn't seem the same as sharing floppy disks, playing Trade Wars on the
local BBS, and installing your first Soundblaster.

~~~
j_horvat
I'd tend to agree with you, I don't think its the same. I'm in university for
SEng right now and my father has been in IT since before I was born (in 93).
I've been surrounded by technology my whole life, but instead of Amigas and
Apple IIs it was Windows 95 on some nameless, beige machine.

I have fond memories of learning how to interact with the family PC but
nothing close to what I read about the original days when home computing and
hacker culture was growing. It makes me envious to a degree, like I love
programming and all that comes with it but when I read pieces like this that
evoke so much fond emotion attached to the skill...I don't know...its a little
foreign. To me programming and computing in general is this thing that I am
good at, that brings me happiness because I like to solve problems but to
people like the author it seems like something more. A dear loved one that
will always warm their heart.

I'm not sure it will ever be the same as it was back then, to be a pioneer...

------
paraschopra
Wow. This article is incredibly beautiful. I can't think of any other word but
beautiful to describe it.

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, especially in technology because the industry
moves so fast that all the effort seems ephemeral. But it's there. It's there
in old floppys, CDs, hard disk and memories. Remember that 33 kbps modem you
used to connect your Windows 95 to the Internet and that weird sound it made?
Well someone invested their time in building that and probably they had an
incredibly good time doing that.

This article also resonated with me because of its recurring, underlying theme
of sharing. The open source community is a living, breathing example of that
the inherent, unstoppable need for humans to share isn't going away.
Capitalism has its way of affecting thinking and motives of many passionate
people (admittedly, including me), but I'm glad there are people who value and
celebrate sharing.

Thanks for this article. Really felt very happy reading it! Sharing with my
entire team.

------
cowabunga
I worry about my father in this respect. He's getting on a bit and has been in
and out of hospital with heart problems for about a decade now. He also has
about 1TiB of crap on a NAS that I'm going to have to go through. Most of this
is recent but there are thousands of files going back to TRS80 and early MSDOS
systems, through 25 years of windows. All of this is code, mostly in BASIC and
C. Everything he's ever done he has kept.

I'm just as bad really but I've kept it down to a mere 18Gb and it spans back
to my first serious programs on Acorn RISCOS in BASIC and ARM assembly. I
still fire up and emulator and fix bugs in them occasionally. They are still
useful despite being old.

Nostalgia is painful sometimes however as not all those files are readable and
perfectly preserved.

------
ctdonath
One of the great instances of this (made the rounds, google "xbox ghost dad"):

 _Well, when i was 4, my dad bought a trusty XBox. you know, the first,
ruggedy, blocky one from 2001. we had tons and tons and tons of fun playing
all kinds of games together - until he died, when i was just 6.

i couldnt touch that console for 10 years.

but once i did, i noticed something.

we used to play a racing game, Rally Sports Challenge. actually pretty awesome
for the time it came.

and once i started meddling around... i found a GHOST.

literaly.

you know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded
as a ghost driver? yep, you guessed it - his ghost still rolls around the
track today.

and so i played and played, and played, untill i was almost able to beat the
ghost. until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and...

i stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldnt delete
it. Bliss._

------
bshimmin
I've loved Paul Ford's writing for a long time now.

"If we do not have children, we will move somewhere where there is a porch.
The children who need love will find the porch. They will know how to find it.
We will be as much parents as we want to be."

I'm sorry, I think I have something in my eye...

This piece of his is also incredibly beautiful and moving:
[http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-age-of-
mechanical-...](http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-age-of-mechanical-
reproduction)

------
JohnBooty
I do this by watching YouTube longplay videos of games I've never played, for
systems I never owned. Games for "exotic" Japan like the Sharp X68000 and the
FM Towns that we never got over here.

I'm always trying (and occasionally succeeding) to recapture that feeling of
catching a glimpse of some amazing thing in a game magazine. The _wanting and
imagining_ was always better than the thing itself, which is probably why I
generally seem to prefer watching screencapped videos of the games to actually
playing them.

------
johnloeber
This article was simply superb. So much emotional, human depth. How
interesting: I think Paul Ford was scraping at some real, deep aspects of what
it means to be human... in a piece that is at least superficially about
computers.

------
gegenschall
Something that I really enjoyed doing as a child was typing around on an old
Sharp PC-1401 [0] calculator. To be honest, I completely forgot about that
"machine" until I read this article. Heck, I didn't even google for it in
15-20 years.

The amazing thing about it was, that I had BASIC and so I taught (with the
help of my dad) myself to write easy games on it (you know: Guess the number
and such). I just right _now_ discovered that the thing has an RS-232
interface and you could use PEEK, POKE and CALL. Oh my, the missed
opportunities; But hey I was just to young at that time.

I think I know what I'll do, when I get home for christmas: Grab that PC 1401
and try out the RS-232 to see what's possible. Good times.

[0]
[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1401](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1401)

~~~
jacquesm
I have one of these (it was my first computer too, as in the first one that I
owned) and stuck a couple of batteries in it some months ago. It immediately
booted up, I was quite surprised that it had survived 3+ decades in storage
without any trouble at all. The weak point in old hardware is capacitors and
my guess is that because it is battery powered and has no need for much power
stabilization that all the caps in there are either small or non-electrolytic.
Props to Sharp for building an extremely rugged product, I don't have any
other hardware from that age but everything I bought after that has died by
now.

This may come in handy:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/48707750/sharp-
pc-1401-manual](http://www.scribd.com/doc/48707750/sharp-pc-1401-manual)

------
kator
My ex-wife of 21 years passed recently and we've been going through the
remains of a life. She was a programmer at Rockwell working on Shuttle Systems
when I met her. We married and had three beautiful children. Over the years
technology has woven itself into our lives and when she passed I was handed
piles of floppy disks, CD-ROM's and even account info for the MMO she was
playing.

I've often joked about Digital Archaeology[1] to my kids, told them they'd
have to get a masters degree in it to review all the digital cruft I will
leave behind. I thought this was all good and fun until she passed, and wading
through all this stuff just tears at me. This trail of floppies, some I
couldn't recover all of, some blank but I could see files that were deleted in
hex dumps of the raw images. It was all very surreal like looking at old
photographs of our life together but much more visceral for some reason. It’s
like digital items don’t have dust on them, they look exactly like they did
when you made them 30 years ago. You don’t boot an old floppy and see a fuzzy
or yellowed and crinkled screen. It’s perfect in every detail, like the second
it was last booted.

Logging into her MMO account and seeing the toons she was playing when the
cancer started to take over her brain just killed me. I knew how much she
loved these games both of us were gamers over the years and she loved to level
to the end game and join guilds, run raids.. To be the center of attention in
her online world. We deleted the toons, figured it was the closest thing to
reality, she was gone now her digital form was gone, nobody would login and
play those characters ever again and no need to make others wonder where she
was. She had a large list on-line social network outside of Facebook, guilds
in all sorts of games where she was a central figure. Her passing is known to
us and those who where on Facebook, but out there somewhere is someone who she
touched who’s wondering why she’s not logged into the game for a couple
months.

How strange “Death” is in a digital age, sure our minds might stop working and
our bodies no longer function but the perfect lines we drew in the digital
sand continue on forever.. Or at least until a floppy finally gives up that
final bit, or a hard disk somewhere crashes. As our digital world evolves into
a place where bits really can live forever these thin digital lines left
behind will remain forever etched in the digital world.

I often wonder what will happen to the petabyte that will be my digital impact
when I go, will some AI some day in the future consume it in a matter of
minutes and derive anything of value? Or will it just sit silently being
copied from one storage medium to another forever without anyone thinking
about why and what is in it?

Many years ago a customer of mine did a storage assessment and they realized
it was cheaper to buy more disks then to ask all their employees to delete
unused files.

I knew then the digital lines would go on forever, being copied from one
storage system to another because it’s just cheaper to keep it...

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Archaeology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Archaeology)

~~~
ANTSANTS
I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm not sure you did the right thing with her MMO
accounts. Even if I've never met them IRL and probably never will, if one of
my gamer friends died, I'd sure as hell want to know. I still find catch
myself thinking of some of the people I've met online years after I lost
contact with them, and would appreciate the closure that you don't always get
in the pseudonymous gaming world.

~~~
kator
It was her wish before she left us.

~~~
ANTSANTS
Oh, my apologies then.

------
patcon
Holy f*ck, that article was so much more than I was expecting, and it just
kept getting better. I can't believe I almost passed it by. I'm still
digesting it...

------
vanadium
What a fantastic read; I can relate to going back and trying to relive that
sense of wonder in a certain place or time, whether it be retrogaming or
booting up MS-DOS 3.3 and System 7.5 after my wife and child have gone to
sleep. It comes back, if somewhat fleeting; I message my brother to talk about
how much fun it was in those days, or to try and drive back a memory or two on
how to do something I've forgotten.

So, so very relatable. Thank you for this. Now I want to figure out where I
put my old archived BBS, unpack it, and take it for a spin in the dark.

~~~
salgernon
textfiles.org is your friend here too, and I really enjoyed his (Jason
Scott's) bbs and "get lamp"!documentaries.

[edit: url. Just in the window!]

~~~
voltagex_
I think that should be textfiles.org but I fear your edit window is gone.

~~~
krallja
No, it's not textfiles.org.

~~~
salgernon
So embarrassing. It is in fact textfiles.com. Sigh. Sorry all.

------
paublyrne
I read something over breakfast that affects my emotions for the rest of the
day.

I am also a recidivistic emulator. Sometimes a Super Nintendo. Others an Amiga
600, like the one I got for my 10th birthday.

I do it because I miss the games, maybe.

Or maybe I do it because I miss being 10.

------
ddingus
I really enjoyed both the writing and perspective in the piece.

Well done.

I have an Apple //e on my home work desk. It's running nicely, and it has a
spiffy card that allows me to plug a USB flash drive in, boot from an image
file on it, and reenter the first real computing world I started with.

Prior to the Apple, I got to flirt with a TRS-80 Model 1 a neighbor owned.
Writing a few BASIC statements and actually having the machine respond was
intoxicating for me. Loved it, and I knew right there and then I would be
doing things with and on computers.

The Apple //e machine represents a whole lot of that early discovery time we
all are thinking about. It was open, had a monitor, mini-assembler, reasonable
BASIC, and, and, and...

I got bootstrapped onto computing and the magic of assembly language on that
machine. And there were others, but that one really was the first. The friends
I made, stuff we did, things we learned were like magic. I miss it all.

So, I boot that machine every so often. Really, I always just want to know if
it still works. Then, I decide I want to write, play, code, and I do.

When I write, I can do it on that excellent keyboard, with the machine and
it's memorable feel. The whole thing takes me back in time, and I do remember.
And then I can get it back onto a modern machine with that same USB stick and
wonder at such a gap, still being useful.

I was moved by the idea of keeping in touch with the little kid part. Yes. I
have a great memory of my childhood, and can tell you many events, times,
places, things, people. To be honest, I draw on it an awful lot. Sometimes
it's to realize new perspectives for what they are, not as they are framed up,
or colored to be. Other times, it's to remember that spark of interest and the
drive to learn and explore.

Play. That too.

I love these machines and I love all the people I've come to know related to
them. To me, I can understand a lot about somebody when we share a computing
experience, be it retro, modern, or maybe something of a hybrid, like
embedded.

@japhyr, I don't do it professionally either. Though I have done a few
projects, drivers and problem solving. As you are aware, it's a bug that bites
deep. Doesn't let go. Have fun. Remember. Your Dad would be happy with you
doing just those things.

------
ChuckMcM
Perfect. Man that touched a lot of emotions in me, from fondness to anger to
frustration to depression to envy and back again. And I had no idea Jim Kent
was a force in the genomics world. I just remember all sorts of crazy things
we would do with Animator and my kids.

------
narrator
A while back I booted up an Apple II emulator and got in to Bard's Tale for a
bit. I used to play that game for days and days during lonely boring summers
during my misspent youth. While playing it I remembered, if just for an
instant, what it was like to be that age. The world seemed so vast and
mysterious and complcated at that age.

------
hanasu
I found this really moving. It brings me back to pilfering discarded computers
from a scrap metal company and bringing them back home like I had found the
Ark of the Covenant. When I chose Red Hat as a science fair project. My jigsaw
puzzles were motherboards and drive jumpers. My Walter Cronkite was Leo
Laporte. I wish I could go back and figure out for the first time again that
to keep playing in Oregon Trail on the Apple //e in 4th grade all you had to
do was flip the disk over and put it back in. I never thought the world could
be faster than an ISDN line.

------
voltagex_
I think I've been into retro computing since the first time I was able to run
ZSNES on a Pentium 133.

Does anyone think that some "retro programming" tutorials would be of any
interest?

~~~
gohrt
Yes.
[http://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/](http://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/)

~~~
voltagex_
That's very cool, thanks.

------
zhx
I bought an Amiga 500 six or seven years ago from that guy singing the theme
song. He's a pariah in the Commodore community, but I gotta admit he had a
pretty cool garage.

------
stevenjohns
I don't want to sound redundant by repeating what everyone else has said but I
just have to: that was a really great read. If you are after a good
20-something minute read, this is it. Stirred up all sorts of emotions and
memories.

------
mturmon
Beautiful piece. It jumps around, hitting my memory like chimes. Such
wonderful writing.

------
organsnyder
I recently acquired a complete Tandy 1000 TX system (from circa 1987),
identical to the first system I used regularly as a kid (we had a Sanyo
computer before it, but I hardly remember that one). My dad passed away in
2007, and this system definitely reminds me of him (along with my childhood in
general). I remember playing various games on it with him, especially Monkey
Island. I also remember him playing Leisure Suit Larry, but—for reasons that
didn't become clear to me until much later—he never let me play that game with
him.<g>

I found a copy of Reader Rabbit at a thrift store, and my 3-year-old son has
enjoyed playing it on the Tandy. While I'm certainly not going to deny him
access to the progress we've made in technology and education over the past
three decades, I think that there is something about the simplicity of that
machine that is valuable.

------
jacquesm
The Amiga still refuses to die. It's like the old man in Beau Geste, still
hanging on. Some computers will always have their fans.

~~~
vidarh
Part of it is because modern day computers seems so... uninspired. And time
after time we also see the mainstream reinvent what the Amiga had 25 years
ago. Yet there are still missing bits for us in modern computing. And because
the community has diversified. Some just loves the classic systems. Some care
about the elegance of the hardware. Some loves the OS and user experience, and
want to reproduce it on newer systems (e.g. AROS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4)

I'm currently trying to "reintroduce" AmigaOS into my life via AROS (AROS is
an open source AmigaOS re-implementation). There are challenges - while there
are lots of features in it I miss dearly, there are also so many things I have
come to expect from Linux that is not there. So I'm taking the approach of
running AROS in a docker container, let it mount my home directory, and bring
it up on its own work space, so I can work on filling gaps in AROS to let me
spend more and more time in it. I don't necessarily see myself using it 100%
of the time, but thankfully a combination of a decent window manager,
workspaces and docker makes it trivial to get an environment where I can mix
and match AROS with Linux.

~~~
jacquesm
The full-circle feeling is hitting me hard whenever someone makes a simple JS
program that shows a rotating cube in the browser and everybody falls off
their chairs that this is possible.

The only thing that has really changed is how we consume media (movies, music,
news, books and so on) and how software is delivered. For all the rest of it
we could be back in 1987 dialing into some video text service but with better
graphics. 1200/75 Looks so much faster than 180/20 anyway.

The real net revolution is still waiting somewhere in the wings, when it hits
we'll be remembering the days before it on the web as the pre-history and some
kind of distraction from making real progress for more than two decades.

Roads have interesting properties, they enable all kinds of activities that
were previously impossible because each and every idea started with 'first we
have to build these roads'. Pretty soon we'll have multiple megabits upstream
from just about every locality for a relatively low cost.

IPv6 will re-establish the peer to peer nature of the net and will (hopefully)
get rid of the biggest stumbling block to launch the next level of
application: the NAT (the biggest kludge on the net aka a poor mans firewall).

~~~
eric_bullington
>IPv6 will re-establish the peer to peer nature of the net and will
(hopefully) get rid of the biggest stumbling block to launch the next level of
application: the NAT (the biggest kludge on the net aka a poor mans firewall).

We can hope. But I'm not optimistic. Legacy kludges like NAT have a habit of
sticking around for a long, long time. And ISP have come to rely on NAT
basically -- like you say -- as a firewall for their less technically-inclined
customers.

It's too bad, IPv6 could have opened up a world of p2p apps.

------
tacoman
This caused me to reminisce about all the software that I've worked on and
used. The vast majority of it is gone and completely irrelevant.

------
robarr
My mother died many years ago, and at That time I had An Atari st. In the
years that followed, macs, amigas, pc's became my computers. But all along the
way emulators were the way to go back to the first years of my life when my
parents bought my first Sinclair zx81, my Vic 20, my Commodore 64. I feel you.

------
notlisted
Beautiful, especially the last part[1]. My youth started with a ZX-81 (10
print "notlisted"; 20 goto 10;), followed by a Vic 20 (poke poke), a Commodore
64 (6502 ASM, Pascal, C), Amiga (that demo scene! video toaster), a Silicon
Graphics Indigo (rayshading) and various PCs, a NeXT, a few Suns, more PC-
based (gaming) rigs, and somehow I've ended up with a Mac (Mini!) and various
tablets.

[1] "Such a strange way to say goodbye. So here I am. Imaginary disks whirring
and screens blinking as I visit my old haunts. Wandering through lost computer
worlds for an hour or two, taking screenshots like a tourist. Shutting one
virtual machine down with a sigh, then starting up another one. But while
these machines run, I am a kid. A boy on a porch, back among his friends."

------
mwcampbell
The author's statements about Windows bother me:

> It changed the world economy by being all things to all people.

...

> That said: Windows is the Superbowl Halftime Show of operating systems.
> Given what everyone got paid, and how many people were involved, you’d think
> it would be a lot more memorable.

What more did the author want? Getting pretty damn close to being all things
to all people is quite an impressive feat. I'm reminded of the classic blog
post "How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?" by
Eric Lippert:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/how-m...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/how-
many-microsoft-employees-does-it-take-to-change-a-lightbulb.aspx)

In particular, this summary:

> Getting software right -- by, among other things, ensuring that a legally
> blind Catalan-speaking Spaniard can easily use the feature without worrying
> about introducing a new security vulnerability -- is rather expensive!

Things like internationalization and accessibility really matter.

And this brings me to the real head-scratcher from the OP:

> You can no longer be all things to all people when it comes to computers,
> but Microsoft keeps trying.

Presumably this is a dig at the poorly executed attempt to target both
desktops and tablets in Windows 8. But Microsoft might actually pull it off in
Windows 10. More worrisome to me, though, is the implication that the level of
universality achieved by Windows is no longer worth pursuing in software
development. If that attitude prevails among developers of software that is
used in business or education, then pity the aforementioned hypothetical
legally blind Catalan-speaking Spaniard who needs to use a particular
application to do her job or complete some coursework.

It may not literally be possible to be all things to all people. But Windows
has shown us that a piece of software can get pretty close. And I say it's
still a worthy goal.

------
bch
The cadence of this reminds me of William Gibsons Agrippa.

------
lukeh
Wow. A really beautiful article.

------
robarr
At the time my mother died, many years ago, I used to have an Atari mega st.
In the years that followed, amigas, macs, pc's became my computers. But all
along the way emulators were the way to go back to those firsts years when my
parents bought me my first Sinclair zx81, my Vic 20, my Commodore 64. I feel
you.

------
nsxwolf
So... Anybody else cry?

~~~
krupan
Yes

------
ribs
I have a couple of boxes of 5.25-inch floppies! formatted for the Apple ][.
I've kept them since I had one. Mostly for their aroma; it's capable of
evoking memories that nothing else can. Still, from time to time I feel like
booting one. Maybe I'll try sometime soon.

~~~
wlesieutre
Smell is an interesting sense that way. I was just back in my college
engineering building at an industry event, and it has such a distinctive
smell. I'd never be able to describe it, but it calls up so many memories.

Sadly not something that I can put in a box and hang on to. They've talked
about replacing the building for years, and once it's gone that smell will be
lost forever.

------
iamthepieman
This was long and meandering and beautifully written. I read the whole thing.
Thanks for sharing.

------
1hackaday
I was surprised to learn that there's a Lisp Machine emulator. I googled a
little bit but could not find good installation intructions. Can anyone
explain how to install this emulator on a linux computer?

------
vidar
Reminded me somehow of this:
[http://www.43folders.com/2011/04/22/cranking](http://www.43folders.com/2011/04/22/cranking)

------
akzfowl
Beautiful and affecting article. Thanks for sharing...

------
asdfw88342432
Amazing article, very touching.

------
cbd1984
And another little thing that stays with me, anyway: "C" as the name of a
programming language. Not C, but "C". Maybe it's like Platonism: "C" is the
"Form", C is the imperfect shadow the "Form" casts on our world. But then, why
is Java never "Java"?

I'm over-thinking this, but it honestly transports me to old web fora and
Usenet newsgroups and late nights with a modem, stumbling around in alt. and
coming across spammed chapters from "The Trance-Formation Of America" is
pretty damned creepy at 3 AM when you're the only one awake, and learning
about the deep C secrets in chatty posts is amazing when your only other
source is "Learn Java in 21 Days For Dummies", but O'Reilly books come close.

Names come back. Dan Pop. Chris Torek. (I'm pretty sure they're still alive.)
From a different group, Pascal Bourguignon, whose name I spelled right the
first time although I'm sure I still can't pronounce it.

Strange typographical quirks. That's all it takes.

