Comments on: Vintage Computer Festival 2007

By: newsham

newsham — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:56:49 +0000

Wow, I’m jealous. Retro-computing is very cool and I’m very interested. I would highly recommend anyone interested in computer history to download source code of old systems and install and run old systems on emulators. The SIMH project has great emulators for some historically relevant systems. The TUHS project has a large archive of unix source codes. Mailing lists for both projects often discuss other systems, such as the recently open-sourced multics source code. There’s lots of great stuff out there to play with even if you don’t have access to hardware. And if you’re into hardware, FPGAs are powerful enough now to build some of these old systems on a single FPGA chip. There are lots of online projects that have built various PDP systems on an FPGA, for example.
I would have loved to get to see some of those systems in person.. very cool, nate.

By: David Molnar

David Molnar — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:29:17 +0000

@Nate: I’m under 30, and I do study computer history as part of the grad courses here at Berkeley. To pass the preliminary exam in operating systems, in fact, you have to study a selection of papers that reaches back to Multics.

That being said, your question was about why under-30 people weren’t at the event. In my case, it’s a question of while the event is somewhat interesting, it’s not interesting enough for me to deal with the costs: I don’t have a car, so Mountain View is incovenient for me coming from Berkeley, I’m too lazy to get up early enough to make a full day of it, and I would usually prefer to see friends in SF or in the East Bay instead. (or work on my research, which always seems to need more time).

@Sellam – I went to sign up for the mailing list, but got this:

First name is required.
Last name is required.
Address is required.
City is required.
State is required.
Postal code is required.

is there a way to just give one’s e-mail?

By: Andreas

Andreas — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 09:04:22 +0000

Well, I recently turned 30 so I’ll give this a shot. I guess it’s the mindset that is different, some people are born engineers, some are not. If you’re in this industry for a love of engineering and learning how things work, you’d most likely be interested in computer history, but if you’re in this industry to become rich and famous, it’s probably more attractive to skip history and bet your money on superficial things like Web 2.0.

Besides, in general, most people today seem to believe that we, the currently living people, are much smarter than the people who lived before us, thus history can teach us nothing, because nothing that has happened before can be applied to this modern age we currently live in. All is brand new and shiny, everything under the sun is new! So I guess it’s just to be in lieu with the spirit of the modern day that so few people are interested in computer history. Time will prove that harboring this mentality is wrong and time has proven it before, but we’re too blinded by our own, completely own(!), progress and ingenuity to see it.

By: Nate Lawson

Nate Lawson — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:47:16 +0000

Ryan, you’re right about the relative age of computers as well as nostalgia. But I’m trying to draw a line between nostalgia (interest in the computers you used at a younger age) and history (computers older than you that you never used). There are different motivations for interest in each. I think both are valuable, but my original question remains — where’s the interest in history?

I’m starting to wonder if learning from the past is a motivation that also waxes and wanes, along with wider generational changes (see Renaissance Fair growth in the 1960′s). Maybe some day your kids will argue that Knuth can only be read with a deep understanding of MIX. ;-)

By: Ryan Russell

Ryan Russell — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:02:25 +0000

I think it’s easy to forget how (relatively) young the computer industry is. When I go for “computer history”, I’m looking at machines from the 60′s and 70′s, the practical birth of the industry. I started on a Commodore PET in 1980. I suspect there is also a minimum age before nostalgia kicks in. Both of those together may mean that this is the first generation that has critical mass on this topic.

By: toasty

toasty — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:57:15 +0000

26 – unfortunately, had never even heard of this. I’d have been there for sure…getting the word out more effectively might have helped with attendance (thanks Sellam, for the link)