old meets new

I don't have a TV in the flat and the internet is rather patchy so I tend not to watch much during the week. However, sometimes it's good to switch off the brain for a few hours so I watched WarGames - instant nostalgia for 8" disks, acoustic coupled modems, mono screens and line printers. My first experience of computers was in the early 80s - the TI99/4, TRS-80, ... - and my father worked for IBM so lots of big iron, very early CAD/CAM systems and an XT.

I used to pore over the RadioShack catalogue (you know, paper things with loads of detail in them that existed in the days before the internet) and learned all manner of geeky things about electronics, 2m radio, CB, audio, amplifiers, ...

Fast forward some years to '89: on my tour of Edinburgh University the corridors of JCMB were lined with VAXes (VAXen?) being thrown out in favour of SUN workstations. Positively fancy what with their 2-bit screens and mice but if you didn't get a place in the computer lab you had to make do with a VT-100 terminal - learning shell and emacs key strokes suddenly became very important.

The irony of watching a film about old-skool computing on an ipad isn't lost on me...

Good stuff.