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Generations
Back in the old days, it was exciting when new software came out. Every day, we hurried to Computerland, hoping it was there. I remember a new version of WordStar with a million control-everything commands. I remember new interactive fiction games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from Infocom.
I don't remember the first time I skipped an upgrade on a software application, but now I skip them all the time. I seldom need the less-than-essential new features that require close perusal of an eight hundred page manual to master.
Same with life. Living life at different speeds, we inhabit different temporal niches. Generations no longer last a generation.
I wrote an article - "In Search of the Grail" - in 1993, describing the impact which playing that Infocom game with my oldest son on an Apple II had on my understanding of what would happen to the world as the world played games with distributed networks.
I believed that interacting with the different world of symbol-manipulation in a context of distributed computing would change how we thought in fundamental ways. In retrospect, my intuition was correct. But six years later, it is also dated, at least three (digital) generations removed from the present.
A generation now in its teens or twenties has been so thoroughly socialized by interaction with the digital world that it doesn't see the lenses through which it sees. What was revolutionary a few years ago is ho-hum, the stuff of wild-eyed speculation now the platform on which that generation stands.
Last week I delivered a keynote speech for a web-based training conference. I said that the symbiotic relationship between networked computers and networked humans had spawned a large number of people who think they're working for the human side but in fact are working for the electronic network. "You're working for HAL," I said, "teaching people how to speak HAL's language."
A woman approached me after the speech.
"Many people in the audience," she said, "don't know what you mean by HAL."
Or what I mean by an Apple II. Or interactive fiction. Or Infocom.
No narrative chronicles the social history of popular computing. The way it came to us like an unexpected birthday present. And nobody seems to want one.
My wife came upon an "ice box" yesterday as we toured a Victorian house. She told a guard that she remembered a real "ice man," how she waited as a child until he had hacked ice into blocks for delivery, then picked up the shattered splinters to eat as a treat.
The guard listened politely and looked away, checking his watch for closing time.
They said it would happen, but they didn't say it would happen again and again, faster and faster. But it does. The points of reference that define the shared experience of a generation are changing more rapidly than ever.
"The Big Picture changes," a friend once said, "about every ten years." I discovered that, indeed, every decade or so, I transitioned into a new developmental stage which re-contextualized everything that had come before.
Now, I am finding that I must reinvent myself, that is, revise the points of reference of how I think, every eighteen months to two years. The leisurely pace of an evolutionary life cycle that changes by the decade is a vanished luxury.
The fact of history itself as a shared point of reference has morphed into an indifference to the historical perspective entirely. History as a discipline, threaded through textual narratives and how text defines time and causality, has morphed into a world of hyper-textual images, in which our personal interests determine the path we travel through images of meaningful events. The patterns of our explorations either connect at intersections or they don't. A shared vision is less important than the machinery which enables us to search in the first place.
I can hear a dissenting voice, pointing out that people ALWAYS did that. We ALWAYS chose which books to read and created a unique pattern from our study. But - and this is a huge "but" - readers in a universe of printed text did not know that's what they did because they shared a vocabulary with which to discuss their experience. That vocabulary imposed what felt like a shared perspective. Only in retrospect - only after images and words had been reorganized in digital space - did we see our former experience as computers have taught us to see it.
The singular prism that bent all light in a print text world has been shattered by a hyper-text world that perceives that prism as a prison.
The excitement of my vision in 1993 is gone. Merchants, circumspect and wary, prowl the digital world. They have taken the gold from the pioneer miners who had to use it to buy food, shovels, and hovels. Merchants are always the pragmatic parents of the next generation, defining the real possibilities of their offspring. They even sell their children uniforms sewn with symbols of rebelliousness, the symbols each generation needs to pretend to break new ground.
So what is the value of experience? A broader perspective? Patience, as Yoda suggested ... what? Who, you ask, is Yoda?
Yoda is a puppet invented many years ago by a film-maker to represent purveyors of ancient wisdom. Yoda articulates wisdom in sound bites that we can snatch on the fly.
I remember diving on the reef, chasing the quick fish and never catching any. One day I swam out over the reef and sank in thirty feet of water. Then I just sat there, waiting, and all sorts of fish, wondrous and strange, came to me.
The digital world can be exploited or pursued, dreams of stock options feeding our greed. But it can also simply be observed. We can just sit there, under the ascending bubbles of our deep breathing, listening to the subterranean clicking. Not even learning the wisdom of not doing. No. Not even that.
In the 1950s, the trend was towards commonality of experience. The nation was forced to come together, in a way, to get through the crises of the depression and second world war. As a result, differences between people were extremely de-emphasized. Consider that during WW2, Japanese Americans were systematically rounded up and put in camps. This would not be tolerated today - thank goodness.
That same attitude towards emphasizing common experiences, bringing the country together, etc. helps explain why there were only three broadcast networks. We all watched the same TV shows, ate the same foods, wore uniforms to work (or traditional black suits with black hats and black umbrellas). Movies such as "It's a Wonderful Life" emphasized the value in community thinking.
During the 60s, a generation rebelled against this sort of conformist attitudes, and slowly the subculture became the culture, permitting diversity. Today, having only three broadcast channels would be unthinkable. For many of us it would be an unimaginable horror.
It is this celebration of the individual and the diverse that has permitted computing to move boldly ahead. It is a sort of "glorious anarchy" that permits, for example, the publishing of individual websites without the okay of some sort of certifying board.
Going back to "Pleasantville" would be a horror, but there is an odd danger in our reductio ad individual. There will surely be a time when society has to come together again -- to save itself and hopefully improve itself. Strauss and Howe, in The Fourth Turning, suggest that every four generations there is an inevitable crisis period that requires common ground and brings people together to weather the storm. This crisis could be anything: international war, disease, monetary crisis, social/governmental system breakdown. In such times, once again diversity might be seen as a natural enemy.
These generational effects are quite evident if you look back in history. The same feelings you mention in your column were seen in the 1920s. Here's what Strauss and Howe say about that period: Up until the fall of 1929, American still inhabited a decade then known as "an era of wonderful nonsense." through the 1920s, America felt increasing wild, its daily life propelled ever faster by a stream of thrilling and innovative technologies.
Wow. So: the "speeding up" of technologies and lack of common experience ARE our common experience. Enjoy them now, and hope that the economic improvements and innovations come fast enough to provide us all with a good place to be once the crisis hits.
I sat at my desk during my internship at Cray last summer and watched a few of my coworkers become (or who had already became) seriously outmoded. I watched, just as intently, as a round of layoffs came around, mandated by SGI. I saw people who, once their contributions were laid out, had done some awfully exciting things back 10-20 years ago when Seymour and Friends were making the fastest computers anyone had ever dreamed of. They retired before they could get axed -- I ate a lot of retirement party cake.
It made me seriously wonder about my future. It's easy to start out at the cutting edge and at high salaries, but it can apparently be near impossible to stay there. The pitfalls are everywhere -- starting a family and not devoting 90% of your time to computers anymore seems to be a rather significant one. Others had just gotten stuck in a rut, missing one too many upgrades.
Those few whom I looked on as having led a worthwhile life (and this scares the shit out of me) were the pointy-hairs. They all had families, good vacations under their belts (backpacking in Europe, not visiting Comdex), secure retirements. Many of them had started out as tech people and moved "up" the ladder.
So, is it possible to be a technical person all your life and still live? In the case of the first generation of computer techs, I'd have to say almost certainly not. That frightens me.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Wherever this person went to high-school/college, please do not send your children there. Let me quote something from the essay:
"History as a discipline, threaded through textual narratives and how text defines time and causality, has morphed into a world of hyper-textual images, in which our personal interests determine the path we travel through images of meaningful events."
Let's deconstruct it. First we remove the useless comma-delimited buzzwords:
"History as a discipline has morphed into a world of hyper-textual images, in which our personal interests determine the path we travel through images of meaningful events."
Still doesn't really mean much, now does it? We'll try again:
"The study of history has morphed into a world in which our personal interests determine the patch we travel through images of meaningful events."
Now it makes some kind of sense, just barely. Basically he's saying that since we don't read about history in books anymore (his premise, not mine), we only learn about what we want to learn about? Gee.. That's a pretty bold statement.. It's not every day that we hear some inane truism shrouded in "new media" buzzwords.. Or is it?
Maybe Katz should sue for damages.. Obviously this guy is out to steal bread from the mouth of our resident Master of Buzzwords.
Ok. But I dont see much of a problem there. Except for that communications on a higher level are harder to persue as it's more likely that the one you're talking to doesnt understand what you mean (I think you went into that in your first editorial). But that is more a matter of people wanting to learn/understand rather than a slight increase in what there is that actualy has to be learned.
I'm of the opinion that being dumb must probably feel pretty good. You dont have that much fun but you cant worry about anything. And there's always been dumb people. And that's not because they wouldnt be able to learn or wouldnt have the access to information but because it seems to be easier. You can definately survive without knowing Yoda.
The only problem is that you start to feel pretty lonesome if you're in a room full of people with noone "knowing Yoda". And it gets more frustrating if you try to get people to teach themselves so you might someday have the possibility to have a decent conversation with them. That's not "it's lonely at the top" but more "its sad that so few actually want to get higher" (no puns intended).
All in all the rules dont seem to change that fast though. It's still not cool to kill people and sex is still the first thing I think of when seeing an appealing woman.
[With all due respect to the generation that coined that phrase -- the one that begat we X.]
In the beginning there was Babbage, and many the years his ideas and others lay dormant. But then lo, there was ENIAC, and it was good! But the goddess Insectidae saw this and was angered by the light of this ENIAC, and all its children, produced without air. And they were attracted to the light, and there was a great inward Popping sound, and the minions of ENIAC and her successors ran diligently around her hulken skin replacing her airless lights incessantly.
Then there was BellLabs, and thus was born the 3-Legged Spider that could kill the minions of the goddess Inscetidae! Slowly but surely the airless lights disappeared, and the Children of ENIAC grew smaller and sleeker. And they consumed the 3-Legged Spiders, and it was good. But still, the Children of ENIAC were large and slothy, and still required many, many 3-Legged Spiders, which they then called Transistor, by which to live.
Then the Transistors started to form many-legged collectives. The Transistors were packed tighter and tighter, with only a few legs exposed, Integrated into a colonies which they called Circuits. And these black Integrated Circuits further reduced the Children of ENIAC, until some underdeveloped offspring formed small, hand-sized entities, which could do the ubiquitous functions of Add, Subtract, Multiply and Divide with inhuman speed. And these small Children begat others and begat others and begat others and so on until they called themselves such as Palm, but that was yet many years to come, and we have not yet reached the Generation of X.
Then it was 1969, and Man walked on the Moon and HAL 2000, a descendant of ENIAC, was foreseen in a Vision by the late Kubrick, and a Great Bird reminded us to live long and prosper and the world rejoiced! [The King William V version of this document has the additional line: "And thus they knew the Cybernetic Men would roam the cities and the Pepperpots cried an extinguishing tone, first with a mission to EX-TER-MIN-ATE, and then more horrific still, with mass purchases of Piston Engines all across the land."] And thus was begat the Generation of X. And those of X learned of what had come, and saw their parents and their Holy Cards and their ancient tongue of Fortran, and were thankful it was not them. For X had avoided the lurching progress of the last quarter century and were grateful they had not suffered it. For they were now on the vanguard, with a perspective like no other! Young enough to have escaped the slow years of ancient progress, yet old enough to see the coming changes in perspective.
And so it was that X had its War of Stars, its Striking of Empires and its Jedihical Return. And it understood when the Reagan spoke of the War of Stars and again when the Clinton did, and it knew the nature of the Phantom Menace like no one since. And it knew Apple; it knew XT, TRS-80 and C64, all the Children of ENIAC, now small enough to live in our human homes. And we invited them, slowly at first, but in ever increasing numbers, watching, as they became as ubiquitous as the ancient Telephone and Microwave. They knew Atari, they knew Intellivision [nod to a certain moderator there...] and they knew the Connecticut Leather Company -- and they saw it all disappear.
"I knew that company." Spoke one of X of those days of yore. "I remembered passing it many times from my home in West Hartford. Coleco was what we called it. So lively a place, we watched its cabbage fields rot as we drove by in those bygone years. Then it was just a husk. Gone forever, and all we had left was our Commodore and our GWBasic for DOS. Little did we know what a virus the latter would spread..."
So it was that the phoenix rose again, festering in the Park of Xerox for many years. Thus came Macintosh and Nintendo and Sega, and another generation we watched go by. And it was good. But the virus did not lay dormant, for the goddess Insectidae grew restless at her near defeat and helped the virus grow. It gathered strength and saw the success of Macintosh and said, "I must have that!" And so it plotted and conspired to develop the Window of Oblivion, as the Children of ENIAC continued to contract.
"I had seen pictures of old hand-held Children of ENIAC, what we used to call Calculators. What a thrill it was to own my own! Not only did it Add, Subtract, Multiply and Divide, it took logarithms, cosines, and plotted graphs and was even programmable using Reverse Polish Notation. I also had a Wizard to help me remember things, the Original. It even had expansion cards, which could do anything from add more memory to translate Happy Birthday into Chinese. Little did I know what I was holding was the ancestor of a being many generations removed." So it was that the seeds were being sown.
But while the Windows of Oblivion began closing in on germination, a secret was wrought, known only to kings and their minions. And they called it ARPA. And the discoverers, like the breeding at Xerox, knew not what they had created, and had not the tools to allow it to grow. So it lay dormant, when the Window of Oblivion finally took hold!
"I remember the Third Generation of the Window. It was all shiny and new and fit so nicely on my Third Generation XT, which we called 386. Finally I had escaped the confines of the DOS. Little did I know the menace lurking within." The tables had turned and the pace accelerated.
3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 32, 95, OSR1, OSR2, 98: faster and faster they came, wave upon wave. Killing our OS/2 and our Macintoshes like a worm to the core. And so too those ancient Integrated Circuits got denser and faster, and we had 386, 486, Pentium, MMX, PentiumPro, Pentium II, Celeron, Xeon, Pentium III and K6-3DNow swarming, each generation trying to extinguish all others. The legions were afoot; the stage was set, and there seemed like no one left to fight.
"I remember installing Linux pre-1.0 on my 486. I loved it! It was great to finally escape from the gaze of the Window of Oblivion. Finally, there was a third way. We all thanked the generations that came before, the AUX, SunOS, BSD, but now there was a generation for us." And X knew, slowly but surely, there was a light in this generation.
Then came the Genf-people, who formed an enclave called CERN. And they plotted and planned and knew that information needed to be transmitted, indexed and cross-indexed again, like the net of a spider. And they saw ARPA, which developed far away and was now called Internet, and they knew it was good. And thus they developed a new generation across the Whole Wide World, and they called it Web.
"I was living not far from Genf, as the locals called it -- Genève or Geneva as I have sometimes heard it called. Little did I know that in a Canton not far from mine, a new Generation was in the making! I returned to the Royal Mountain of La Belle Province where I was studying, and knew that I needed to have my own slice of this Web. It took me a year to get access, but in 1993, I finally premiered The Original George Harrison and Tomorrow People home pages. Now, if there was only a better browser than Mosaic...." The stage was set.
But the virus returned, this time with a Spry Air about it! And it saw Mosaic and Mosilla and was again jealous. So it created an Explorer and integrated it into its 95. And the world at once cheered and feared. And finally the ARPA, now the Internet, was free to prosper. No longer did the people want their machine-telephone connections to be to simple BBS. And it was that everyone wanted access to this Internet. And the generations again rejoiced. [Until pornography took over and made everything seem smutty, but that's another story...] And soon the secret of kings was as ubiquitous as the Children of ENIAC were, and it was good.
Yet as another generation was born, but a few years later, a new war was beginning, a war between the Palmists and the Sea E of Oblivion. "Look, I played Phantasy Star, PS II, PS III, Gaiden and all the rest, and I can tell you, they are not Palmists, Parma-people or the lost race of Palm. They're Palmans, from planet Palma, like Alis, got it!? Jeez, kids these days with their Play Stations and their PDAs and their iMacs! What's the big deal; it's been done! And they're called Computers, ya yoink!" And so X became more outspoken and scoffed at being left behind as Generation after Generation built upon her [After all, this is Generation X we're talking about, not Generation Y or XY.] work. And X joined the ranks of the old foggey generations before, and could but watch as the world changed around her. But one thing is for sure, X knew her Windows were right!
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
This is one reason to get a degree (to connect this with an earlier post). While it certainly is true that you can land a great job in the industry without it, the base knowledge gained at a CompSci department or similar will last a lot longer than proficiency in whatever the latest buzzword technology, and it also makes it easier to live through a technology transition. While this is no panacea for obsolecence, it will make you employable longer than without it.
:)
Then, of course, there's those of us skipping that race altogether by entering academia instead
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Wow, fascinating meme. Really.
In case, it wasn't clear, I'm being sarcastic. This is the time-honored practice of old coots the world over - to bemoan the fact that the icons of their lives are forgotten by most everyone they meet.
Yes we age, our favorite shows go off the air, our favorite appliances rust, our bellies/boobs sag, etc.
So what of it? Live for today. Nostalgic sentimentality exists for those who have otherwise no reason to wake up.
I think you're being a little condescending there. Who's to say that future generations of computing will even be based on what is taught in computer science? Will quantum computer code be anything like C or C++?? Probably not.
But then again, it's possible you've not studied enough cs. Math is the basis and while quantum computing may change some of our process, what Dijkstra proved will not be any less important. That's the nice thing about fields involving science and math, you can't start anywhere but the beginning. Sure the roads branch here and there, but it doesn't change the facts.
If anything, what has been presented in the past will only be expanded.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
I would agree with you. The world is moving faster and there is no time to enjoy it. We are lured on by more ... ever searching for something that is slightly faster, more exotic or more powerful. I think the "cyberpunk" authors of the eighties were prophetic in spirit about the attitude and direction of the world today. How far are we from jacking in? How much time will we have then to sit and watch the fish?
The Internet is a perfect example of this - I've met people from all over the world, young and old, and from a perspective of history, we have nothing in common. However, we do have something in common, and that is what we are interested in. Comparing my life now to what it was 5 years ago before I was on the Internet, I think my life and the friends I've made in it have changed for the better, as rather than being confined to those in my physical area who may have a common history but dissimilar interests, I find myself interacting with people who are interested in the same things that I am.
I'll shut up now.
The high-level summary, if I understood correctly -- "The rate of technological (and cultural) change is fast and ever increasing. This makes communication between people ever more difficult."
I have to agree with this. It seems so obvious to me I don't know how it could be argued. Not that this is a new observation -- Alvin Toffler made exactly this case decades ago with Future Shock. It's practically a truism -- witness the current buzzwords of "web time" and "internet time."
But Thieme stops there. The question that desperately needs to be asked, and thought about, and debated, is "Is this a good thing?"
Otherwise, we're stuck in the grip of a boosteristic technological determinism, where our "options" with each wave of change are simply Sink or Swim. I hear lots of rah-rah about how "enabling" the Internet is, but it rings kind of hollow if I am not "enabled" to Just Say No.
(From this perspective, the Amish are some of the most technologically enabled people around. As a group, they have a certain set of values and priorities, which do not include being current and hip and up-to-the-minute. Instead, when a technology presents itself, they ask "Is this good for the community? Does this help or hinder accomplishing our highest priorities?" If the answer is "no," then the technology is rejected. They are masters of the art of Just Saying No.)
So, is this shortening of "generations" a good or a bad thing? I'm inclined to think it's not good. What good is it to email around the world if the price is that we are cut off from our parents and our children, and even from our own "generational" peers who are outside of our particular circles of interest?
Are these drawbacks inherent in the technology of global internets, or can they be mitigated or eliminated? I don't know. Thieme either doesn't know or isn't saying. It would not bother me if he doesn't know the answer. What bothers me is that he isn't even asking the question.
Zach
And yes, before you reply, I know it was originally keyed to the 80386 hardware, but that's no longer true.
The key is that new hardware and software concepts can be either integrated or run on the OS. This gives far better flexibility the Win CE/9x/NT family - they are all seperate code projects, as opposed to general purpose Linux/X Windows and Routers and embedded palm systems and mpeg car sterios. The Linux family are all based on the same actual OS, not just a user interface.
--
Evan E.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
One of those odd creatures that pops out of time and lands in a place it ought not to be.
You see, I am only 18, and I have noticed this trend from the beginning of my days.
I was a voracious reader, and I got my first computer in a box. Or rather, my father did. It was a good box, a nice box, a box filled with little things and bigger things, all pretty colours. I watched and read out the instructions as my dad soldered the components together and built an Apple ][. An Apple ][ is a comforting thing; it exudes this sort of coziness and warm familiarity. I pounded out stories on WordStar (in mostly gibberish of course, I was only three at the time.) Even my little sister likes to play with it from time to time, we haul it out and stick a television on top whenever we get the urge to play "Zaxxon" or "Mystery House".
I remember nearly drooling (okay, I guess that's normal for a kid of five) when I got to play with my first IBM PC (look ma, no "XT"). Eventually I got my hands on an AT and I am typing on it right his moment.
What saddens me is the fact that few of my generation remembers these things. They seem to drift dreamily through life, noticing only flashes and spurts of the images they pass. The present flutters past them and the past is never known, much less forgotten. Their only experience to the Bard is in school, they have never heard of Homer and the Illiad is foreign to them. Even more present media is unknown: Hitchcock was a nobody, Humphrey Bogart is not a name they know, references to Audrey Hepburn draw a blank. Even quips from television shows but ten or twenty years old draw blank stares. Quoting poets like Tennyson, or Dylan Thomas, or sages like Lao Tsu draw shocking looks from passer-bys.
We are nearing another Dark Age, where past knowledge will disappear just as it did when the Goths sacked Rome; because those that care about the old will be few and far between. People are innundated with messages spouting rhetoric such as, "Forget the old! Come with us, we're new and we're fashionable! Don't do what your parents did!"
This seems to be an unstoppable trend, the media juggernauts racing towards the goal. But we will recover. Historians note that we regained the ancient Greek and Roman epics in the fifteenth century, when old scrolls and sheets of papyrus were found hidden in monestaries and libraries of ancient and old cities.
We must preserve the past, so that the people of the future will be able to find it again, and listen once more to the words of the ancients.
== I am not Me.
Software upgrades aren't generational improvements by their very nature. They're a way for software companies to regenerate fading streams of revenue for legacy products.
Hardware platforms and architectures are evolving and being discarded at what seems like a frightening rate from here, close up by the trees but if you step back a little and look at the whole forest we're not all careering madly along on a technological roller-coaster at all. ( what a mixed metaphor
Sure, the techier aspects of the "Information Revolution" seem to be exponentially shooting out everywhere and at a faster and faster rate, but I suspect that this is just because we're slap bang in the middle of the earliest growth stages of a new-ish science / technology offshoot. I imagine the "crazy" proliferation of factories and then railroads around Europe during the Industrial revolution looked very similar to industry observers of the time.
Myself,expect this particular curve to flatten out eventually. From my vantage point evolution seems to go in stop start binges. Overall you can view social / technological innovation as a smooth growth curve. Close-up you can see the wild spikes and line-noise. Its a fractal thing.
Everything changes, everything stays the same
Whilst it is true that many things about your own particular "good old days" of computing were great fun, it is equally true that its great fun now.
-- Oh Well
I am only 25 and have already lived through more generations of computing than my father has calculators! With the rapidly expanding knowledge base of the tech industry, generations of computing can now be legacy before they ever hit the consumer market... a frightening thought indeed.
So where does this leave us? The people who can't afford the new systems, but yet need to keep up with the rapidly changing climate among the revolutionary new advances in order to keep some semblance of job security? We are caught in the middle. The lucky few actually get their companies to pay for the hardware and brainware (training), but the majority are lost in the ebb of the tide...
How soon will it be until Linux is considered a legacy system?
Something really witty should be here...
A fascinating article. Kudos!
I especially liked the section talking about how software updates have been speeding up. I know that I run software that is almost all at least a year old. I even run a few programs that are more like 4 or 5 years old, simply because I like where they were at that point, and felt that I didn't need anything else. They do everything I need, and I get lost in the new programs.
As for that joke about not knowing who Yoda was... Please tell me that was just a joke? If it wasn't, then I'm very worried about society.
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
>- Skyshadow said:
[big snip]
So, is it possible to be a technical person all your life and still live? In the case of the first generation of computer techs, I'd have to say almost certainly not. That frightens me.
Well, I am not sure of the current trends; I only personally know of three people who have been around that long. One is indeed in management, but the other two aren't. One, my boss, is in title a VP of the corporation I work for, but he functions as the senior system/network administrator, something he has been doing for hei entire career. The other man, my father, has been programming in various languages and on various operating systems since 1971. Both of these men are willing to learn the new technologies and "fads" that permeate any evolving technology, and then filter out the trash. If you are willing to constantly learn, and then (most importantly) constantly do you best, a long career (with huge paycheck every two weeks) can be had; come to think of it, that is what you should do for any job.
-G.
If you base your life on the technology, you will lose. The technology has a short half-life. If you base a career on a technology (i.e. "I am a Unix sysadmin") and live by that, you will become obsolete as soon as the technology does. So what is a poor geek to do? First off, don't base your life on the technology. There is a lot more to life than ones and zeroes, no matter what you can do with them. You can make technology your life and possibly make a lot of money, but you will have missed out on the good stuff. Basing a career on technology is certainly doable; it's basing a career on a particular technology that is problematic. If you base your career on technology, you are building your house on a fault line. It is better to base your career on the unchanging, and then to add the changing technology skills. You certainly need to know the current tech, and you need to learn the future tech. But companies look for things beyond the technology. Things like a can-do attitude, a commitment to quality, an understanding of business communications (aka talking to people in your company), and the ability to juggle multiple products. These aren't pointy-haired mumbo-jumbo; these are skills that make companies money, and thus skills that they want you to have. Those skills don't go out of style, and companies will pay big bucks for them. If you have those permanent skills, some companies will even hire you and train you to get the techno skills that you need. If you have the techno skills and not the permanent business skills, you may be tolerated--or you may not be. If you have both the permanent skills and today's hot tech skills, you can basically write your own ticket.
--The basis of all love is respect
Great article! Like many others, I've worried about the issues raised therein. But, more recently, I've become preoccupied by a related malady: the rewriting of history.
I read computer history books. I love it. I like reading about the stuff I was there for, but it's also great to read about the true pioneers from the 19th century, the WWII years, and so on. I read a lot of those books, so I have at least some idea of what happened and when it happened, especially when it comes to who invented/discovered X, who first put it into production, and when it first became widely accepted.
Time after time, though, I'll read an article in a popular magazine or newspaper, or see a segment on a news show, and I'll see that Microsoft, the IBM PC, or some other relative latecomer to the game has been given credit for something developed long before by someone else. It drives me nuts.
And when I try to correct these folks, I rarely get anywhere. As far as they're concerned, their sources are gospel. If the sources say that Microsoft or Apple invented the GUI, then that's what must have happened. If they say that high-res graphics started with the first VGA card, then that must be right.
Which isn't too bad, until you start thinking about all the people who read those articles or watch those shows. Those people don't know any better, so they believe what they're told. And eventually it becomes a form of truth, because it's generally accepted as such.
And it gets worse. How many articles on other subjects about which I am less knowledgeable have I read and believed, when in fact they are grossly inaccurate? I must end up believing dozens of inaccuracies a day because I simply don't know any better than what the 'journalists' tell me. And you do, too. We all do it. There's just not enough time to learn enough to make sure that you're not being mislead. That's why journalists are supposed to do fact-checking.
I don't know what the solution is to this problem, but I thought I'd bring it up, since it's at least tangentially related to the concerns raised in the article.
-Joe
I suddenly find myself reminiscing lunch breaks (junior high school) spent sitting in front of the Apple IIe with the cool green monochrome playing oregon trails....heh
wonder if anyone ever thought of a hybrid quake and oregon trails....instead of your oxen dying from lack of food, you get pissed off and launch rockets at them and turn them into dinner!
:D
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Yes, but what _you_ said was nothing more than a usual practice of the young ones who think that "icons of life" doesn't matter anything.
But it does. We are human beeings, and not digital computers, yet. And we need other human beeings around us, because we were created so. Community and the symbols of this community is very important for everyone.
For istance I am Hungarian, but currently in Germany. And felt very uncomfortable even at home, until I spoke with one of the german poeple, and he said, that he had read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well. And then I felt a little bit comfortable. Like if I were at home a litte. I had someone around me with the same "icons".
Yes, we age. Yes, we live. And do you think, that the simple fact, that you can say that sentence : "Yes, we age", makes or and aging easier ?
You asks : What of it ?
It hurts. At least it hurts even me, when I cannot follow the fast advance in life, and cannot smile to others knowing that we share the same background.
In the time of C-64s, it was enough to be a computer-fan to feel yourself home among other computer-fans. Now you have to be a Quake-fan, or even especially a Quake-II fan to feel the same.
I liked playing Ace-II, but don't have enough time beeing a QuakeII fan. I've tried and missed. And Quake fans wouldn't accept me as a company. Because I am not a full-time Quake-fan.
So what I think this article was about, that you have less and less poeople around you, with whom you can speak comfortable. Others just chatting something, that wouldn't matter a bit.
Live for today, yes, true, I agree. I really agree. But I can live for today only WITH people, and if I meet someone who just cares about Quake and thinks, that Quake is what matters, what can I do with it ?
Replace Quake anything you want.
Now I feel disappointed, because I wrote down one of my most important faith about life, and you will just skip it. Because I write it in electronic form.
Ah...