40 year old flashback
Greetings Programs
Since playing Tron for the last month I have been having many flashbacks. Not only from 20 years ago but have you ever had a flashback of a flashback?
Maybe there are subliminal messages in that game...
My first rememberings of a science fiction type thing was the futurama and bell exibits at the 1964 world's fair when I was 3. They showed us that Computers would run everything and make all our cars and houses and enable us to live on the moon and under the ocean. So in 1964 my high tech interests were set in motion. Split between the visions of the outrageous buildings that would never come to be and the equally fantastic but real computer and communications equipment. Someday we would be able to see people we talk to on the phone.
I remember a computer entity called ELIZA that could actually carry on a conversation with people. I talked to ELIZA the first time I saw an Apple II computer. I wanted one badly. But in 1978 the $2500 was well beyond my reach. Someday I would have a computer.
(flashback - How do you do. Please state your problem.)
Sherman, set the wayback machine to 1981. In the space of 11 months I aquired a family of 5 and had to think about the future. I had the best high school level of electronics training a Vocational High School could offer. But computers were the way of the future. Big computers were taking over. One of the big three computer makers had a school and I scrambled to come up with $5k for 9 months of intense mainframe hardware training.
(flashback - your future is a phone call away.)
So in 1982 I was learning about bits and bytes and I/O methods and sectors and tracks and storage and peripherals and video games were making a comeback in the arcades. Commercials were running an the radio for Xevious and Pole Position. After settling in to a routine I start spending my lunch half hour at an arcade half a block from the school. I had heard about Tron but I can't remember where. And there next to the three asteroids machines, was the Tron arcade game. And there was where I stood for at least 15 minutes a day for months. I do not recall when I first saw the movie but I know I read the book first. And all the Tron merchandise. I understood the language. I understood the religious references. And after reading Robert Heinleins "The moon is a harsh mistress" I was ready to come face to face with a computer.
(flashback - the first therapist I had was named Mickey and she recommended meeting Mike the computer in the book.)
I bought my first computer the month before Tron came out. And I built that computer so I was intimatly involved with soldering every component on to the circuit board. It was a Sinclair ZX81 kit. While going to school during the day taught me how mainframe computers worked, programming my little ZX81 taught me what computers could do. Learning Z80 machine language was like being Tron. Comparing it to 8080 and 6502 languages was like imagining different beings.
(flashback - MOV ES, 13h)
However games at that time were more suited for consoles like the coleco and atari. They had better colors and more action but lacked the complexity of say a real flight simulator or a chess program. The home computers that followed narrowed that gap but then the real IBM pc came in and turned the gap into a chasm. Real business computers would never play games would they? ( That is a subject for another time ).
(flashback - all computers are IBM or IBM compatible.)
So here I am thinking about 40 years ago. Wondering just how much of what I saw when I was 3 years old has affected my life. I know how much of an effect Tron had. I also know how much time it just took for me to look up the usage of affect and effect so I was grammatically correct. And that is a point against how far things have come. Near instant information retrieval. The action in Tron took place in nanoseconds in the computer world against seconds in the real world. Mainframe batch computing was not instant. Just like most research back in 1982 would have been done in a library. Go to a big library have access to thousands of things on any given subject and take a day or two finding them.
(flashback - cut and paste = 1 dollars worth of dimes to make photo copies of book pages to insert in a book report. 3 hours in the library and 3+ hours "writing")
Today you type Tron in google and 2.7 million results come back. Where is all the information getting us?
Is it possible that knowing it is there makes you less likely to get it unless you absolutely need it? Is less being learned?
Twenty years from now and 40 years from now. I wonder where these words will be archived. These bits and bytes making up the text you are reading is only as good as the circuit they are stored on. Being brought to life as an I/O request is made. Users, preserve your legacy code well ....
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