Reminiscing

2001-10-24

Slashdot recently point out an interview with Steve Wozniak on MacShowLive that sounded interesting so I listened to it. Note: if you decide to listen, cue it up to the 55 minute mark since that's were the interview starts and the interview is about an hour long.

The first 3rd was about the beginning of Apple and it was very natsukashii as the Japanese say which means it brought back lots of memories.

It's hard to believe that back when I first got into computers through my friend Greg Marquez in 8th grade that state of the art was a Tandy Radio Shack TRS−80 with like 8k of memory and a text only black and white display.

Our high school's state of the art computer lab was 3 HP 3000 terminals running at 300 baud (30 characters a second) connected to some old machine at another high school. Plus one teletype terminal that used thermal paper.

Later we got an Apple 2 with a cassette tape drive. Our friend Ron was the first to get his own computer, an Atari 800, and we used to go over quite often to play with it (and him 😉).

Now I have in front of me a 1.7 gighertz Pentium 4 machine with 512 MEG of ram (that only cost $50), a 60 gig hard drive for $210, a 21 inch 16 million color display and a GeForce 3 card that can probably draw 60 million polygons a second and manipulate each pixel on the fly.

In high school in our senior year we got an all Apple computer lab. It had 1 networked Corvus 6meg hard drive that cost $5000.00 That's 6meg. 1 ten thousanth of today's $210 drive.

It's hard to believe that was only 20 years ago. Only 20 years. F*CK! I'm getting old.

Another thought that came up while I was listening is just how much I miss hearing stuff I understand (English). There's nothing quite like being in a foreign country for a year or more to make you realize just how much you take for granted all the stuff around you. Hearing radio talkshow interviews while I'm driving my car (aaahhhh, driving), news or TLC, CNN etc on the TV while I'm doing whatever.

Although, at the same time, another thing that popped into my head is how much of a waste of time it all is. As in there are those that listen and those that do. That's not to say you should never take a break but at the opposite side, how many people spend 3 to 8 hours a day reading a magazine, watching TV or browsing the net. If you put those 3 to 8 hours a day to achieving your goals, where do you think you'd be today? I guess it comes down to figuring out how you can get closer to them putting in a couple of hours a day. Most of us, myself included, see my goals as so big that I can't think of any small way to get closer to them 1 or 2 hours at a time. I guess that's just an excuse for not thinking a little harder.

I'm not sure why but I this also popped into my head. From the guy that wrote those music visualization plugins I mentioned the other day.

The accepted singles scene is a sore topic for me. Unfortunately, it seems that anyone who doesn't accept the singles scene rituals pays the price of solitude in one way or another. However, I choose solitude and industriousness over idling hours away on a barstool playing social games. If you don't agree, then ask yourself some things... How many of your favorite musicians watch the TV the amount that an average American watches? How many of your favorite authors choose to bar-hop over staying home in order to complete their work? I appreciate people who know what they want and have higher goals than the goals valued by the mainstream. I appreciate people who use their free time to be industrious, in whatever from it happens to take, and I'm quite aware that this comes at the cost of lonliness.

I don't know if how much that's true. There's lots of successful people that have a significant other but the basic concept of using your time to veg vs using it to create something whether it's to create a piece of art, or to create a better life or future...

Well, back to browsing the net 😖

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