From: "Joseph M. Reagle Jr." <reagle@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 08:38:08 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: PBS show
Message-ID: <9606131649.AA28172@rpcp.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 10:26 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
>I caught the show and thought it was pretty good, all in all.

        I thought so too? When is part II coming on? (I hope it didn't come
right after that, I had to run.) Next week?

>I personally despise the term "nerd," but I won't get into that here.

        Ahhh... it makes them happy. What I find most unnapealing is the
unabashed, "I don't have a life, I live with a computer" mentality. I was
rather taken with that mentality myself for a bit (and I'm sure it
contributed to the RSI), but even then I would have found it painfully
difficult to only associate with one "culture" and only do one thing all day
long. Maybe "nerds" over do it, but they do do other things, like play
magic, or assasin, D&D, or whatever. <grin> And the most
interesting/brilliant computer people that I run into _have_ other interests
beyond computers.

>first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal
>computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked
>too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.)

        The thing that startled me, was the contrary temporal perspective.
Watching it I felt like, "Hey! I remeber that, I used an Apple II in
kindergarden to write LOGO," or though I didn't have an Altair, I had a
Bailey Arcade. No one here probably remembers, but it was a kick ass game
playing (the best at the time) and programmable machine. I remember
belonging to a mailing-list club and getting a thick envolope of type
written code that I'd dutifully punch into a calculator like entry pad. (All
~20 keys for quadrupely overloaded!!) The cool thing was it had cool (c-64
like) peeks and pokes and you could call a plethora of the pregenerated
graphical things from your own code. Then there was always saving it to the
audio tape... <ack> Ok, so that is the nostalgia bit (hey I remember that),
the other bit was a, wow that was a long time ago. Looking at PC-history
always feels like a contradiction in time.

_______________________
Regards,            Laziness is no more than the habit of resting before you
                    get tired. -Jules Renard
Joseph  Reagle      http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html
reagle@mit.edu      E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E