I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel like I was imminently going to be turned into paperclips.
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> ...that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on.
I think there's a strong lateral connection to this quote:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
I think this has interesting implications wrt the perception of nostalgia, because nostalgia seems to be able to apply at any age to any event that happened far enough back in time; while the above theoretical model maps roughly to specific ages.
So I wonder what things are actually a partially overlapped Venn diagram of the above maxim and nostalgia.
In this case I think it's possible the idea that we were "roughly on-track on" with certain technologies - the notion of an emergent sense of structure that was certain to unfold - could map to some point in between points (1) and (2) in the maxim above. An objective analyses would instead recognize "success" as the survivorship bias that it is; but we're not objective :) - and I find that endlessly fascinating!
After working at the 6502 one for awhile I can start to understand why the Homebrew Computer Club was an obsession for many.