Generational Cycles in Technology

Original draft: Jan 08, 2021 08:45 AM 

In 2020 I turned 50. I first played with computers in the 70s via coin-slot arcades and Pong. By 1979 I began programming around 8-9 years old. I was also fortunate enough, because of friends and family at the University of Utah, to get access to the ARPANET which would later become the Internet and then the Web layer on top.

I was also allowed to play around on some decommissioned PDPs, and see how the older and newer mainframes of the time worked. It was all about shared virtual resource allocation.

Then the "PC Revolution" began to get traction, and pulled computing power away from the "Big Iron" companies like IBM, DEC, etc. and put the power and freedom of computers in each home and business. With (slow 300 baud) connections via phone lines to BBSes and the Internet.

Also Citizen Band (CB) was big in the 70s and 80s, and I was very actively part of this "social media" dynamic, including upper and lower side band talking to people in many other countries.

I watched as developers increasingly become more open about sharing code freely, until their managing companies started to crack down on "piracy", firing and even in some cases incarcerating their developers for sharing Intellectual Property (IP) secrets.

I watched and participated as the push back that lead to increasingly cohesive and organized "Open source" communities grew, and more push for independence, to get away from the vendor lock in of the UNIX flavors, began to be pushed back thanks to "the philosopher" Richard Stahlman and other advocates created an increasingly altruistic philosophy of sharing through GNU and related efforts. This finally developed real traction and critical mass thanks to "the engineer" Linus Torvalds and the Linux project.]

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