As I get older (42) I see history and time a little differently than when I was younger growing up through the introduction of computer tech in the commercial space. This lead me to interests in what was before and the kinds of mindsets about computer tech prior to its, imo, being soiled by commercial intents.

Was just wondering if anyone out there is into the hobby from this perspective. I think with anything you enjoy doing or experiencing moderately should come with a healthy dose of respect to its history...

Personally a lot of my interests in this has been interface design as a means of making complex and programmable environments accessible and dare I say intuitive. Stuff like Smalltalk, Sketchpad, Grail fascinate me.

Anyway...just checking to see if other folks out there find this stuff interesting.

Who doesn't like history.

Sorry double post, didn't realize it posted. Real post below.

It's not necessarily 'who doesn't like history'. It's more about 'who's into history more than 'steve jobs started apple and bill gates started microsoft'.

Sure, those things are commercially important pieces of pop history, but I guess I'm more or less looking for folks that are just as interested in the pre-commercialism of the tech as the post commercialism as well as the global developments that happened concurrently...those weird things you only find out about if you go looking, such as the Quantel Paintbox, the Xerox Alto, the Bell Labs research into computer animation terminals in the late 60's, etc. The Mother of All Demos.

That sort of thing, the stuff that influenced the commercialism before commercial viability was even possible.

I mean, I can talk about stuff that happened, but I'm more interested in discussions about stuff that happened and waxing poetic about 'what if commercialism took a different stance based on that pre commercial era stuff?' You know, the utopia folks like Englebart had in mind.

I used to program mainframes, before the personal
computer was invented..just a note here in case
anyone is interested..in the early days we shared
a mainframe with other companies to use (much
like the net today) only we interfaced with
teletype machines, before the pc ;-)

I am not very knowledgeable about such things, but I am interested because of its parallelism to neurology, which I am interested in because the health of which is what determines our conscious existence.

The neural sodium ion channels with similarities to computer silicon transistors. . .

We could start a community around the self-organizing force that separates nature from life and watch it endure forever.