[Coco] The early days of Hacking and Coding a CoCo Was: Here's a CoCo 1 ...

[Allen Huffman]

On Jan 20, 2014, at 6:56 PM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> It scares me when I hear variations on the popular themes "90/95/99% of
> people only need a tablet" and "most people are just information
> consumers".  Have we given up on 90/95/99% of the population?

Yes. Once computers went mainstream. THink of how many people know nothing about the computers they have owned other than how to plug them up and turn them on. They can do e-mail, Facebook, maybe some games. They've never programmed it. THey've never upgraded it. They really don't even need a computer. They just need e-mail, Facebook, maybe some games.

Think about that. We stood at the beginning of "buy off the shelf and plug it up at home" computing, and then a blink of an eye later, "everyone" has a computer. Everyone has broadband. Most folks have PDAs with portable internet.

It's stunning.

And then there's us old guys... Sitting in front of me is a quadcore Mac mini (paid for by one of my employers), and a 2009 Macbook (it's still doing great for everything but rendering so I never updated - used to upgrade every 2 years). Then, I have *14* hard drives on my desk. Wait... 15. I have... Crap. 16.

And all of this storage and power is used so rarely, but when I use it (production time for me is August-October), they are on 24/7, sometimes spending all day to export a full HD project.

I would say I am in the 1%... But the rest of my time, I probably spend it with the other 99%.

(And in the closet? I still have my CoCo 1, my CoCo 2, a CoCo 3 and a backup... Plus tubs of old 80s hardware... Sadly, I use all that even less.)

You know we are living Star Trek when the biggest, toughest bully jock in school... is carrying around a computer in his pocket.

-
Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
Sub-Etha Software - http://www.subethasoftware.com - Established 1990!
Sent from my MacBook.