Out with the old, in with the new
Object Memories
maddog reflects on some of the many souvenirs from his long career in computing.
I started writing this article as the last column of 2012, and you will be reading it as one of the first articles of 2013, but in reality, I started writing this story in 1969. As Rob Hunter of the Grateful Dead once wrote in the song “Truckin”: “Lately it occurs to me, What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
I am a person who has a hard time throwing things out that should have been thrown out long ago. On the other hand, as I face the fact that I am 62 years old and, sooner or later, these things will be of absolutely no use to me, I look at these objects and see an opportunity to remember the days when they were new, as well as remember the people who created them and what their contributions meant to “computing.” The memories are sometimes bittersweet.
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