Recently I toured the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, located in a remodeled old SGI building just down the block from Google and Microsoft. The tour was pretty fun, with lots of ancient big iron and zillions of personal computers, some of them very familiar. I was amused to see how much of my work experience is now literally history.
At the end of the tour our group visited a working old-fashioned computer room, complete with raised floors and zealous air conditioning. In the room, amidst the giant electronic brains, keypunches, and tape drives, some guys working there were very excited: they had just gotten an old line printer to work for the first time in 25 years and were gleefully showing off the output. These men appeared to be 15 to 20 years older than me. That's when I realized I was looking at my future. In a few years, come visit me at the Computer History Museum. I'll probably be troubleshooting LisaWrite problems or something. ;-)
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