> On May 19, 2024, at 11:14 AM, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> A friend of a friend had a birthday gathering. Everyone there was in their
> thirties, except for myself, my wife, and our friend. Anyway, I met a Google
> engineer, a Microsoft data scientist, an Amazon AWS recruiter (I think she
> was a recruiter), and a few others in tech who are friends with the party
> host. I had several conversations about computer origins, the early days of
> computing, its importance in what we have today, and so on. What I found
> disappointing and saddening at the same time is their utmost ignorance about
> computing history or even early computers. ...
I don't find this very surprising. It's just a special case of the fact that
few young people know much about history. And the fact that they know so
little about the country's history is a far more serious matter than that they
know so little about the history of computing.
That said, I've run into a number of young people who definitely are
interested. On the PLATO system at Cyber1.org there are a number of them. One
is a CS professor who teaches a course about computer games, and has brought
the PLATO multi-user games that date back to the 1970s into that class.
Another is a small business tech owner/engineer who has made himself into one
of the world's top experts on the PLATO plasma terminals -- which are older
than he is.
paul
