A different kind of Walter? :-)

[Georg Wrede]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 0ffh wrote:
>> Davidl wrote:
>>
>>> i would rather call it BrightOS
>>
>> You can find a lot of Brights here:
>>
>>   http://www.the-brights.net/
> 
> Eh, never heard of those guys. My lineage is replete with nerds. 
> Consider my grandfather's favorite picture of himself, with his telescope.

Well, consider yourself lucky!

My grandfather's _non_-favorite picture was at a Baccarat table, in 
Wiesbaden or Monte Carlo (nobody seems to remember which), where he 
spent every holiday for 40 years, meticulously (and unwillingly) losing 
all of his fortune. When he died, it was the maid who owned even the 
furniture. A bit of a surprise to my Dad and his brother.

And yes, my father is and my grandfather was an incurable nerd. Maybe at 
the casino tables the women pretended not to see this. My Dad bought 
himself an Osbourne-1 at 50, without even a hint of a serious reason or 
excuse for buying it. Twenty-five years ago this was unheard of, 
especially when you could buy a sub-compact car for the same price. Last 
year he gave it to me. Alongside with the Atari Portfolio, whic is now 
so seriously outdated it's unusable. But hey, it runs MS-DOS.

Contrast that with my HP LX-95 pocket-size PC-compatible, a late 80's 
design (also Dad's surplus, since he bought the LX-200), which 
essentially was an entire 8080 IBM PC with 1MB mem and PC-cards as "hard 
drives". Even today it beats the pants off of smart phones, 
communicators and palms, when it comes to sheer raw utility. The 
calendar, the spreadsheet, the database and the word processor are just 
unbelievably intuitive while providing advanced features. Connect the 
thing to a modem, and you can edit your /etc/passwd like you were there. 
And the bundled RPN (+arith!) calculator let's you do off-the-hip math 
that nobody with an ordinary calculator could. And solving and graphs!

Sometimes I feel that the world is not advancing. And computer keyboards 
are still laid out for the illiterate, with Caps Lock where Control 
should be. If we nerds were as aggressive as the neuro normals, we'd 
take over the world in two weeks.

Oh well, let's just say I'm lucky I got born late enough to enjoy 
computers for most of my life!