A different kind of Walter? :-)

[Walter Bright]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> 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!

I do. The only unlucky part is he died before I was born, I never got to 
meet him. I'd give a lot just to be able to spend an afternoon with him.

When I was in high school, nerd was a perjorative term. But I've grown 
out of all that nonsense, and am happy to be what I am.

> 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.

Everyone has feet of clay.

> 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 so seriously outdated it's unusable.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!

I still have my original IBM PC. With an 8080 chip!

> 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!

If I was born in the 1800's, I'd be happily immersed in designing 
locomotives. In the 1930's, I'd be building high performance aircraft. 
Every decade has its cool nerdly stuff to work on!