Null references (oh no, not again!)

[Georg Wrede]

Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> Denis Koroskin escribió:
>> On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:20:22 +0300, Georg Wrede wrote:
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> Georg Wrede wrote:
>>>>> I've still got this computer, in mint condition!
>>>>  I designed, soldered, and wire-wrapped together my first computer 
>>>> around a 6800 microprocessor, wrote the rom software, etc. Those 
>>>> days are long gone.
>>>
>>> Alas, they are! Today kids won't do that with a quad-core...
>>>
>>> Incidentally, I just realized why I've had such a problem with 
>>> hello.d at ~200k. It doesn't fit on a Kaypro floppy!!!
>>>
>>> In the old days one had the OS and dozens of programs on one. I need 
>>> to start thinking outside the floppy ^h^h^h^h^h box.
>>>
>>> (Oh, the last D2 makes a much smaller hello, thanks!)
>>
>> What are you talking about? Is Kaypro some kind of oldish Flash USB 
>> stick? :)
> 
> What's a floppy? :-P

Heh, at the time, every once in a while I kept thinking what life will 
be after the awed year 2000. I imagined a time when the computer I'm 
sitting at will be considered antique, and floppies and many concepts 
totally foreign to that day's youth.

Mobile phones, satellite dishes on rooftops, the "entire knowledge of 
humankind" literally at your fingertips, picture telephony (skype), 
genuine laptop size computers for everyone, on-demand TV (hulu.com), 
satnav for all. And naturally I thought that with all this, people would 
stroll the streets with an eternal smile of techno-bliss and love.

I did not imagine computer viruses, phishing, spam, global recession, 
9/11, oil prices the demise of Soviet Union (not that that's bad like 
everything else here), global warming, pandemics (bird flu, HIV), a 
tsunami killing more than Hiroshima nuke.

And all of a sudden, I'm here. Time flies all too quickly. I wonder what 
the world is like 25 years from now. In the old days we used to think 
about this a lot more than today, because the year 2000 was such a big 
deal. ("A historical change of millennium, that only one in 50 
generations get to even see!")

At my company we even had a data entry machine that used 8 inch floppies 
(and not the 5 1/4 ones). Bet not many of you guys have even touched 
one. :-)