Playing With Technology
Been playing around a lot with tech lately. Somehow I re-embroiled myself in implementing some solutions for a couple of small businesses over the last couple years. I guess it started with a friend that needed to recover an ancient intel/unix system from a crashed drive… So guess who was the only person in a large radius that had a clue?
Moving on… the great thing about open source is not that not much of it isreally “new”, heck I was doing half this stuff (conceptually) in the late 80’s on big iron. The more things change the more they are the same. The great thing is how cheap “big business solutions” are for small business. That and some of the tools are pretty amazing in terms of convenience. Vagrant/Chef has to be the best thing since sliced bread.
All of this playing around got me thinking. Why is it that some platforms/languages/tools generate so much devotion and some don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean popularity or market penetration, I mean that almost all the users of of some platforms/languages/tools are extreme Zelots vs. mere fans or users.
Multics, VM/CMS, Unix, C, emacs, and a few others seem to stick out as the former. I predict that ruby may become one of those few that have a Zelot like following even after it’s time has passed and it’s not “new” anymore. Who knows but I have the same feeling about it as I did for some of my other fond tech memories. We’ll see. Thinkng about some of the good ones got me so teary eyed that I fired up VM/370 over the weekend on hercules regen’d it and then got MVS/TSO, MVT, and a new gen of VM all running under it as virtual machines. Amazing. I even remember alot of 370 assembler. My Core i5 Macbook Pro sure blows the ol’ 3083 into the weeds. It is amazing how efficient the big iron code is even in an emulator. I think the 3083 is the first machine I worked on – that and a Burroughs B6900
More later.
RB