I'm 43. Here's me in 1983 with my first computer at age 11. I
got to play Zork, War Games was favorite movie. They called me
Whiz Kid. Ran rings around the teacher in Computer classes in
1986, got online in 1989 and never looked back. I watched the
world become "nerds like me" after going through the period
where simply having a computer and watched most this boy's
dreams about The Future come true, although I'm still waiting
for a LOT OF stuff that that boy down there was thinking about
while teaching himself BASIC. [you never forget your first]
I breath computer and I breath Internet; Part my intuition.
At present I can fix any computer, I know what a smartphone is
doing while it's doing it, I see every letter I type traveling
across the 'net and all of their connections in an ongoing mini
movie that plays as I type... visualize the electrons doing
their thing in what certainly feels like real time, although my
cogsci knows all about the time delays between reality and our
perceptions of such...
Computer Science at college was learning future AI theory,
limitations of neural networking and where it might go,
complexity theory and chaos theory in 1990/91 at College among
other things,
I knew people just like that - the ones that hadn't worked on
computers in 3 years - - Pure Computer Science. They could tell
you how to build a computer out of toothpicks and gumballs after
waking them up in the middle of the night yet they didn't care
much for actual computers because they "just weren't there yet"
- their expectations of computers were more advanced than
anything then, or even now 25 years later.
To see the same kind of respect and love for our predecessors
from someone who was born while my modem was making its very
first 300 bps squeaks into an unknown world...
someone with the same kind that I have for systems and
processes... writing words I could have written... was a really
nice thing to wake up to and see.
Thank you smile emoticon
I'm responding mostly from the entusiasm of this boy down below.
In a strong sense, he's really the one that was impressed,
looking up to a version of his future self, someone of like
mind, and hoping one day to be as smart as all that.
