As I See It: Then and Now

by Victor Rozek

Combine selective memory with too much beer, and you're apt to start whining about the good old days. That's exactly what we were doing, my friend Mike and I, having a few beers at our favorite oasis and waxing nostalgic about the good things of our youth that had been replaced with inferior imitations. We were in full delusional agreement about societal decay when Mike started expounding on programming.

Not so Mike. But who knows. Maybe his perspective, not unlike his liver, was getting slightly pickled over time. He took another swig of beer and started peeling off bits of label from the bottle as he reminisced about the days when computers were as novel as rockets and it took the right stuff to fly them.

"I fell in love with computers because they had mystery and stature," he said. "They were important. Like aircraft carriers supported by a battle group, they had rows of supporting disk drives, tape drives, and printers. And a swarm of people to minister to their every need. They were enigmatic monoliths with blinking eyes--the nerve center of the company, protected behind thick glass, but also proudly available for viewing. And not just anybody could work behind that glass.

"It's not the same any more," Mike said. "Everyone has a computer these days and every 15-year-old kid with bad skin is a hacker. Computers don't have any real stature today; they're just a bunch of electronic components stuffed into a box so small you can hold it in your lap. Can you imagine holding an MVS system in your lap? It would crush you like an ant. These days computers come in pastel colors. Buy one to match your throw rug. Then, in a couple of years, it will be useless," he said, shaking his head. "You sure as hell can't fix it, and since it has no trade-in value, you end up tossing it. Not much different from a disposable camera or a washing machine. And everybody has one."

"That's a bad thing?" I asked.

"Well, it's not bad that everyone has a computer," he replied, "but most people don't even know how they work. And don't care."

"Why should they? People drive cars," I said, "and most of them don't know how cars work, either."

"Maybe it's just that people used to have more respect for a device capable of changing the world."

"Are you kidding?" I asked. "People only say they want the tools to change the world. Really, they'd rather have the world trained so they don't have to bother changing it at all. And that's just what computers do: They permit the world to run fairly smoothly without requiring too much of our attention."

Mike just shrugged. Since I clearly wasn't getting his attention, I tried the bartender and signaled for another round.

"I miss real computer rooms," Mike said. "Our system is stuck in an old storage closet, for God's sake. I miss raised floors with miles of cables underneath, entwined like hibernating snakes. I miss the glass wall that separated us from mere mortals. I miss people peering in with envy, entranced by the mysterious blinking lights, watching giant tape spools whirring back and forth, and listening to the drumming of printers, big as dumpsters, rattling out acres of greenbar."

"They weren't peering in with envy," I said. "They were just curious to see how long a human being could last in the air-conditioned freeze without protective clothing."

"I miss the big iron," Mike said. "Those were systems you knew were important because they arrived with pallet-loads of manuals. What do you get these days, a fat brochure? In those days you had to know a lot of stuff just to get near a computer, and you could tell the stature of a programmer by the number of manuals he kept and the size of the bookcase in his office."

"Size is everything," I offered.

"And systems engineers were gods, not just idiots who can point and click on the word INSTALL. You know, I even miss punched cards. When I first started coding, the complexity of a program could be measured by the sheer volume of cards. I'd need a cardboard box just to carry my programs to the operations center."

Mike looked down at the pile of label fragments. I could almost see the memories, like punched cards, flashing through the sorter of his consciousness.

"You ever drop one of those card decks?" I asked, momentarily interrupting his remembrance. "It took about three weeks to get them back in the right order, and then you'd always get one out of sequence and your program wouldn't run."

But Mike ignored me. He was lost in his own virtual fantasy: 26 years old again, a super coder with drop-proof hands, proud of the size of his bookcase. Probably the only thing he ever dropped in his life was his first wife. Maybe she wasn't impressed by his large bookcase.

"I wrote an inventory system that weighed about 12 pounds," Mike remembered proudly. "Hell, it was better than most of the junk out there today."

"Nostalgia will let you believe things like that," I said.

Mike thought about that for awhile, scraping the last bits of label off his bottle. Finally he looked up and said, "What I miss most is the bigness and importance of it all. In those days there were relatively few of us. We were special people, working in a unique environment, with equipment that was remarkable for its time. There was an excitement to it that's hard to communicate to people who didn't experience it. You knew you were part of something important and leading-edge, maybe a little like working on the early space flights before the Space Shuttle became a taxi."

I pondered that for a bit, nodding my head. "When I was a kid," I told him, "I remember my parents had a few friends over one night, and after dinner the men sat around drinking and pining for the good old days. I got tired of listening and left the room with a rude exasperated sigh that the young reserve for their foolish elders. My mother stopped me in the kitchen and said, 'You don't understand it yet, but most of life is memory, and God gave us memories so that we could have roses in December.'"

"Maybe that's enough?" Mike said.