Steven Frank on the Retro Room →

Humans have short memories. One of the things I hope to gain from my collection is an ongoing reminder of how I became me today. How we, as an industry, got from there to here. Perspective. I don’t want to live in the past, but I don’t want to forget the lessons learned either. I don’t want to lose sight of cool ideas that were just starting to bud when they were shoved rather brutally aside by the express train of progress. It’s all too easy to do as we hurtle along.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this, and I think Steven has done a great job explaining the reason that so many of us nerds love machines and technologies past. I feel it must be more difficult for a software developer to stand up and take a breath in the constant wash of new and evolving technologies. As a network engineer, the software, hardware, and protocols with which I interact on a daily basis change relatively slowly, and I still prefer to configure them via the command-line (though, sometimes I wonder how long that will go on. Probably just until Cisco or Juniper can make a decent, usable UI).