huibert-aalbers.com
My home away from home
Lost memories
I was promoted a couple of weeks ago. This was something totally unexpected but it turns out that I am now just a step away from becoming a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, which just a month ago seemed like an impossible goal to achieve. It won’t be easy but I will certainly do my best to try to reach that position.
The best part of the promotion is that I got a larger, closed office. When you spend as many hours as I do at work, you want to feel at home at work. I therefore decided to decorate the walls by hanging pictures of all the tech luminaries that have left their mark on the computer industry as well as the products they brought to market. In a way,this is my personal Computer Hall of Fame.
Well, it turns out that this is much easier said than done. If you look on the web you will not easily find many pictures or stories from our recent past. Try for example looking for images of Sir Clive Sinclair (the man who brought us the ZX 81 and the ZX Spectrum computers) and you will be disappointed by the results. Same story for Sir Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad, who brought us the CPC 464 back in the eighties. You may think that this only happens to brit aristocrats, but you would be wrong. I tried to find a picture of former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner and could only find a small picture on IBM’s corporate site. Even worse, I could only find two poor quality pictures of Adam Osborne, the man who brought us the first commercially available portable computer, and passed away just five years ago. There isn’t much information about him in Wikipedia either.
In general, most companies will carry current pictures of their top executives but except for a small number of honorable exceptions (IBM and H-P mainly) they don’t seem to care much about preserving their history. The situation is obviously much worse for dead companies like Netscape, Amstrad or Atari which do not have curators interested in preserving their legacy.
With the Internet focusing mainly on recent events, if we are not careful, in a couple of years we will have lost a large part of our recent history. There are a couple of nice sites that deserve praise, for example folklore.org which extensively documents the history of how the original Macintosh was built, but that is obviously not enough. It would be nice if there was a place for all of us to collaborate on preserving the exciting stories of the computing revolution. On wikia there are 28,586 Star Trek articles, but there is nothing comparable for the computer history. That is really sad.
August 5th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I agree with you.
As Robert Heinlein (1907?1988, american science fiction writer, said: “A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.”