A Walk Through Dead Tech Lane

The computing industry has come a long way, but it seems parallel to human evolution, there's no end in sight, just continuous change for the better. Computers and their related technologies were ironically devices for the purpose of World War 2 that found more productive use in the academe and on the consumer's hands.

Even the internet as we know it was designed for the US military requirement of a network that automatically re-routes network packets when a network node was unreachable (could have been obliterated by a nuclear bomb attack, seriously this is the idea behind TCP/IP). Worse than the body count of war atrocities, there were many computer technologies that were left for dead or put aside considered obsolete but whose contribution to the advancement of our computing user experience deserve revisiting.

Operating Systems Utopia: Alternative, Academic Systems and the System of the Future

My background with and enthusiasm for free and open source operating systems started when, back in college here and then here, I needed to use a computer and there's only MS-DOS (and its GUI for your personal confuser, Windows) together with its quirks and virus bandwagon, not to mention the agony of inconvenience they bring. As I mentioned in my previous article, I learned to program computer viruses and realized there's no creative, social or educational benefit from it. Frustrated, I pined for the day I can have an operating environment that's impervious to computer viruses, can run multiple applications, is free (haven't yet imagined it's source code is also accessible) and most importantly, shouldn't crash (at least compared to DOS and Windows that pulls this stunt on a regular basis).