Comment by jambalaya8
12 hours ago
It isn't only the decay. People change. Who you were online at age 23 and 30 and almost definitely 39 is bound to be vastly different as your priorities and real life relationships change (like marriages, etc).
And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.
In the late 80s I was working at Rabbit Software in Malvern PA (they made IBM 3270 terminal emulator software). I used to car pool to work from Phila. with a brilliant woman who was a lot older than me, and had a solid lifetime of IBM mainframe experience. I was a Unix hacker with just a few years under my belt.
We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.
Back in 1984 George Lewis apparently did a stint at IRCAM, culminating in an electro-acoustic performance with three Apple IIe's connected by MIDI to three DX7s. I'd bet his conversations with the IRCAM directors were similarly limited!
Hey, speaking of ircam, does anyone know how to contact the legendary jojo (Joseph Francis, francis@ircam.fr)? I was just asking FJ!!! about him, and he thought he was last seen in LA.
Please jojo, if you can see this, send me email at don@donhopkins.com -- I'd love to catch up, reminisce, and talk about how to apply some of those brilliant user interface design ideas in this modern age! The time has come for XBorges.
"Le Jojo: Fresh 'n' Clean, speaking out to the way you want to live today; American - All American; doing, a bit so, and even more so."
Jojo on UI:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-o...
XBorges.
One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions.
Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.