“Mid-Century Entitled”?
Exactly. See also the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam-War protest movements.
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Yup.
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Didn’t they used to call them “fact-checker”?
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Go and look at the ages of the people involved in ARPANET and the early internet. Vint Cerf is silent generation, Bob Kahn is silent generation, Leonard Kleinrock is silent generation, Paul Baran was silent generation, Bob Taylor was silent generation, Larry Roberts was silent generation, Wesley Clark was silent generation, Donald Davies was borderline greatest/silent generation. I could carry on all day.
The boomers were standing on the shoulders of giants. They deserve credit for popularising the information age, but they provably did not invent it.
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And all were popularising what already existed. OK, Metcalfe invented ethernet, but that was several years after the creation of the internet.
I can give the invention of practical personal computers to the boomers, but I won’t rewrite history for their egos.
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Terms Of Service are everything
Mussolini was always on about how the Other was the source of all Italy’s problems, and Hitler admired and emulated Il Duce
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This… building the modern landscape for computing took generations, from the days of Ada Lovelace and Babbage to today…
Let’s not forget that programming, which is a high status job dominated by white men used to be considered grunt work that was “boring” number crunching done by women called computers!
Also… another silent gen who contributed to our understanding of computing, Grace Hopper!
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I have to chime in here. Cray!
Also…my dad. Born in 1937, I made playing cards out of old FORTRAN cards as a very small child.
I never met Cray but I got to see his machines when I was small, although the only thing that I really remember is going to Daddy’s work that one time.
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And Lynn Conway, who people tried to write out of history because of transphobia.
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I’m not familiar with her! Thanks! Sad, yet unsurprising, that her contributions have been buried…
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Her later contributions weren’t buried, VLSI was critical to processor development in the 70s and 80s. She was stealth about being transgender though, as she didn’t want to re-experience what happened to her at IBM. She only came out in the late 90s when someone made the connection (as part of an article on an IBM supercomputer, not maliciously) that Lynn Conway and [dead name] were the same person.
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Institutionalized Mentality might work; a term describing those who so have become so entrenched in the societal status quo to which they’ve been indoctrinated that it is extremely difficult for them to think or behave differently.
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I saw that she got fired from IBM, which sucks (but again, not surprising, as this is an issue still today for trans folk).
Sounds like she was still forced to be out, malicious or not. Sounds like it was out of ignorance, at least.
But over all, I’m liking your focus here on connecting the developments of the war/immediate post war period to the rise of later technologies… I think it also reminds us of the important role that the public sector played in these developments, too, which is way too often downplayed when we talk about the micro-computing revolution in the 70s/80s.
I like this. It gets at a mindset that can’t see past the ideology in favor of the historical reality.
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Say what they will about Stephen King’s writing, the man can turn an apt phrase.
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I’ve always enjoyed his writing, honestly. There are plenty who are more elegant, but he gets the job done, mostly.
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Same here; though hardly “perfect” he spins a good yarn, usually.
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There’s a very good reason he’s so super-successful: King really is good at writing engaging horror yarns.
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