Skip to main content

Triumph of the Nerds Part II

The second part of triumph of the nerds is a documentary of how the first personal computer, as we know it, was born. An interesting story of how a single group of nerds revolutionized the way we work, the way we talk... as a matter of fact, the way they changed everything.

It all started with Intel. Well, everyone tells that they first thought of the PC as a means to say that you thought about it first... but you didn't actually do it. So Intel had everything to make the first PC, they made this things that were used for processing at the time, and had a lot of years doing them. From transistors to microprocessors, they had the expertise no one had, but didn't found a way to making the first PC possible.

Another big giant was IBM, who made a lot of progress in the area and made the first personal computer architecture a reality, but they lacked one thing: an operating system. That's were Microsoft had the shot.

Microsoft was a very little company, but they had the guts to take the challenge: conceive the first operating system, which Bill Gates had already sold to IBM, when he didn't even had it. Lucky for him one if his friends, Tim Paterson was working with operating systems and already had a working version of one that they could use as their first Operating System.

What Microsoft didn't had was the vision that Steve Jobs had for the personal computer, the reach that it could have and he made it a reality. Apple revolutionized everything, making communication between man and computer just a step closer.

What history in computers show us is that there is no absolutes. It's an industry and a passion that is growing everyday at amazing speeds. People like Linus Trovalds show us that we all can be part of the change, no matter how big or how small we are, we all can contribute to the world of tomorrow. So what are we waiting for? We love computers, we love science and we love technology, let's make a change!



Diego Canizales Bollain Goytia 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beating the Averages

This is a review of the reading Beating the Averages by Paul Graham,  which you can read here .   Our resistance as humans to learn new things is expressed in a function named the learning curve. The learning curve represents in a mathematical form of how we learn through time. It accomplishes this by taking into the equation experience with a particular subject or topic and placing it vs learning. In particular, I like this funciton because it represents one of the author's main points: why we tend to prefer what we already know. What this function represents is that we tend to have some resistance to new knowledge. We may apply this resistance through contradicting knowledge that we might already have, namely, experience in a certain field, maybe because it a new paradigm to see things, very different from what we are used to. As we grow older, it becomes harder and harder to change the way we see things. The Paul Graham, the author, expresses this himself, he say...
Post a Comment
Read more

Revenge of the nerds, by Paul Graham.

So, once again we go to Paul Graham and his absolute amazing opinions on lisp. He understands the difficulty in changing the industry, but faces this with a good sense of humor and courage. You can check out his blog entry here . Taking it to the next level So the story goes like this. Michael Phelps went out there to change the world of an olympic sport. And did. Only he and his coaches know what he is doing differently but definitely, he is. Michael Phelps is such a good example because before Phelps, it was very rare to think of a swimmer that could do all the strokes in a competition, from crawl from breast stroke to his olympic record breaking butterfly stroke. In a sense, Phelps is like lisp. Phelps came to the 2004 Athens olympic games as a kid, he was only 19 years old, but everyone knew he had the chance to break the olympic record for 7 gold medals in the same event. He went on it and won 8 of them. So... what is he doing differently than any other swimmer? How long does...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dick Gabriel on Lisp

So this post is going to be about the high and downs of LISP. You can check out the amazing talk that Dick Gabriel gave on LISP history, it's capabilities and what he calls " The winter of LISP" . Go ahead and check it out here . I thinks it's a little bit sad to think about how great LISP is and all the capabilities that it has, and just see it as "God". We can not bring God down to earth so easily. Some of us, may go ahead and try and check it out, and then just think... wow... how the hell didn't I thought about this that way before? It really hasn't been that long since I started learning what LISP is about. Today is about the third week I believe (maybe fourth, I don't know) since I started. And I already feel that this language should be the language of the future. After listening to this guru of LISP research, one of the biggest name in the community, it just made me feel a little dull. Knowing that everything is so cool on LISP, how ...
Post a Comment
Read more