[penguicon-general] A couple of thoughts about programming

[Rob Landley]

On Monday 30 April 2007 11:28 pm, Jeff Hanson wrote:
> I think some old systems presentations may be of interest to an older
> general-geek crowd.  Could do PC (C64, Apple I-III, Atari, TI, TRS-80)
> and consoles (Atari, Coleco, Magnavox).  A swap-meet perhaps?

It would be nice if we had a place to set up some old systems so people could 
see them in action.

My computer history panel this year went three.  I feel bad about that, but I 
could have done an hour just on the commodore 64.  Computer history could 
easily be an entire college major.  (I actually tried to study this at UT, 
but the one course they had on the topic filled up with a longish waiting 
list, and talking to the professor convinced me it wasn't going to cover 
anything I hadn't already studied.)

We could do a computer history _track_ if we had the rooms for it.  At 3.0 we 
brought in Peter Salus (one of the world's leading experts on the history of 
Unix).

If we bounce an invite off Eric we might be able to get one of the early Bell 
Labs Unix guys, perhaps Doug McIlroy?  (I invited Dennis Ritchie to year... 
2?  But he wouldn't make plans more than about 3 months ahead, and our GoH 
list filled up long before then.)

Rob