Wired did a great report on the 25th Anniversary of WarGames.
The trip down memory lane reminded me of the good ol' days. 5.25" floppy disks, 60-pound magnetic drum drives that stored a whole megabyte of data, and acoustic couplers.
I can't say that WarGames got me into computing. My Osborne 1 running CP/M was already functional when it came out. A home version of Space Invaders was a nightly must-do. What that movie did however was make hackers cool. It highlighted the potential of security flaws and back doors, and opened many people to the notion that computers could communicate with one another over a phone line.
I think also "Good evening Professor Falken, would you like to play a game?" become one of the most over-used welcome banners to home-brew linux boxes of the early 90's.
Looking back on 25 years of technology evolution from what was then a futuristic view of military technology yields a pretty impressive "then and now" list. What I starting thinking about though is: are we really where we could/should be?
What if Apple and Microsoft collaborated instead of competed? If Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, and others only created open standards of technology upon which to base new capabilities?
What if Corporate executives saw a higher value in IT to fund larger, more progressive expansion and evolution programs?
Should we be at a point where cars so fly, transporters are real, and pervasive, high-speed bandwidth is available to everyone?
Sometimes I just wonder if technological advancement gave way to capitalism.
There are three very different visions of the future painted by Star Trek, Star Wars, and Dune (I had to include that one - steampunk meets space folding is way too cool!). Makes me wonder which future we are heading towards and when we'll be there.
Who knows - I just hope that even if we don't become an all-loving co-developing society, the historical documents we produce will encourage other civilizations to do as we say, not as we do.
What do you think?
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Competition is good
Well now you've made me go out and add WarGames to my Netflix queue.
You ask....
I would suggest that if everyone had "just cooperated" we might not be as far as we are. It's the capitalism, the potential to make billions of dollars, that drives companies like Nortel, Cisco and Avaya to invest billions in R&D.
If there were no differentiation there would be much less profit potential, and as a result fewer dollars going into the R&D and innovation that we have today.
As you can see, I have a very "capitalism is good" attitude. :)