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| Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"? |
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| CatalinaWOW:
Yep. Today's folks can hardly comprehend that at first, booting a computer meant entering a loader program by setting the bits of memory using switches on the front of a computer. This wasn't just the hobby world, the minicomputers like the PDP series and HP 1000 series worked that way too. It wasn't as big a problem as it might seem because core memory was non-volatile and you usually didn't have to do all that switch flipping every day. And while it would have been practical by the time the Altair and others came out to put that loader in a ROM, the people buying those computers had cut their teeth on those commercial machines and wanted their home computer to be a "real" computer. It took a few years to grow out of that mindset. |
| tpowell1830:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on November 07, 2018, 01:10:24 am ---Unless we talk about actual sect gurus, calling oneself a "guru" is kind of tongue-in-cheek anyway, as "guru" often bears a slightly negative image. I don't think that someone really full of themselves would really call themselves a guru. --- End quote --- Yes, it's strange how the language morphs and evolves. I remember, at the time, that a "guru" was some sort of mystic from the middle east and was associated with achieving nirvana through budhism. The "gurus" came to the US in a wave associated with the Beatles, who, at the time, had visited the middle east, (I think India?) and had their mind expanded by smoking hemp, tasking LSD and listening to these gurus explain how to achieve inner peace and achieve the ultimate nirvana. This was adopted by the "hippies" of the time and, along with LSD and other mind bending drug use, opened their arms to these gurus of the middle east and India. There was a tremendous influx of these gurus into these sects in the west, but mostly to the US. EDIT: Nowadays, gurus are synonymous with someone who is an expert. END EDIT So, at the time, any mention of anyone being a "guru", a middle eastern or Indian holy man came to mind (and citars would play in the mind), and for the more conservative folks, this was somewhat of a joke. This is why Don tried to depict himself, jokingly, as a "holy man" or, in a word, "guru". I read Don's articles in the magazines, when I could get them, but always thought that this was a bit out of reach for me at the time because I was a poor young father, who had no money and no time for hobbies. Without the very simplest of measuring instruments available to me, I could not pursue this interest. I would still read the articles and wanted very much to get the devices and experiment, though. Don was a force for young people interested in the hobby, or in professional electronics design. In my book, he was one of the very few friends of hobbyists at the time and opened up avenues that otherwise would not have been available to someone who was unable to go to college and study electronics. Again, those who are young have missed out on the most important period in the history of electronics and that Don was a pioneer. In a way, I feel very sad that the young folks of today did not experience the revolution that was occurring back then. I know that I felt it in my bones at the time. I am not trying to take away anything from today's advances in the industry, but anyone in that time period who happened to understand logic circuits and also happened upon a PDP-8 can not grasp the significance. This was just my take on history, some of you may have experienced it differently. |
| james_s:
At least throughout most of my life, "guru" has been a common term to describe anyone who knows enough to be one of those experts who everyone goes to for information. It doesn't have to be the original definition of a far east mystic or whatever. |
| tpowell1830:
--- Quote from: james_s on November 08, 2018, 05:51:05 am ---At least throughout most of my life, "guru" has been a common term to describe anyone who knows enough to be one of those experts who everyone goes to for information. It doesn't have to be the original definition of a far east mystic or whatever. --- End quote --- I guess I would ask if you were around at that time, because that is when guru came to be synonymous with expert, not before. I do agree that Don is/was an expert in the '70s and '80s, but in the context of the time that he was doing his best work in the '70s, the context that I was talking about was why he jokingly said he was a guru (or whatever). |
| rhb:
@rstofer I had one encounter with an 8800B in response to an ad in the student newspaper. It turned out to be someone I already knew. I sat with him and a couple of others and we struggled and failed to get a simple blinky light loop entered via the front panel. There was a TV typewriter terminal sitting nearby, but there was no interface board available yet. Much less a ROM monitor. For the benefit of younger readers, a ROM monitor is a *very* minimal program that communicates over an RS-232 serial line and allows you to load images by reading from disk by track and sector addressing, dump or modify memory, etc. The standard was a 2 KB ROM. So the same functions as what is now called a BIOS courtesy of Gary Kildall's influence and IBM's naming. But with the benefit that it had a command line which IBM did not provide. @tpowell1830 Excellent summary of the times. Those were heady days because all manner of small things were happening which were changing the world forever, even though most people didn't realize it. And none of us could imagine that one day for $5K (1970 $) you could buy a machine with a terabyte of core and several teraflops of performance that could sit under your desk and not cook you. Don's business name is Synergetics. Don saw better than most how the individual bits would fall together and the whole would be far greater than the pieces. And how many million seller authors will answer the phone and talk to random readers about their technical problems? I'm sure he picked up some nice consulting contracts that way. But today someone as successful as Don would have lots of people to screen out 15 year olds and the like. There is a real problem in the tech sector with not knowing history. I have seen the same mistakes made over and over as a new generation came into the workforce. I benefited greatly from reading about the history of computing in the 1940 to 1980 time frame before I got involved. In the early 90's on my first contract job at a major oil company I counted 8 people an hour through my cubicle with questions. That made writing software rather difficult. So I went to my supervisor to discuss it. We arranged that a regular employee would prescreen questions. The situation was so bad that I would often say, "Obviously you have me confused with someone who knows what they are doing." I'm quite sure that if someone had referred to me as a "guru" in my hearing I'd have started doing some elaborate parody of a 1970's guru. I can do a wicked parody of Oral Roberts or Garner Ted Armstrong style preaching. "I want you to reach out, put your hand on the seismic section. Feel the power of the vibrations saying, "I've got oil. I'm going to make you rich." Can I have a witness? Brother, will you testify for those who have not yet felt the tingles and don't believe?" |
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