Content area
Full Text
The title of this month's column, as any lover of science fiction can tell you, is lifted, with a slight twist, from a Robert Heinlein time-travel classic, "All You Zombies-," a strange, wonderful, twisty short story. The history of the personal computer era is also a strange, wonderful, twisty short story, with characters who seem to die and get properly interred only to reappear some time later with dirt beneath their nails. This month is about some of those zombies.
Never do yesterday what should be done tomorrow.
-Robert Heinlein
By the way, I've dropped some quotes throughout the column, like the one above. They're all from that Heinlein story. They are, at best, marginally relevant to the surrounding material, but they constitute a thread that runs through the column. Several other, more substantive threads twist through this story, so to keep from getting tangled up, let's get a firm grip on both ends of the bundle.
One end of the bundle of threads is the world of technology today, and you know what that's like. Here's one snapshot:
A few weeks ago I attended the O'Reilly Open Source Conference while doing my best to stay on top of MacWorld Expo, which was taking place at the same time. One conference was a gathering of revolutionaries, the other a revival meeting. I context-switched from one to the other: In an age of lightweight portable computers, fast modems, and live webcasts, it's not hard to be in two places at the same time. My portable looked bulky, though, in this age of the Palm device, and my need to find a phone connection to get online no doubt seemed hopelessly quaint to the cellularly enabled.
The other end of all the threads, arbitrarily selected for the purposes of this story, is 1980. Remember 1980?
If you had a PC in 1980 you probably bought it from Apple, Tandy/Radio Shack, Atari, or Commodore, unless it was one of the dozens of S-100 bus systems. And you thought the new Apple III looked like the machine to win over corporate America to the virtues of small computers you really did, even if six months later you'd deny you ever believed it had a chance.
For an operating...