And by “the family,” I mean the computer tech community.
And by “a death,” I mean a loss of sorts.
We’ve had a few recently.
- Douglas Engelbart pases away: On July 3, 2013, Douglas Engelbart died at 88. Known for his famous, waaay ahead of the (tech) curve “The Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart helped change the way we thought/think about/interacted with computers and, well – frankly – information.
- AltaVista goes offline: On July 8, 3013, AltaVista – once the go-to site for search – was no more. Bought (apparently) by Yahoo!, it became one of the casualties of Yahoo’s continued effort to make itself viable. I don’t blame the company, but it’s still sad: Before Google, there was AltaVista – really, the first search engine that was powerful. (Inktomi – which powered HotBot – was cool for a year or two).
- WebTV death sentence announced: In early July, Microsoft announced that its WebTV property (now called MSN TV) would be shuttered Sept. 30, 2013. I was never a fan of WebTV, but I had to deal with WebTV customers for the web property I was working for in the very late 1990s, and boy, did the folks who had WebTV love it. Mainly (from my conversations), male retirees, but they had no use for a computer, and if other sites worked on their WebTV, then dammit!, so should our site (they had a point…). Yet WebTV never really caught on – at the time I was dealing with the WebTV customers, our site was getting more traffic from Lynx – a text-based browser (mainly *nix) – than WebTV. Whatever. In a short while, it’ll join Netscape, Mosaic and other broswers in software heaven. But honestly – if you heard this announcement, wasn’t your first thought, “Wait – WebTV’s still around??”
- PCWorld magazine exits prints: In another one of those “it’s still around?” moments, PCWorld magazine has announced that the August 2013 issue will be its last print edition, as it focuses on its website and digital edition. No surprise, but just the end of an era. PCW was the biggest of the computer magazines, and lasted way longer than most could have expected. Does anyone under 45 or so even recognize IDG or Ziff-Davis as magazine publishers?*
The computer world is relatively young. Whether you mark its beginning in the 1940s with ENIAC and Bletchly Park – WWII efforts, or the advent of Unix/C in the early 1970s (and resulting mainframes/heavy iron), or even the advent of the personal computer/internet in 1980s & 1990s – the computer industry is young.
While the industry is growing like kudzu, it still takes some time to where it’s so old that one notices the passing of entrenched players, be they tech, software, people or protocols (remember GOPHER??). We’re getting to that critical mass, which is why the passings noted above are, well, notable.
* Cynical bonus questions: Does anyone under 45 recognize what physical magazines are/were? Do they read same as dead-tree editions?
I dunno. Do we have the beginnings of the next “The Good Wife”?