168 168 Never Quit

The Xerox Alto absolutely FASCINATES me. Everything about it, just... HOW? HOW do you run an OS with a foldered file system and a windowed GUI, with Ethernet networking capabilities, driven with a mouse, all on nothing but 7400-series TTL ICs from 1973?!  The CS1 professor I had last semester actually worked on the Xerox Alto. He would always go on about how frustrating it was that the Xerox execs just didn't understand how innovative the machine was. He was there the day Steve Jobs came to visit. He's still a bit bitter over the fact Steve got most of the "innovative" idea that the Macintosh was applauded for from the Alto, a computer which existed 10 years prior to the Macintosh. I was a computer tech for Data point back in the 70's and CTC 2200 ( and later 5500 and 6600) formed the score of their commercial systems.  No way were these a candidate for personal computer use.  These ran a sophisticated programming language, could support about 16 async terminals ...

In 1995 I trained using SGI computers and it wasn't just the hardware that was outrageous, it was also the software and support. At the university that I attended, a SGI super computer about the size of a household refrigerator replaced a Cray super computer that took up a huge space in a building designed for it. Years ago, I found one of these in a storage room at my employer's warehouse, which they once used for their R&D department. They let me take it home and it sat in my living room until 3 years ago when I moved. Probably should have kept it, (like that Commodore PET computer that sat in my garage for a long time) but I ended up giving it away because I was tired of looking at the damn thing and not knowing what to do with it. Back in the day, around  1995 , I worked at Bungee software.  We used an indigo for much of our character creation and animation stuff for the Myth series.  I hated Unix shell but loved the machines capabilities and render features....

When I was in kindergarten, I used to like school and it was really fun, my grades were through the roof. But when it came in high school, especially in the pandemic it became so boring that I had no motivation to go to school and kept telling myself that I wont even need 70% of what we learn in school like studying physics, cube roots, algebra and so much more . When I was 23 I was jobless for more than a year, my mom throwed me out of her house . Then i saw your video at the end of June 2019 , a half year after I lived by myself. I started finishing my school and in about 7 months I'll be finished and I am going to study meteorology at an university to do my dream job. Your video hit me at the hardest time of my life so far and showed me what i need to do, to be happy. I know I'm not finished yet, but the process itself makes me very happy. Thank you! God bless you! I’ve done what I can to try and help him. I have the advocate personality and can really try to help people und...