Don’t know much about history

by Esther Schindler

The OS/2 community is trapped in present time. While the question, "Do we have a future?" is a debate best left to "advocacy" sessions and late night beer hall discussions, I fear that the larger problem is that we're losing our past. That is, we don't have a clearly recorded history, a group memory that makes it easy to know and understand where we came from.

This point was forcibly brought home to me during WarpTech, when the right answer to a Warped Jeopardy question was "Who is David Barnes?" The audience participant didn't know the answer, although Barnes has been off the OS/2 scene for only about four years. While that may seem like eons in computing years, Barnes was as much a recognizable spokesman as OS/2 ever had--an icon (or desktop object?) to a large community of people. For his identity to disappear so thoroughly in a few short years is a disheartening event.

Group memory

The problem, naturally, isn't limited to OS/2. The entire computer industry suffers from a lack of context. With new computer users buying a "first machine" every year, few people will know, or care, how the PC on their desktop evolved. Though it may dismay us old-timers, most of them don't need to know. They're better off learning how to back up their data, or reading an application's manual not that they engage in those activities, either.

However, even if the mainstream computer user doesn't need to know his PC's genealogy, the information is available. It's easy to find a wide variety of moments frozen in time. Pick up a dusty book on Windows 3.1 "secrets." Find an issue of PC Magazine circa 1991. Read a good biography, such as Steven Manes' and Paul Andrews' Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry-And Made Himself the Richest Man in America (which I think is an immensely fair-minded book). Buy a copy of the recently reissued Fire in the Valley (www.fireinthevalley.com) by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, a history of the PC's early years that I enthusiastically recommend to anyone that will listen. (If you ever doubted that this industry has always "made it up as they went along," this book will disabuse you of the notion.)

Another way to remember "how we used to think" is to search an older CompuServe forum for a generic topic like "consulting." You'll find archived message threads from, say, 1987, which will give you a clear picture of what we thought was important, back then, and how we viewed the industry's future. (Not that much has changed. We argued about PC versus Mac, vi versus emacs, and the comparative merits of laser printer brands.)

David who?

But OS/2 users have relatively few resources of this nature. The last "learn about OS/2 book" was released four years ago. While there are way too many abandoned OS/2 Web sites, with the "frozen" context of "not updated for two years," none of them would have given our hapless game show contestant information about David Barnes, much less what David Barnes meant to the community.

Fame is always fleeting, and I'm not sure how much David personally cares about our fond memories of him saying, "I don't think so!"—but those incidents should be recorded on more than the fallible memories of us OS/2 oldsters. It's not just that we forget, but our later experiences cloud the way we perceive the past. (If you need an example to prove the point, just ask any bitter divorced individual to explain how much and how completely he'd once been in love with his ex-wife.)

Frighteningly enough, the longest-running journal of the OS/2 community is (gulp) extended attributes. In some way, if we don't record it, it didn't happen. I'm not particularly glad of this fact; it's way too much like finding out that, after six months on the job, one has seniority at the company.

It does, however, raise the importance of our mutual responsibility to report "what is happening" to and in the OS/2 user community... along with the status of drivers, applications, and the like.

Making it happen

That reminds me, too, that public acknowledgements and thank-yous are more than gracious appreciation of a volunteer's time. They're keepsakes of special moments that, without public recognition, may fade into obscurity.

So, although we've devoted a whole feature to WarpTech in this issue, I'd like to point out a few of my own vivid memories of the event—and of the people who made them possible. In no particular order, I'll remember...

• Burke Swanson--on one hour of sleep inside of 24. Not only did Burke carefully plan audio-visual facilities that wouldn't fail (he had two backup projectors and two backup data displays), but he wouldn't go home until everything worked perfectly.
• Jerry Stuckle, installing the Visual Age software development tools at midnight—followed by a download of about 76MB to add fixpacks. Just so he could volunteer his time, the next morning, to show WarpTech attendees how object oriented programming works.
• Craig Greenwood, holding up that first valuable door prize during the Friday luncheon—an AOL CD with 500 free hours! Warring with that laughter is my mental picture of Craig looking around the exhibit hall with exhaustion and pride battling for preeminence. Craig, as WarpTech's captain, never lost his temper despite a crew of unruly volunteers who had the silly idea that earning a living or seeing one's family should take priority over WarpTech responsibilities.
• Randell Flint's face at the rodeo when the Jeopardy music theme began to play. After he'd downloaded every possible variation on that jingle, subjected his coworkers to the torture of listening to each one dozens of times, and relentlessly practiced the Warped Jeopardy presentation for hours... well, it was obviously karma for the Rawhide rodeo to play the same music during a lull between the calf-roping and the bull-riding.
• Dinner with Frans Morre, several days after WarpTech, on his way home from a tour of Arizona. Or perhaps a more graphic memory will be the 84 email messages he exchanged with Bill Schindler on the Monday before WarpTech—when Frans’ hard drive crashed eight hours before the Proceedings CD image was slated to go to the CD duplication service. (Fortunately, the service was able to give us 24 hours grace and the CDs were ready on time, but there were a few desperate hours.)
• Richard Klemmer, volunteering to run the Phoenix OS/2 Society's booth at Warpstock, this fall.
• A room full of user group members, carefully smacking mailing labels onto copies of the magazine and, come to think of it, mostly lined up waiting for me to slice-and-dice the sheets of labels.
• The full bag of speaker gifts I started with... and the bag, empty, at the end of the weekend. Those 30 windchimes are my personal symbol of the time and energy that the presenters donated to the OS/2 community. Not only did they come to the event at their own expense from as far away as Australia, but most of them spent hours putting together slides, researching their material, and standing up in front of a room full of strangers... all to help someone else figure out how to make sense of a technical topic.
• Two attendees, whom I don't know at all, talking in a hallway. One said, "Oh! I've had to solve that problem, too. Let me help you." Putting those two people in the same place at the same time is the essence of what I believe WarpTech to be about—and I'm happy to have participated in a small way to making that happen.

These are a few of my memories. I'm glad for the opportunity to share them with you.