Yearning For the Yesterdays

Old memories bring tears to my eyes, as Michael Moritz shows a slide of the first wooden Apple computer, in Sequoia's "Israeli Internet Cocktail".
The event was not about networking nor about fundraising, at least not for me, at least not this time. Moritz, probably today's most appreciated high-tech investor in the world, brought up a slide of Steve Jobs as a QA engineer at 17, with Steve Wozniack, both inspecting some unknown tech thingy in Jobs' hands. Yes, there were some other slides from the old days, like the first Cisco router, the first Pong arcade machine, the "Archon" game box, and more, but this photo of the two enthusiastic techies was enough to get me all mushy.
Most of you probably bought your first computer in the late 1990's or later, but those of you who were the "geeks" in the 1980's can surely relate (I have no idea what it was like in the 1970's or earlier).
It was back then when you were walking among people, anxious to talk to someone about the new Sierra game (Frogger?), your new 20MB hard drive, or that you got a Boney-M song on a wav file. You wanted to talk to someone about how DOS is such a powerful operating system, that you got a 16 color monitor, your 2,400bps modem, or the new version of Norton Commander.
So many people, and none to share it with. You were a geek. You were speaking Chinese. You are something to keep distance from.
I yearn for those days. For the thrill that gave me the sound of my hard drive when I turned my computer on, the rush I got just by reading news about Keving Mitnick on some dark BBS, or by successfully running an assembly code segment that made the keyboard lights dance.
I yearn for the days when "computer people" were those who, like Jobs and Wozniack at 17, got a rush just from inspecting an unknown tech thingy.
And I bet I'm not the only one.

Have a happy Purim,

Boaz.