Before the Web...

There was a time, a brief moment, before the web (BW), but after computers (AC), when hardware ruled, and nerds holstered HP’s, not slide rules, in leather pouches, ready for duel by Reverse Polish. When Pi was memorized to ten places, and Rand published A Million Random Digits.

It was before Alta Vista, before Mosaic. Before spiders, before search engines, before social media. Before clouds, memes, trolls. Before smartphones, dumb phones, iPhones, Android phones. Before swiping, tapping, clicking. When drag and drop was about getting the kids to school! When hallucinations weren’t AI induced, nomads roamed the deserts, and doom wasn’t scrolled.

Here, in the ethereal realm of 1k memory, great masses of switches were awakened by punched tape, holes probed with metal fingers, translating patterns to digits to machine code. The chip was king, and Assemblers were big, turning text to blinking-lights and powers of two.

Then Fortran ruled, along with the other “high-levels”: Algol, Cobol, and the jester, Lisp. They begat Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk, SQL, as well as the mighty C.

The Era of Hardware slipped into the Age of Software. Programmers held the purse strings, and ruled by bottleneck. Here, the nerd learned the art of choking extortion. And masses were herded through Gates of endless upgrades.

Gold gushed from the Silicon Valley, sweeter than the fallen apricots, pouring forth great fortunes and fortunates: Jobs, Gates, Allen, Kildall, Hewlett, Ellison, Carlston. They are almost forgotten, echoes in the shadows of today's Megas, the Age of Internet, and dawn of the AI.

But there was a time, before the Web, after computers.