Severo Ornstein called his memoir of the 1950s - 1970s Computing in the Middle Ages. Ornstein worked on SAGE, TX-2, LINC, and the Arpanet IMP among other things, before moving on to Xerox PARC.
Great read, but he undersells the weight of von Neumann's EDVAC report. If you haven't read that (which I imagine you have), it's crazy how prescient some of the lesser-known ideas are. He seemed to assume that we'd end up with some kind of neural architecture, and it's easy to imagine him being surprised that it took us this long to get serious about the idea.
Apropos of that, I couldn't resist telling Gemini 3 to run with your story prompt from the earlier thread: https://gemini.google.com/share/ac122aba6f7f. Thanks for the inspiration, apologies for following it. :-P
(Also thanks for posting the material you wrote back in the 1980s on the SCP initiative. I had heard of it as an SDI connection or component, but that was all. Reading through it now.)
I’d call basically anything before the mid 90s ancient, even though I was there and using it at the time, just because of how much of the way we use computers now has changed so drastically.
How many of the operating systems that you listed remain as ways we use computers?
Even Macs were an entirely different codebase that didn’t even have memory protection or preemptive multitasking, which very much changed how you used it.
