computing

I read a few days ago that Bram Moolenaar has passed away. I didn’t know him but I use his work almost everyday. Bram was the main author of vim which is an excellent and flexible text editor. A truly great piece of software. It is also remarkable that vim is charityware to raise money to help children in Uganda. He was very dedicated to this cause and made a big difference in peoples lives beyond software.

We all know that AWS is expensive. But it used to be that it was by far the best hyperscaler and had the appeal of being novel. AWS profits reflected that. Now that it’s been around a while, the bloom has come off the rose. There are now solid competitors (especially Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) and enterprises are starting to move their infrastructure back to their own data centers.

This article about The Home Computer Generation struck a chord with me. I think there are a lot of us Gen Xers who fell in love with computing due to our early exposure to primitive home computers. I fondly remember the Atari 800. We had some games and a simple word processor (and a weird dot matrix printer that was super slow and noisy) but my favorite thing was Atari Basic.