I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I’m losing my edge to the kids from Stanford and from MIT.
But I was there.I was there in 1979.
I was there when they demoed the GUI to Steve Jobs at PARC.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on Hacker News.
I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every feature of every good language from 1962 to 1998.
I’m losing my edge.To all the kids at Facebook and Tumblr.
I’m losing my edge to the Mission startup hipsters in Commodore 64 sweatshirts and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.But I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
I can hear the footsteps every night on GitHub.
But I was there.I was there in 1974 in the computer lab with Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Harvard.
I was working on the GOTO statement.
I was there when Eugene Jarvis was coding “Robotron: 2084”.
I told him, “Don’t make it so hard. You’ll never make a quarter.”
I was there.
I was the first guy showing microcomputers to the minicomputer guys.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I’ve never been wrong.I used to work at big companies.
I had everything before anyone.
I was there at Caltech with Steven Wolfram inventing Mathematica.
I was there at the Mountain View Byte Shop during the great Apple ][ - vs - TRS-80 clashes.
I helped Apple wreck a nice beach in 1992.But I’m losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they’re actually really, really nice.I’m losing my edge.
I heard you have a collection of every issue of BYTE Magazine and Creative Computing from 1975 to 1979. I heard you have copies of every Xerox PARC technical report including the one with the Dynabook in it. I heard you have autographed galley proofs of The Art Of Computer Programming volumes 1 through 3. I heard that you have the source code to the original Macintosh ROM on a 3 1/2” floppy disk.
I hear you’re buying an Arduino board and are throwing your overclocked quad-core Xeon tower out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make an Atari 2600 cartridge.
I hear that you and your startup have given up on OOP and switched to Haskell.
I hear that you and your startup have given up on functional programming and switched to Objective-C.I hear every API that you know is more relevant than every API that I know.
You don’t know what you really want. You don’t know what you really want. You don’t know what you really want…
[with apologies to LCD Soundsystem]