Computing memories

My good friend and colleague Antonio shared some thoughts today about a post he'd just read: The Last People Who Know How It Works. I was composing a reply to Antonio's thoughts on LinkedIn, but then thought better of it, and in the proper spirit of "owning (and being in control of) one's own content", harking back to the good old days of communication and community on the Web, I thought I'd write my reply here and then point to it via a URL. So here goes. The post is a lovely read, and makes a great point that resonates with me, a point about the potential (or imminent) loss of knowing how things work, through having to make things work. I have many memories of building things from scratch, making computers do things (where in their default state they would do nothing). For our SAP community readers, I also remember (in the early to mid 1990's) calculating which actual magnetic tracks across which cylinders (physical partitions on the DASD) to place different parts of the SAP R/2…