Tag: Startup

In the early days of computing, “using a computer” wasn’t really about using it at all.  Honestly, it was about keeping it working long enough to do something useful (anyone who has seen the film “Hidden Figures” will know what I mean). In the very early days, you actually had to understand the hardware. Not in a conceptual sense—in an electrical engineering sense. You needed to know what might fail, how to diagnose it, and how to coax it back into operation. A multimeter and an oscilloscope were not optional tools. They were part of the interface. If something didn’t work, the problem wasn’t abstract. It was physical. You went looking for it.