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ITWeek - nostalgia and archived issues

Here's an appeal to readers for back numbers. As I wrote in a recent column for IT Week, nostalgia rules.  "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history," lamented Shaw - and of course, more recently, a rather lesser philosopher sobbed that "nostalgia aint what it used to be." Well, I need to make it what it used to be, and to do that, I need help.

My problem is my archive. I wrote many pieces since I started in computer journalism in 1974, and in those days, there was no Internet to store them. I wrote for Electronics Weekly, New Scientist, and then Personal Computer World, where the "Newsprint" column became quite well known. And then I moved on to MicroScope, PC Dealer, PC Magazine UK, Computer Life, and IT Week.

I suspect that it's really rather hard to learn from the history of IT, simply because things really do change so much that it's hard to work out what page from the past applies to today (I told readers of that paper). But it's even harder to learn from history if you threw away the back issues...

We learn from the history of computing that "640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anybody" and laugh at the idea that Bill Gates could ever have said anything so obviously silly; or that IBM chose MS Dos over CP/M because Digital Research founder Gary Kildall decided not to meet IBM executives, preferring to go for a spin in his plane, and so on.

The problem is, we can't really be expected to learn from history if history isn't accurately recorded. And where it is, we find we have lost the copy of that magazine.

For example, I knew Kildall very well and, some years before his tragically early death, we discussed that legend. It's a very instructive legend because

1) IBM didn't choose MS Dos over CP/M. The executives chose CP/M which was the default disk operating system on the IBM PC when it launched. It was customers who chose MS Dos because it was very nearly half the price - for the perfectly sensible reason that CP/M86 was the superior product, and could command a premium.

Lesson: quality really does go out of style - especially if Marketing screws up the pricing for the mass market.

2) The fact that Gary had a plane isn't a secret, nor is the fact that he used it to commute over the mountains between San Diego and the Silicon Valley area.

3) The IBM executives in question weren't expecting to meet Gary, because they'd already met him, and signed the deal. The question of where Microsoft found MS-Dos, and whether it was intellectual property they were entitled to buy, is dealt with elsewhere

As far as Bill and 640K goes, I knew him reasonably well at the time, and he would never dignify the question with an answer. What he meant - and what he obviously meant - was that in a PC based on a chip which could address no more than a megabyte of RAM, the loss of 300 odd K to system address space wasn't significant.

At that time, CP/M (eight-bit!) had already been given memory page extensions to six megabytes by a standards-based body, and the only reason PC Dos didn't was because Gates quite reasonably expected to use 16-bit and even 32-bit chips when memory extension became an issue.

So, in an attempt to learn from history, it perhaps helps to discuss history with someone who was there, and remembers the occasion. And it's getting to the point where IT Week is such an authority. So I'm going to try and consult the guru.

My own memory of the personal computer business goes back to the launch of the Intel 4004 microprocessor. Goodness knows, there was an awful lot between then and now that I missed... but I think that we don't learn lessons from those historical days simply because we've literally forgotten what people did and said.

So in future columns, prepare for nostalgia! I think there's a lot of good stuff in our back numbers, and it's time to dig it out... with your help.

What I need, simply, is emails please... from anybody who remembers or has copies of news items or columns from my journalistic past. If you have an example of events from the past - unusually prescient is good! - but stuff that really missed the point is also good...

It would be really appreciated!