I've been thinking about the history of computing spanning my 30+ years of involvement with it (I got my first computer when I was 8). Things moved so fast back

I've been thinking about the history of computing spanning my 30+ years of involvement with it (I got my first computer when I was 8). Things moved so fast back then (C64 was released in 1982, and the Amiga just three years later in 1985, Linux came six years after that in 1991), but in many regards have only accelerated since then. The arc of Open Source and Free software is perhaps the most interesting and powerful invisible force in our world today. Imagine the Internet without Apache, Linux, MySQL, etc. And, it's moved further out, as well...now Open Source powers most of the clients, too (Android, Chrome, Firefox; the way people interact with computers is, under the hood, Open Source). This is an incredible shift. Microsoft and Apple (and a few others) fought for years...and, eventually they didn't really matter anymore. Those companies are at the edges now; some people still choose to use their products, but they don't define the architecture of our lives in tech. It's weird to think back to the world in which CATB was written. OSS was a band of insurgents. Today, OSS is the norm, and it's the biggest gift economy in the world. It's not perfect, of course; loads of companies make huge profits exploiting OSS without participating meaningfully (and I'm not saying I have solutions for that). But, I like the world that the band of OSS insurgents has built better than the world they (we? I've been around it, and participating in OSS projects my whole adult life, and since well before CATB was written, but I still don't really feel part of it) started with. And, I find it weird/amazing that today more Open Source code is likely being written and released daily than was written and released in a whole year back then (I'm making up this ratio, but I believe it's a reasonable guesstimate). Also feeling a bit old right now. It really doesn't feel like that long ago.