As I was putting the finishing touches on a recent blog post that I had intended to publish about the 40th anniversary of UNIX, my PC became unresponsive. Looking at the screen, there was the familiar Vista “swoosh” spinning around, the text editor window clouded-up and the words “not-responding” showed on the program’s title bar. All attempts to “wake it up” failed and, other programs became non-responsive as well.

I decided to let the PC run for a while to see if it could work out its problems on its own. My iPod was close by and I selected some music to help me kill the time.

I wound up selecting one of the greatest music albums ever released: Hotel California, by the Eagles, in 1977. Its greatness is backed-up by all conceivable measures: total album sales, #1 singles, critical and popular acclaim, and, most of all, the test of time. New bands “cover” the songs in their live shows and recordings. Radio airplay of the original recording is still significant and the members of the Eagles reprise these and other songs for enthusiastic audiences in live shows throughout each year.

Listening to the title track, “Hotel California”, one of the great lines is

We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.

It struck a chord (no pun intended) and I started thinking that this is an appropriate sentiment for the (current) year 2009.

A lot was happening back in 1969. We put a man on the moon. We were in the most violent period of the Vietnam War. We were closing out a decade that brought about dramatic social change.

While all of this was going on, information technology was also undergoing tremendous change. Intel was formed in 1968. The internet was being born as ARPANET. And, 2 developers from Bell Labs took their dream of a new operating system to reality as UNIX. So, essentially, we had the birth of Moore’s Law, the creation of the Internet and the beginning of the era of open source. Quite a burst of creations that underpin almost everything we use today.

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