[ Updated 26-Mar-2016 ] SEMCO’s 40th Anniversary celebration – Sunday, 10-Apr-2016 at 1:30PM

SEMCO, the SouthEastern Michigan Computer Organization, is celebrating its 40th Anniversary on Sunday, 10-Apr-2016, at its general meeting!
1:30PM-6PM

SEMCO has been serving local computer and technology enthusiasts since the early days of personal computing and holds regular monthly discussions on interesting technology topics, including cyber security, leveraging open source software, strengths of Linux, Windows, and tablet operating systems, and more!

Our members are passionate on sharing their knowledge of what is possible now and what the future brings.

We will be serving light refreshments.  Please see below for the meeting topics and presenters.

Members will be bringing in several vintage computer systems and demonstrating access to some platforms that were in use in the early days of our group.  If you are interested in bringing hardware to the meeting, please let us know at semco40th@semco.org

Please join us in our celebration!

Meeting location:
Altair Engineering, Inc.
1820 E. Big Beaver Rd.
Troy, MI 48083
Please park and enter the Auditorium through the West entry door by the SEMCO signs.

We are featuring three outstanding speakers:

Mike Bader SEMCO President will talk about when he first joined SEMCO, his first computer, the technology changes, Bulletin Board Systems and FidoNet.

Jim Rarus, SEMCO’s second president, will provide a retrospective look at the beginning of the personal computer revolution.

Jim is the manager of Network and Security Services for the Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency. Jim oversees Internet and technology services for school districts in Wayne County, Michigan.

Sharan Kalwani, a super computing expert, will present “Gazing into the Digital Crystal Ball: Trying to imagine the next 40 years would look like!”

The world of computing has now come to change all of our lives, in many ways no one could have imagined. Given the rapid pace of the last 40+ years, many techniques (and technologies) pioneered in this space have become a de facto way of life. For example, automation of many routine tasks, the way movies are made, logistics, travel, commerce, making the globe just another big village, big brother, “big data”, etc.,etc.

So taking cue from the past, I will attempt at imagining what kind of new boundaries we will be pushing aside in the never ending thirst for bigger and faster. There are a myriad of frontiers such as energy consumption, energy efficiency, turning the classical computer architecture as we know it, on its head, the growing use of weird computers of all kinds, some oddball forays in shaping silicon and a few innovative, maybe wild twists with existing models of digital life as we know it.

One thing is for certain, the next 40 years will most likely look totally different that the past! Or will it not?

Sharan Kalwani is currently the Director at the High Performance Computing Center, which is part of the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research, Michigan State University.