Wolfpack

Here's Harry Boy's first computer. It cost him $22,000.

PatsFanInVa

That was the i-bacus. You could buy a competitor with counters that were plain wood and not rounded for 10K, but, well, you know, that wouldn't be the same.

PatsWSB47

I laughed out loud

Michael

In the 80s I worked on a Genigraphics workstation.



It was built around a DEC PDP11. It used those 300 MB hard drives in your op. They looked like cake dishes. The best part was you refreshed the screen by hitting a button. It took so long to redraw you would work for 5-10 minutes just remembering where things were. And it was about a 10 step process just to rotate something. Macs just made it all to easy.

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patsfan13

What type of graphic apps were you doing?


I used to know how to boot the PDP using the switches for the boot commands into the registers


Most of out stuff was sold through Grumman Data Systems for design CAE work to Grumman Boeing and the like for aircraft design.

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"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

PatsFanInVa

Glad you liked it... but that model got fried by the Y1K bug

PatriotsReign

I got you all beat...in the 80's I worked on the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator....

I'm still waiting for the "Ka-Boom"...there was suposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!!

Attached Images

 

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"No one walking this earth knows what is truly righteous"

PatsFanInVa

Here's something that's not meant to be about anybody posting here, but it's an interesting perspective that sort of got "stirred up" by seeing the pics of the actual people here at their early workstations.

Okay we were all around when the state of the art was definitely here, but with some competition, in the whole tech arena.

Now we're in a situation where code-writers say they can't make a living here - that there are some jobs still left here, but that increasingly those jobs get done elsewhere, or by people from elsewhere working here, at a comparatively low wage (contrasted, within a single career,) with a situation where the sky was the limit in terms of prosperity if you were an engineer coming out of school.

My reaction to the pictures is a lot like I feel when I see pictures of auto-workers in the heyday of detroit, many decades ago. Everything looks very solid, very immutable... I expect the story to be that the machines change, but that the U.S. worker in the picture will be doing something more advanced to get to a future where the jobs are, of course, the "future" of American jobs.

I'll stop there. I don't want to get all "analytical" about it and just have the same old arguments... I imagine we'll just have them anyway, but it's just an interesting instant emotional reaction to the nostalgic pics here.

patsfan13

There was a book I remember about that called "Crossing the Chasm"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS.../mikeleeorg-20


It brought up a couple of points, things that were specialized (high value added) products over time transition to commodity product so the innovation required to produce them is reduced. This of course also reduces prices and increases value to consumers.

A lot of tasks that required programmers can now be done by end users. I worked for a company that sold graphics software for scientist, it was Fortran libraries that sold for tens of thousands of dollars and required that you create each program to display scientific data. They sold another program that allowed you to take data from a DEC VAX minicomputer (cost ~1000k +) and make line and bar charts. It could cost up to 250k to run on a VAX cluster. Now Mathematica and Charting built into MS Excel of the Open Office can do far more without any programmers needed. Same with creating user interfaces web pages ect.

Data that could take a year to format and present can be done in hours and at a cost that is lower by a factor of 1k.....

Now 1 year olds can play with computers (iPad).

Technology is and has always been a process of creative destruction.

The downside is that the salesmen don't make 200k a year selling the stuff.

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"Some guys play in all-star games, some guys don't. I don't know who picks all those all-star teams. In all honesty, I don't know who picks the combine, for that matter," Belichick said. "How does (Miami-Ohio offensive lineman Brandon) Brooks not get invited to the combine? How did Vollmer not get invited to the combine? I don't know. We can't really worry about that. We just have to try to evaluate them the best we can."

PatsFanInVa

One interesting implication, let's stay way way at the forest level:

You have a level of innovation, that level of innovation drives some employment, then the task is again progressively automated. Now office drones can make charts with Excel, where a long time ago, you needed a guy on a million dollar machine to make them.

Okay cool. That's good. All the things we want cost less, because machines essentially do more of the work every day.

Yet (of course) we get money to buy these wonderful new cheap things from doing work.

Leaving aside tasks that have repeatedly resisted automation to that extent -- say, unclogging individuals' toilets and the like -- where does the work come from, eventually?

I know, luddite perspective. The pat answer is, well, we invent more stuff. So there will always be a leading edge of tech workers, who can make it to tech management in their niche, before being completely obsolete and being spit out by the machine.

Outside that cadre with the currently in vogue skill, we'll continue to have comparatively undesireable labor -

We'll always need communicators.

Right now we need a lot of skilled medical care workers (but watch out, when boomers are dying -- there will be a glut.)

We always need a small number at the forefront of tech, which, by its nature, winnows the top tier starting with the moment they do something well.

Then there's the clogged toilets. Maybe cabs (don't count on it,) maybe restaurant workers (also sort of depends, but a decent bet.)

Outside of that, it's way more of a crap shoot than we acknowledge.

Even assuming that the constantly forecast death by peak oil doesn't come to pass, what are the 1-year-olds working i-Pads going to make?

Is there, in fact, a built-in engine of unemployment that's more powerful than the engine of employment represented by innovation?

Perspectives?

PFnV