Will clearcut for food

Ageism in the new Millennium

I’ve been pondering what it takes to keep up with the world these days, what it takes to keep relevant and employable. In my recent activities related to hiring a few new employees, I interviewed young folks and older folks and had some interesting conversations with a few people. I was left pondering the question of how to stay relevant and employable in this new age.

Back in the 1950’s, 60’s and such, many people started with one company and ended their careers with that same, or a very similar, company. The best employees would gradually rise within the ranks and end up as managers. Those without management acumen could still have a decent career as skilled labor.

The key to keeping employed and on your track back then was recurrent training. For management folks, that might be seminars and the occasional college class. Maybe even night school for an MBA. For the laborer, it might have been something as simple as learning how to drive a new model of forklift, or putting down the old arc welder for a new model heli-arc welder. Keeping relevant and employable was largely about recurrent training.

The Rise of the Machine

It has been said that it takes about 30 years for a radically new technology to come into mainstream use. The first microprocessor was invented in 1971. The first airplane was invented in 1903. Yes, there’s a lot of fudge factor in there – single chip vs. multi-chip, powered and controlled vs. un powered or just straight flight – and there is always a lot of ground work before the “invented” date. You can spend a lot of debate on just what constitutes “mainstream use” as well, but essentially, the rule holds about as true as Moore’s Law.

Today, it is the independent robot or embedded intelligence. Most of the boards coming out of designers have some sort of microprocessor on board. There are a lot of control, sensor and communications boards. These are the building blocks for automated systems; robotics of sorts. Certainly there are a lot of other devices rolling through engineering departments, but the embedded intelligence / robotics probably take up the majority of engineering resources today.

I ran across this article recently that brings the point home. The text has a military focus but it is not intended as a political statement of any sort. It’s just that in times of conflict, the military tends to be the earliest of early adopters. What I find fascinating, ironic and a bit scary is the humanity extended toward little rolling machines that this article illustrates.

“…a droid hospital in Iraq, that repairs about 400 broken or "wounded" droids a week. About that often, the staff there will have to deal with one or more teary eyed troops, carrying the blasted remains of their droid, and wanting to know if their little guy can be rebuilt”

This is what we are all doing, whether we realize it or not. The children born today are of the last generation that will need to learn to drive a car. The last generation that will be able to make a career flying airplanes is already in the air. Most really complex surgeries already use robotic augmentation. Home appliances like robotic vacuum cleaners and mops are leveraging that military experience into the civilian world.

I saw my first personal computer as a youth in the late ‘70s and the world is very different today. But 30 years from now, it will be almost unrecognizable. We, my friends, are in the thick of it.

Duane Benson
Not now, but soon.

Originally posted at blog.screamingcircuits.com

Microsoft does windows

When I first developed an interest in computers, they were largely things of fiction in the minds of the public. Images of Colossus, from The Forbin Project, or Robbie the Robot were far more visible than anything real. They were semi-intelligent female voiced controllers of the Starship Enterprise. More people, the world over, had interfaced with computers through the voice of Majel Barrett than through any other means, fictional or real. These devices sometimes gained intelligence and tried to destroy the world, only to be foiled at the last minute by some obtuse circular logic. They were huge room-sized machines with spinning tape drives and lots of flashing lights. Sometimes they were depicted as simple as an oscilloscope displaying a sine wave with a panel of big knobs next to it. The most well known computer related phrase was "Don't do that, Dave."

In short, computers were not part of normal society. They hadn't permeated our culture and erupted into daily life. The only people who worked with or on or knew anything about computers were these "Mad Monk" types with thick glasses and a diet consisting primarily of cola, Doritos and Twinkies. They didn't speak the same language or care about the same things as the rest of the world. They rarely came out into the sunlight, preferring to sleep most of the day and, like other nocturnal beasts, perform their productive duties largely under cover of darkness. Put two or more of them together in a room full of people and in very short work they would be gathered in a corner discussing arcane concepts and algorithms. Some would be lamenting over the loss of core memory for this new solid-state stuff that forgets without power. Another would be bragging about the latest 4K added to his PDP: "It only took 128 RAM chips and four dozen supporting logic chips."

I have a full-page advertisement from a Scientific American issue from the mid seventies. The ad jokingly referred to a mythical kit computer with a punch line "stringing core memories..." That is accurately illustrative of what even the smallest computers were back then. The point of the ad was not to give any real information about the construction or value of their smallest machines, but more to mystify and infer technical prowess on a near God-like level. There were few public situations where dissemination of accurate computer detail was necessary, valuable or even possible. Again, these were mythical beasts of science fiction with perceived capabilities far in excess of reality.

Computer people came in the "IBM type"; quiet men with crew cuts and no facial hair that wore white lab coats over their white shirt and black tie. They spent their time in small sterile offices with clean desks lined up by the dozens down unadorned institutional-looking hallways. Every one of them was absolutely predictable, arriving at precisely five of eight and leaving at five past five. They parked in the same spot in the lot, sat in the same seat on the commuter train, and drove the exact same route every day.

Then there were the university types. Not all worked at Universities, but it's a good stereotype. These were the Mad-Monks that didn't shower or shave for weeks at a time. You could never quite predict where they would be at any particular time. Their homes were indistinguishable from their offices; wires and circuit boards and code printouts were strewn about in a homogeneous mix with old half-eaten sandwiches, slices of cold pizza and soda bottles here and there. You could walk up to them and hold a five-minute conversation before they even acknowledged your presence - if they ever did. If you could get a response, it would likely be directed contempt rather than actual two-way communication.

In the mid-seventies, computers began their gradual encroachment on the normal world. While browsing the rack, you might pass by a Popular Electronics magazine with a picture of a home-built computer on it. Your accountant might use a "computer foul up" as a vehicle to buy a little more time to complete your quarterly reports. Here and there they would show up in a school or lab someplace. Many people had a friend with an uncle that worked with computers. Still, few other than the white-shirts or mad monks actually touched them on a regular basis. This was about to change.

As the seventies died of exhaustion and the eighties reluctantly took the standard, names like Apple and TRS-80, Pet and Atari started to float around in more and more conversations. Pong started appearing in empty corners in bars and arcades, only to shortly be dragged into the front. Legend has it that Nolan Bushnell couldn't sell his first Pong game and had to pretty much beg a friend to find a place in his bar. The owner's contempt for the strange little machine only grew as he had to call Nolan to come in and repair it within a few days. Contempt did a 180 when Nolan discovered that the game wasn't broken. Its coin box was too full to take any more quarters.

In 1981, when IBM introduced its PC, the computer gained legitimacy and one of the largest sales engines on the planet. It wasn't long before names like Gates and Moore, The Woz, Jobs, Kildall and Eubanks reached iconic proportions. The PC was honored as Time Magazines "Man of the Year." Andy Grove, the man who gave us memory chips and CPUs, received the same honor a decade and a half later followed in two years by Jeff Bezos, the man who gave the world e-commerce. There is probably some significance in the fact that the PC made "Man of the Year" before any of the people who brought it to us did.

In late 1983, my brother excitedly reported to me: "Microsoft does windows." The Microsoft PR engine had actually managed to get operating system related news in our local newspaper. Not that my brother, or anyone else for that matter, had a clue as to the meaning of the statement. I suspect that if the local newspapers had a clue, they would not have considered it interesting to their audience at the time and wouldn't have bothered to run the story.

Now, computers have permeated the mainstream of society. It's not at all uncommon for a non-technical type to have more computers, embedded or stand-alone, than digits on hands and fingers. It used to be that hacker-types were the ones to brag about having the fastest machine. Now having such is as much a status symbol as having the hottest car or largest big-screen TV. It's a function economics, not expertise. The geeks now have to display their status by the quantity of machines and variety of operating systems installed. You aren't anybody unless you have four boxes networked with Linux or BSD installed on at least one of them. Embedded computers, often more powerful than the corporate machines of just a decade earlier are everywhere. They are in phones, watches, appliances, thermostats, and light switches. A single car may have half dozen or so, not including the engine control computer. A toy room will have countless computers giving speech to dolls, speech and personality to Furby or voice and logic to teaching toys. And no one gives them a thought.

Captain Crunch

At the turn of the century, Intel was one of the largest employers in the Portland area. Back in 1971, when asked to build a new calculator chip, a scientist at fledgling Intel, Ted Hoff, had an idea. It seemed inefficient, perhaps even silly, to him that each new device required a custom chip. He and engineer Frederico Faggin put 2300 transistors onto a piece of silicon 1/8" by 1/16" and changed the world. Intel marketed the device as the 4004 and called it the world's first microprocessor. Not long after, the 4004 begat the 8008 which begat the 8080, then the 8086 and 8088 and Bill Gates has never looked back.

Speaking of Bill Gates; 1971 was the year he and Paul Allen formed "Traf-O-Data." Their future nemesis, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started building and selling phone phreaking devices called blue boxes. Back in those days, phones were a lot simpler than now. Many of the system functions could be enacted with simple-to-reproduce tones and tone sequences. Before Internet chat rooms, "Phreakers", as they were called, used blue boxes to arrange free conference calls with each other. Many kept to activities they thought to be mostly harmless, but others used the boxes to make free long distance calls or to hide their identity from authorities.

John Draper (AKA Captain Crunch) was one of the "polite" phreakers. He believed in hacking for the sake of exploration, not exploitation. He spent time in the voice chat rooms comparing notes, learning, teaching and generally acting like a hacker. When he was imprisoned for doing so, he passed his time teaching other inmates how to do just what had gotten him in there in the first place. He also wrote and published EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, doing most of the work during the waning months of his prison term. Steve Wozniak (AKA Woz) was a little more exploitive in his efforts and sold blue boxes to help fund the start up of Apple Computer. Interesting that what arguably, has been the most aggressively pioneering personal computer company got its start from the rewards of potentially-criminal activity.

Elsewhere in 1971, Lt. Butch Elliot and his UH-1H "Huey" crew, code named "Witch Doctor 5", spent three days and two nights alone on the ground just West of A Luoi in Laos. They were surrounded by NVA (North Vietnamese Army) solders and lived to tell the tale only due to 97 air strikes from B52's, an AC-130A "Spectre" gunship and a host of other fighter/bomber aircraft. When the friendlies finally rescued him, he had but four rounds of ammo left. Apparently, anyone who has ever heard the distinctive report of an AK-47 never forgets. Three days and two nights of that sound must make quite an impression.

While little of that conflict is remembered as being just or righteous, it's difficult to understate the level of compassion that would induce an army to expend hundreds of thousands or dollars, perhaps millions, in the attempt to save a small handful of men. Such an effort can be described only as noble in the most purest of forms. Unless, of course, you happen to be the other guys. As with the events of October 3 and 4, 1993, in Mogadishu Somalia, A heroic stand from one direction may very well be wanton slaughter from the back side.