I just wanted to chime in that the reason I'm a programmer today is that my grandpa helped program the navigation systems on the SR-71. I found that slightly inspirational :)
That's so cool. Imagine, most of us don't even have dad programmers, and you have a granddad programmer and one working on such interesting stuff to boot.
Is he still alive today? And if so does he still work with computers?
He passed (at 82, I believe) about seven years ago. It was both sad and not sad, as he lived a long and amazing life.
He programmed the guidance systems of one of the Titan series rockets. He also was in the Navy in WWII. At one point, his destroyer was sunk, and spent a few days in the open ocean before being rescued. He was also present at the Japanese surrender ceremony.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of learning to play chess with him over Christmas vacation. He was a truly kind man, and an inspiration to many.
My dad passed away a few years ago. He worked in defense electronics for 30+ years. It's kind of weird that I know very little of what he actually worked on. I know he did a lot of work on what became GPS and on Tomahawk and F/A-18 projects, but so much of what he worked on will probably always be a mystery to me.
Interesting. My grandfather died about ten years ago at 86. He was in the Navy during WWII, and was among the first Americans in Tokyo after Japan surrendered. And after the war, he worked on the UNIVAC that was used for the census. We still have all of his UNIVAC programming manuals.
My dad's dad was a programmer, as a desk-captain in the Navy right after WWII. He was still programming well into his retirement in the early nineties, writing little database apps for his PC. My dad started programming while working on his PhD at Berkley in the early sixties, well before UNIX.
My mom's stepmom was an early non-technical employee of a computer accounting startup in the seventies (shared mainframes!), grew more and more technical as they transitioned to PCs, and eventually became the CEO. The company sold to Intuit a while back and she was a VP there for a few years. My mom started programming around the same time, her high school had access to a PDP somewhere.
My parents met when they both worked at a PC database vendor (Condor) in the early eighties, got married, and founded a startup together by poaching one of their customers (which lasted about 20 years).
> What's really sad is that 70s-era technology is better than what we have today. No more SR-71. No more Concorde.
Define "better".
The Concorde was a scam - middle class citizens were taxed by England and France to subsidize a supersonic luxury plane that only the rich could afford to buy (subsidized) tickets on.
The SR-71 was the best tool we could build at the time. Once technology got better, we replaced it with satellites.
The fact that it leaked fuel, flew at Mach 3, had a crew of 2, etc. are not features, they are flaws.
Yeah, it's cool as all heck.
...but don't kid yourself that it's better than what we've got now.
The current airlines are subsidized, too. If you want to fly to Small Town, USA, the airline isn't making any money. It's paid for by the people that live in cities that can actually sustain an airport.
The reality is that it takes 6 hours to fly across the Atlantic now. The reality is that 10 years ago, it took half that. That's not progress, even if it is profit.
The Concorde was not a scam, sometimes the state has to subsidize some technology so it could become available.
Think of the moon landing.
Not everybody had the chance to be an astronaut on the Apollo mission, but I believe that US citizens were "happy" to pay taxes because they got something to be proud of.
I spoke with David Schmidt (of symbolics-dks.com) on the phone recently.
Sadly, there is no way to legally emulate a Symbolics machine on a PC. Symbolics' intellectual property is basically in purgatory, the people who own it or have owned it apparently vastly overestimated the value of the IP and refuse to do anything with the IP aside from exchanging it for large sums of money - which nobody is willing to do.
There is a copy of a more recent version of Genera floating around on torrent sites, but from what David Schmidt tells me, it's pretty incomplete.
Example: Anything that printed out something anywhere automatically generated a hyperlink to open an inspector on the underlying objects. No additional coding necessary. The facility was provided through around inheritance in MOP.
Really? The actual runtime objects? Not the source code of the script, the exe file, or anything hokey like that but first class Objects as in OO and the particular instance that was sent the print message?
You're confusing interface and implementation. You can inspect objects and click links to follow the object graph, and you can change the objects as you like while the program is running.
An around modifier, IMO, is a terrible way to implement debugging functionality, because now everything that's not debugging also gets the side-effect that the method modifier adds. This is a better idea: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/contextl.html
What makes me sad is the disproportionate amount of money and efforts that the US seem to spend on military projects instead of civilian ones(1). Surly the US did and do great civilian projects, but maybe it's greatest achievements are in space where there's also military motives. While it's European countries and Japan which have developed efficient and high speed civilian transportation.
(1) I mean engineering oriented projects like train, cars, telephone networks etc. not academic research where the US clearly is great.
Don't forget the B-52, still the core of the USAF's "drop lots of explosive stuff at once" fleet.
That doesn't mean we couldn't make a better B-52 or U-2 right now (and I don't mean a B1 or B2, I mean a big dumb cheap subsonic bomber), it just means that we couldn't make one sufficiently better to be worth the replacement cost. We could also build a better Brooklyn Bridge, but the existing one works just fine for now.
I'd give it altitude possibly, but the raptor isn't a speed machine.
Mach 3.5 is a speed attained by two things: Space ships and aircraft built specifically to achieve it. The F-22 is neither, as cool as it is.
While I don't doubt (especially with super-cruise and such) that the Raptor is significantly faster than reported, I'd be very surprised if it is actually Blackbird fast.
I do agree that it "outperforms" anything I've seen, but performance isn't a speed thing alone.
You're probably right about the speed records. There really isn't any reason to design aircraft that fast with the satellite technology and weapon systems we have now.
Yeah, sorry for editing my post. I couldn't figure out how to explain what I was trying to say. But said former Lockheed engineers did specifically claim that the F-22 breaks both speed and altitude records. I don't really know what to believe. It does seem smart to release false information about that kind of thing though.
The Space Shuttle is glorious, but it's also an example of how even a bad idea can be made to work if you throw enough cash at it.
Do you know what percent of the weight of the shuttle is cargo?
2%.
It makes zero sense to loft tons (literally. tons.) of ceramic tiles, wings, engines, control surfaces, hydraulics, and more into orbit, just to bring them back down again.
Small capsules with ablative heat shields can ferry astronauts down from orbit for a trivial percentage of the price.
You're looking at all this cool technology and thinking it's a win, but it's not. It's a cost. It raises the cost of spaceflight to the point where you and I will never be able to afford it.
Kill the Space Shuttle and develop something more efficient. It might not stroke the egos of the engineers and the NASA administrators as much, but it will make space more affordable.
It also doesn't make sense to spend the ridiculously high amounts of money required to fly things through the air (what are we, birds?) when trains do just fine.
It also doesn't make sense to store all of those files in a mainframe when the filing cabinets do just fine.
It also doesn't make sense to spend the absurd amounts of money required to develop a packet-based communication network when telegraphs and telephones do just fine.
It also doesn't make sense to go to the moon with humans when we can just send a probe there.
It also doesn't make sense to spend the ridiculously high amounts of money required to fly things through the air (what are we, birds?) when trains do just fine.
Yes it does, flying is faster.
It also doesn't make sense to store all of those files in a mainframe when the filing cabinets do just fine.
Yes it does, mainframes are smaller.
It also doesn't make sense to spend the absurd amounts of money required to develop a packet-based communication network when telegraphs and telephones do just fine.
Yes it does, PBC is more mobile
It also doesn't make sense to go to the moon with humans when we can just send a probe there.
You're right, this one makes no sense. Kinda like the shuttle.
You seem to have completely missed the point. Technology doesn't happen overnight. It's all about costly, seemingly stupid incremental improvements. The shuttle doesn't make sense in its current form, what does make sense is the shuttle as an innovation springboard.
There is really no reason however to have a space launch platform be reusable. The whole idea behind it is that it was supposed to make things easier and cheaper, and it's done exactly the opposite.
I'm not missing the point at all. You, however have equated every innovation to be progress. Wise people realize that sometimes, despite our good intentions, innovations are sometimes negatives overall, and it's best to take a step back to take two more forward.
In fact, once you get by the "cool" factor of the shuttle, what you end up seeing is that is has in fact been a large step backwards. It has prevented the one nation that could actually dream of furthering space exploration from doing exactly that. The US basically uses the shuttle to do what the first Mercury flights did when we were all watching black and white tv's.
Think back to aviation. The wright brothers used a canard design on the Flyer. While ultimately proven to be safer and more fuel efficient, we needed to have a hundred years of non-canard aerospace development to realize everything between the Flyer and a Eurofighter. Fixating on canard designs may very well have held us in the balsa wood aircraft stage for 10-15 years.
Perhaps, one day, the innovation that is the shuttle will come full circle. That day is not tomorrow though, and no amount of emotional attachment to the idea stops it from being anything but a costly and inefficient nightmare.
(btw, both mainframes and PBC were smaller and more mobile right out of the gate, compared to the status quo.)
I guess you are trying to be funny, but I don't see the point. Your first 3 points are clearly false (the 4th is not clearly so). Are you suggesting that there is benefit to the pursuit itself? If so, then yes it is good that we developed the shuttle... but why continue to use it?
I know what you mean....this is the kind of stuff I want to build at least once before I die. Something that is so good it's in another class and changes the world.
That is pretty exciting and inspirational :) I owe a lot of what I do today to my parents/grandparents as well... pretty much everyone on my dad's side of the family has worked or is currently still working for Lockheed at their Skunk Works plant (the guys that did the SR-71) in Palmdale, CA.
My dad and grandpa were both illustrators, drawing out schematics and stuff for Lockheed. I really think a lot of my design abilities are genetic, and I owe it to my dads side of the family.
