patrick.net

simchaland says

2b. All that would happen is that the unskilled would be totally S-out-of-luck as they would be forced to compete with college grads for gas-pumping positions.
Check - Yes, I see this happening right now. I work with 18-25 year olds. Almost none of them can find jobs, not even entry level burger flipping ones. Why? Because they are taken already by state workers on furlough and former “middle managers” and other paper pushers and IT people.

There is a guy who works in the front office at Goodyear tire retail In Los Gatos. He was a Engineer with Seagate for 25 years. There was another guy I meet at Macys, he was a former Cost Accounting Manager for a Tech company I also worked for many years ago. He is currently a tailor. Frankly, their vast experience and talent is being wasted. Its a shame.

This past month i found out that a friend of mine, along with many others will be losing his job. His employers which was slated to go IPO couldnt...not because they had growing sales or being profitable, but they couldnt really behave and develope sound financial statements as a public entity. Real reason, the Accounting was mismanaged by a bunch of inexperienced ivy-league MBA morons. It just wasnt going to happen after many bad misteps.
Good engineering and good salespeople wasnt enough!

tts says

AFAIK the Japanese semi’s weren’t competing with Intel/AMD for CPU’s which were heavily reliant on their in house processes so they couldn’t be made anywhere else anyways, maybe flash is what you mean?

NEC V20 and V30...introduced on Hitachi Laptops and banned from importing by Intel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20
http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=NEC&l2=V20

The NEC V20 is a 16-bit CMOS microprocessor with 8-bit external data bus, object-code and pin-compatible with the Intel 8088. The V20 runs at the same speed as the 8088, but it's slightly faster due to internal improvements - dual internal 16-bit data bus, faster effective address calculation, better loop counter/shift register implementation, and some others. The V20 includes Intel 8080 emulation mode, in which it can execute all of the 8080 instructions. Native NEC V20 instruction set includes all 8086/8088 instructions, new instructions from the 80186/80188 microprocessor, and instructions unique to V20 - bit processing, packed BCD instructions and special instructions for switching the processor to 8080 emulation mode and back.

The V20 is almost the same as the NEC V30 with the exception that the V30 has a 16-bit data bus

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1985/07/08/66112/index.htm

NOW, THE JAPANESE CHALLENGE IN MICROPROCESSORS Japan's largest chipmaker is moving fast to break the U.S. hammerlock on computers-on-a-chip and open the way for Japanese domination of the entire computer industry. The legal and commercial barriers loom large, but they may be breachable.

Wow never heard of one or saw of those things. I had a Tandy "laptop" from that era too.

Did NEC not license Intel's ISA or what?

e: ahaha that fortune article is hilarious to read today. Its an interesting piece of history but it looks to me NEC screwed the pooch instead of Intel using money/political connections to get their chips arbitrarily banned.

TTS - that is why high home prices are very risky proposition around here. Things can get well out of control and change the economic dynamics in the valley in a snap. Seen way too much of that. It can be Semis, SW, PC components, Internet... its all the same when you dig deeper into the business side of our industries. I do not want to see any employers leave due to high costs, mainly from housing. Those changes will be permenant. We should have had some of our leaders in industry early on make a more public and local comments on the implications of high home costs. But its not in their nature to be dealing with these issues in public area, but it does effect us all.

tts says

Wow never heard of one or saw of those things. I had a Tandy “laptop” from that era too.

Ever see Gary Kindalls CPM-OS... buts thats another story regarding Microsoft...

thomas.wong1986 says

TTS - that is why high home prices are very risky proposition around here.

Yea, I don't think high home prices are a good things.

thomas.wong1986 says

We should have had some of our leaders in industry early on make a more public and local comments on the implications of high home costs. But its not in their nature to be dealing with these issues in public area, but it does effect us all.

Personally I suspect they knew what they we're doing, IBG/YBG wasn't something that applied only to Wall St. unfortunately.

thomas.wong1986 says

Ever see Gary Kindalls CPM-OS… buts thats another story regarding Microsoft…

Heard of it but wasn't into PC's at the time so it was well after the fact.

thomas.wong1986 says

Ever see Gary Kindalls CPM-OS… buts thats another story regarding Microsoft…

First PC I spent hours programming:

First one I owned:

Sold these back at the store I worked in:

Thought this was uber-cool once up a time:

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

I'm sure someone will come along and top it though.

Same here Vicente. Certainly did wonders at work when using Wordstar and SuperCalc, but didnt "Plug into" the IBM mainframes as I wished.

You guys got me beat, you are truly ancient (heh).

I still use a Model M keyboard though, can't let go of the clickety-clack!

My Texas Instruments computer circa 1979. I got it as a gift along with an IBM Selectric II typewriter. I did my undergrad at one of the Claremont Colleges. Life was cool!

Here is the first computer I ever had. It was an Apple IIe with an Imagewriter printer that was entirely dot matrix.

Actually we had it as a family. Dad got it in about 1984. I was able to keep it once he got a Macintosh with an Imagewriter II and he purchased an Apple IIc for the family.

Apple IIc

Macintosh

I took that Apple IIe to college with me in 1987 with the Imagewriter. It got me through my bachelors degree in 1991. I used it in grad school until 1993. Then Dad got me a Macintosh Classic. I still have the Macintosh Classic somewhere.

I used to write lots of programs in Applesoft Basic. I remember the transition from DOS 3.3 to ProDOS. Appleworks was the bomb when it came to word processing. All of my college papers were done on Appleworks.

All of those computers were ridiculously expensive in their day. Now, even the cheap desktops that are around $300 make all of these look like stone tablets.

And how about that market today? It looks like we're in a sell off after some gains this week. I think we're still in for a fall.

And my very first experience programming in Basic was on the Commodor Vic 20 with a cassette tape drive:

I was so thrilled when I made a program that could print "hello" on the screen. That was my first program. It took 20 minutes to save it on the cassette and 20 minutes to call it up to run it from the cassette tape. I was babysitting for a guy who had this computer and he would let me use it once the kids went to bed.

Maybe they'll allow me to have my prune juice at the home now... :)

Kids today don't appreciate what it was like reading and writing programs in from a cassette recorder. I vaguely remember on my Atari you could hear the data squeals as you read it in.

There was something wonderfully DIRECT about the process. I ran a BBS in North Georgia that was famous in it's time, and it was on an Atari, with program read in from tape and run from RAM for as long as I could keep the thing running. Uploading & downloading software by xmodem, later zmodem. I ran into one of my BBS users a few years ago, well he recognized me first by my name and said "hey didn't you run that BBS back in...." and off we went.

The BBS ran first on Atari 800XL, awesome piece of equipment in it's day:

Final iteration had this:

Upgraded the RAM with a soldering iron, used the excess for a RAMdisk to speed everything up. I forget when I finally got off cassette and had my first 1050 floppy drive. Woohoo SpartaDOS and using a clipper to cut a notch on the floppy so you could flip it and use the back side. Good times!

Yep, time for my prune juice.

Ca early 1982 I discovered a rather disused 4K Model I in the back room of the advanced Math classroom. This was the only computer on campus. Teacher showed me how to cload and I was off to the races. The next summer we finally got a room full of Apple IIes for the business dep't, and one of the business teachers was nice enough to buy just about every Apple II game ever made up to that time (I think with her own money, dunno).

My senior year I hadn't failed any classes so I took first period off, had "independent study" for 3rd period, and my 7th period history teacher let us cut class since the material was so boring for us. With lunch (5th), that meant I spent every odd period in the computer lab my senior year, LOL. I even had my own system that nobody else used, one of two that had a color monitor along with a monochrome CRT for reading 80 col text, CP/M card, IIRC Mockingboard sound card, mouse card, printer.

I thought computers still kinda sucked in the 80s, until the Mac II came out. That was the first machine I desired with every fibre of my being. Worked two jobs in 1987-89 and was able to get a Mac IIcx soon after they came out. Great machine that I hand-carried onto the plane three years later when I went to Japan. With a mail-order LaserJet 4MP I got in 1993, I was rockin'.

My first computing experience involved COBOL and punched cards. The second was learning why you never drop the card deck.

Vicente says

Upgraded the RAM with a soldering iron, used the excess for a RAMdisk to speed everything up. I forget when I finally got off cassette and had my first 1050 floppy drive. Woohoo SpartaDOS and using a clipper to cut a notch on the floppy so you could flip it and use the back side. Good times!
Yep, time for my prune juice.

Wow, you are really bringing back memories with this comment. I remember using a clipper to notch floppies so I could use front and back. Wow, I almost forgot that detail.

Oh and I remember how expansion meant way more than plugging in cards into ports. LOL!