Yeah, I know CBS Sunday Morning “is intended for mature audiences,” as in “old.” Consider me targeted. Yesterday, they featured a New Yorker cartoonist from the publication’s first twenty years, Barbara Shermund.
Here are Shermund’s first and her final cartoon (that I could find), appearing in The New Yorker.
An important person in the history of healthcare information systems, who shall remain nameless, put me on a career path that evolved over the years and carried me along until my retirement. After I had worked with him on some very interesting projects, including my first exposure to the IBM PC, he asked me if I was interested in taking over the evaluation and approval of computer peripherals for our software system. I could see that for him it was busy work, but for me it was an opportunity I couldn’t resist, and I pursued it enthusiastically.
I became immersed in the products and technologies of terminals, printers, modems, statistical time-division multiplexors and data PBX’s, with a very heavy emphasis on data communications and serial interfacing. Network configuration and troubleshooting was added to the mix a couple of years later.
Working with manufacturers and distributors, hardware came in the door with the understanding that, if approved for use by our customers, we’d hold onto it for support purposes. My philosophy was to always take first crack at every customer problem, which was best done by having the gear on hand. That way, we could determine if a problem was ours to fix without finger pointing. If we needed to point a finger elsewhere, we could explain exactly why. If we weren’t certain, we would at least know in which direction the next step of the troubleshooting process needed to go.
At that time, there were dot-matrix printers of various sizes, gigantic band printers (also called line printers) and table-top daisy-wheel printers. The print quality of the first two technologies, almost always on perforated fanfold paper, was serviceable. A daisy-wheel printer with a cut-sheet paper feeder had quality that was almost comparable to an IBM Selectric typewriter, but it was agonizingly slow. Also, all of those printer technologies were VERY L-O-U-D!
After I’d been settled in my new role for better than a year, one of the software bosses said he was interested in high-quality, formatted printing for an office system that was under development. It had to be faster and quieter than the daisy-wheel printers. He was in luck, as Hewlett-Packard had just announced the first generation of its LaserJet.
The HP LaserJet was introduced at the low, low price of $3500, equivalent to about $10,000 today. It wouldn’t cost me anything to try one, so I arranged for delivery of an evaluation unit and we got to work. Considering how quickly we acted, it’s safe to say we were very early in announcing support for the HP LaserJet.
Around the same time, I was contacted by a distributor for Siemens. He wondered if I’d be interested in their cutting-edge PT-88, with inkjet printing. It printed in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. From my business travels to hospitals, I knew that nurses weren’t fond of noisy dot-matrix printers, especially in the ICU. The compact and whisper-quiet PT-88 seemed like a good option for them, so I had one delivered. It worked fine without any special software, making it an easy addition to the support list.
Today in my home office I have a 20-year-old Samsung laser printer and an 18-year-old Canon inkjet printer.
There’s another class of printers, called thermal transfer. Those were/are in widespread use for barcode labels, and I had no say in what was supported. Whatever thermal printers a hospital happened to be using, we had to make them work. Which reminds me of another story for later. The Case of the Melted Case.
The minicomputer industry was created at Ken Olsen’s company, Digital Equipment Corporation. Digital, also known as DEC (pronounced “deck”), dominated the industry for its entire 40-year existence.
Data General was started by former DEC engineers, most notably Ed de Castro, who was CEO for its first twenty years. He was followed by Ronald Skates for DG’s final ten years.
My father worked at DG for almost ten years. My first exposure to the company was in 1976, when visiting Dad there during my junior year of college.
Five years after that visit to Westborough, I was starting a new job and working on both DEC and DG systems. That was the same year Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine appeared. It told the story of how DG developed its 32-bit system, called the MV-series. I bought a copy as soon as it was out in paperback.
DG was a perennially distant second cousin to DEC in every way, right down to its circuit boards. Where DEC’s boards were beautifully fabricated, DG’s often had patch wires with solder splash. With the exception of a couple guys I worked with, DG’s field engineers didn’t have the same level of training and skill as DEC’s FE’s. They certainly weren’t as well equipped.
An unexpected and pleasant assignment I once had was assisting de Castro’s girlfriend Eileen (later his second wife) for a couple of days. Closer to my age than to Ed’s, she was bright, personable and unpretentious. My immediate thought was she must have had a marketing background. I helped her get an early DG laptop computer up and running and we put it through its paces for a presentation she was preparing.
Every so often I have checked to see if de Castro was still alive. During my recovery from cancer treatments I missed spotting his obituary. (I’m saddened to see that Eileen passed away a year ago. She was only three months older than myself, and I was right about her marketing background.)
https://www.chiampafuneralhome.com/obituaries/Edson-Donald-De-Castro?obId=33029648
The nadir of my association with DG came in 1994. The DG sales rep for my employer, a guy named Peter, tried to get me fired. Five years later he had to scramble to stay on board after EMC took over. Here is the long, painful story as was told on LinkedIn, without mentioning DG.
Sometimes the distinction seems blurred between the two PBS series, American Masters and American Experience. It has come to light that the recent Masters installment about Art Spiegelman was censored to remove a mention of Trump that associated him with fascism.
Giving in to Trump, especially pre-emptively, is pointless. Doing that will get you nothing. Harvard University is refusing to go along, but it has the financial resources to resist his authoritarian edicts. Everybody else will have to hang on until he’s out of office. Which will be four years from now, if we’re still a democracy by then.
The latest installment of American Experience explores the hits and misses of Polaroid’s inventor-founder Edwin Land.
Watching the documentary, as the timeline progresses it becomes obvious that Land was stuck in the mindset of photography as a chemical process. So was Kodak for that matter, despite having conducted the first tests of digital photography.
My most significant takeaway from ‘Mr. Polaroid’ was learning about Meroë Morse. While saying that, “of course he loved his wife and two daughters,” the point is made that Land was “married to his work,” which included Morse for almost 25 years.
It’s easy to infer that Land’s feelings for Morse went beyond her being a highly competent and trusted colleague who made significant contributions to the company’s success. In contrast to Land’s deadpan expression in his Polaroid photos, Meroë shines in this attractive test photo.
It would be a stretch to say that Polaroid’s decline began with Morse’s untimely death in 1969, but not that much of a stretch. Edwin Land isn’t alone as a Boston CEO who was as responsible for his company’s demise as he was its past success. Other CEO’s of failed technology companies include DEC founder Ken Olsen, DG’s Edson de Castro, and An Wang at his namesake company, Wang Laboratories.
Twelve years after the death of Amar Bose, his namesake company is still in business. So he’s an exception to the Boston rule, with a caveat. Bose sank an estimated billion dollars into a pet project that ultimately went nowhere. After its founder’s death, the company sold off the technology.
https://www.extremetech.com/cars/259042-bose-sells-off-revolutionary-electromagnetic-suspension
The Trump administration is not considering a reality show in which immigrants compete for citizenship, according to the Homeland Security chief, despite statements to the contrary by a department spokeswoman.
