"On This Day" In Engineering History

In my high school's (Guilderland, NY) innovative history-english hybrid class ('82-'83) called "His-Lish", we had the choice of reading Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984. Still need to catch up with his Animal Farm. Amazing how well Orwell predicted social behavior that I've witnessed first-hand in the real world as an adult. Also, The Apple ad was great. However, from their latest, very positive quarterly earnings, looks like IBM may have finally changed their corporate culture, with its new focus on software and services (no more "Big Brother" culture, I think), so Armonk may be on the rise again, keeping Apple on its toes. - Larry

Thanks for the comment, april05. I've never read Orwell's Animal Farm either, but recall hearing that it was a critique of the Stalinist system in Soviet Russia. 1984 is much more sinister because it's about a world that could still come to pass (even though the year 1984 is now part of history, too).

Those who have read both books are invited to jump in here and correct me if I'm wrong about Animal Farm.

As for the advertisement "1984", I think it helped to make computers "cool". Imagine an alternative commercial that discussed the gooey (GUI) and mouse in some detail. The glazed look on the eyes of some football fans would have been visible.

Hey Moose -

Agreed - 1984 still has relevance -

The ad was definitely effective for the masses, and Apple's GUI a break-through (replicated by Amiga and others), but I had already been bitten by the computing bug earlier in 1980-81 or so, when I became a regular in our high school's geeky computer room, courtesy of my inspirational math/computer science teacher (and former local public TV personality).

Back then, there were Apple Kids vs. Atari Kids vs. Commodore Kids (I was a Commodore Kid), and all heck broke loose during the after-hours computer club meetings (bytes and sprites flying, etc.). I suspect we were slightly less rowdy than the A/V crowd.

My latest hero - apart from Orwell's predictions - in looking at the 80's and 20th Century in general is Scotsman Niall Ferguson - saw his PBS documentary "War of the World" on DVD last week - amazing new take on the last century - recommend it to all the CR4 history buffs out there.

<-- Commodore PET, circa 1980. My first PC. :)Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

I myself pretty much use the computer as if it was a typewriter. Went from typewriters to a Smith Corona 9050 word processor, then to old computers my mother's friends gave her to give to me to write on. Since the HP hard drive died I bought a couple of reconditioned MACs. Lately I feel like Microsoft is as much a villain as IBM might have ever been. "Why can't we just get along?" Big Brother is watching you. 1984 and A Clockwork Orange are realities. Everybody is supposed to be a spy now. Cameras are everywhere. Delete doesn't really mean delete. Doublespeak is endemic. Now if I write a politician I figure putting the message in an envelope means it won't get read, so I make a big postcard. Milan Kundera wrote a book titled The Postcard, you might find interesting. The US Postoffice is laying off. If I was President I'd charge them with protecting our computers from hackers and extortionists. The sad and evil truth is that our government is more interested in spying on us, than protecting our privacy. Hence we are in a world predicted by these great authors like Huxley, or Orwell. -don't like football, never saw that ad.

Hey Moose - I need to correct myself - the memory came back to me - properly - over the weekend: we had the choice to read "Animal Farm" (Orwell) or "Brave New World" (Huxley). I opted for Huxley, but also went to see the movie "1984" - John Hurt version w/ the Eurythmics soundtrack - during the same year. Thanks for letting me clear my conscience. - Larry

I vividly remember seeing this commercial, sitting in the living room of a friend's house during a Super Bowl party in Stamford CT, a foot of snow on the ground, and me the only Raider supporter in the house. Most of us were in the "time-sharing" industry, and we were about to experience what the advent of the PC did to that business. Interesting now that "cloud computing" seems almost to be timesharing re-invented. No longer do you run your data and your applications on YOUR desktop, but now you get to store them on someone else's computer, and depend on that remote computer system to serve your data back down to you... Any other old-timers see this parallel?

Hi Jim - I remember those "cloudy" days of queued-up jobs on centrally-ran BASIC program compiler mainframes (paper streaming over the top my tele-type keyboard console, as my baseball statistics program ran on some remote box ran by my school district), Digital VAX and micro-VAX systems, Prime, IBM RS/6000, and so on. Seems like Google is bringing us back-to-the-future with their new spreadsheets and other applications running on their servers. You're definitely right - full circle. - Larry