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Before Silicon Valley got nasty the Pirates of Analog Alley fought it out (2014)
- zeristor 7y agoI never realised Kelvin took over from Babbage
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pattusk 7y agoThis was a fascinating read overall but I found the effort to translate everything into modern big-tech terminology very distracting. Furthermore the Gates/Jobs or Microsoft/Apple analogies seem tenuous at best and gives the impression that the author is misrepresenting a story that is already interesting enough on its own.
- mcnichol 7y agoI liked how he wove it together (or attempted to). Agreed that he made points which appeared to stop you and think up the story to draw a parallel but I believe there is a cyclical nature to this. I like seeing the story behind great rivalries, Tesla and Edison, Marconi and Maskelyne, Einstein and Hilbert. Arguably you could say it parallels across the mere premise of rivalry. In any case, that was a new one for me!
- madengr 7y agoKelvin bandwidth model only accounted for the RC dispersion of the undersea cable, hence it had horrible dispersion and a sub-Hz bandwidth. It was Heaviside that introduced the loading coil via his solution of telegrapher equation and coaxial cable that made the undersea cable practical. Of course he died a pauper. He is the father of RF EE, if you ask me. https://ethw.org/Oliver_Heaviside https://ethw.org/Oliver_Heaviside
- Stratoscope 7y agoOddly enough, Heaviside's name has been heard in song by tens of millions of people in recent years. In the musical Cats, every Jellicle Cat hopes to be the one chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer. This may be a metaphorical place in the play, but it is also an actual layer of the ionosphere. Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly (working independently) predicted its existence in 1902, and it was confirmed in 1924 by Edward Appleton. Cats is based on the 1939 book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Shortwave radio was a big deal at the time, and anything to do with radio signals and propagation caught the public's attention. Today, the Heaviside Layer is known as the E layer, and is much beloved by amateur radio operators for its unpredictable propagation known as "sporadic E skip". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_layer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay... https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Heaviside_Layer https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Heaviside_Layer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Possum%27s_Book_of_Practical_Cats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Possum%27s_Book_of_Practic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation
- dmix 7y agoI don’t see where it said he died a pauper. He spent his whole life researching science. That’s a luxury life of the first world. The last sentence said he ‘lived comfortably’ until his mental capacity diminished and he died at an old age.
- pfdietz 7y agoI'd also like to see a historical tech article about magnetic amplifiers. These were used for gunnery also.
- mr-ron 7y agoFor people interested in this part of Computer history I highly recommend the book "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution" https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-Revolution/dp/1476708703 https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-R... Gets deep into this part of history, and goes deep into what was shared between companies and research as well.
- pinewurst 7y agoAn excellent book on this subject (without any of the heavyhanded Big Tech comparisons) is “Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics”, by David Mindell who also wrote the great “Digital Apollo”.