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> Amazon pioneered hyperscale logistics efficiencies Actually, I believe that was Walmart as well: >TIMMER: I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is

> Amazon pioneered hyperscale logistics efficiencies Actually, I believe that was Walmart as well: >TIMMER: I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is the world’s largest supercomputer?” And the correct answer was, “It’s at the Pentagon.” Okay. “Where is the world’s second largest supercomputer?” Bentonville, Ark. Home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing. And it was pretty much invented by Walmart. Source: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/#:%7E:text=where%20is%20the%20world%E2%80%99s%20second%20largest%20supercomputer%3F https://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/#:%7E:text=where...

chubot 5y ago
Ironically Barnes And Noble was also a significant computer user in the 80’s and 90’s. They put a lot of local bookstores out of business with superior inventory, prices, and generally being data driven. Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties!
- echelon 5y ago
  The pattern is that efficiency increases and hyperscale fell the previous incumbent. If the pace of innovation doesn't slow, Amazon may fall to the same forces. Imagine a virtualized army of engineers that the AI or brain upload future may bring. Maybe that won't happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen at some point if we don't manage to nuke ourselves. There are probably a handful of other trends that will cause instability and salients to develop in the fitness gradient.
  - DougN7 5y ago
    That sounds scary - a company even more powerful and competitive that could beat Amazon. Imagine what their abuses would be!
- tjr 5y ago
  I frequently shopped at Barnes & Noble ~20 years ago. But they slowly carried less and less that I was interested in, seemingly shifting from a "store for people who like books" to a "store for people to buy gifts for people who like books". At first I placed online orders with them, but once moving to online shopping at all, it was clear that Amazon had even better selection, prices, shipping, etc. But I still enjoy a good physical bookstore. I might still shop there in person today if their stock was more interesting, even if the prices were a little higher.
  - Rd6n6 5y ago
    Chapters/indigo in Canada is like that. Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc. They removed all the tables and chairs they had 20 years ago for you to read at. At least they still exist though, all 4 used bookstores (plus one chapters) near where I live have closed down
    - fzil 5y ago
      > Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc. Yeah this annoyed me to no end, however after a few shops I realized the only reason these are even open right now is because of the high margin gift section. Check the prices on their plushies when you are there. $35 for a small rabbit! and people buy them.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        That's the GE-ification of retail. Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product... ... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store. B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I buy books by the bushel from thrift stores. Can't beat those prices!
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties! They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    I want to quickly emphasize that they are data driven enough to understand that lots of people buy those books because about 51-54% of the country doesn’t and never did like him.
    - kortilla 5y ago
      But who are those books for? I don’t buy books about politicians I don’t like.
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        A non-trivial number of people do across the political spectrum. Political memoirs for instance are usually ghostwritten (outside of the first Obama book and maybe the Pete book given he was a nobody) and are only purchased in order to show support for the candidate. It's a team spirit thing. Plus, I'm sure some have their own niches (satire, exposés like "Frankly we won this election" that have new reporting, etc) and many have their own historical value. I saw an ant-Tom DeLay book in the wild a few years ago well after his fall from grace and considered buying it just as a keepsake of the era.
        kortilla 5y ago
        No, not books meant to paint politicians in a good light. I’m talking about these “orange man bad” books. Why would I want to spend hours of my life reading more details about a man I don’t want occupying my mind?
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I do. "Don't like" is not the same as "not interesting".
dekhn 5y ago
Um the pentagon didn't have the world's largest supercomputer, and neither did walmart. walmart wouldn't buy a supercomputer to do logistics, as supercomputers are super expensive for modest speed improvements and you didn't need them to do supply chain optimization, and anyway, product tracking is a DB problem, not a supercomputer problem. What's sad is that there probably is some interesting IT story behind Walmart scaling, but not using supercomputers and using PCs or somethign instead.
- syshum 5y ago
  It would be funny if everyone thinks they used this sophisticated technology or supercomputer when in reality it was just someone with an excel workbook at ton of vba code /s
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    An Excel spreadsheet with VBA would have been a huge improvement. I figure the Pentagon probably did that about twenty years later.
- 14u2c 5y ago
  In this context it sounds like supercomputer would more analogous to mainframe.
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    In 1985, they did have mainframes at the Pentagon. But they dated from the 1960s. My first job out of college in 1989 was to go to work in the basement of The Pentagon for the Defense Communications Agency, as an Analyst/Terminal Operator for those old pre-Multics Honeywell WWMCCS mainframes. One of my first jobs there was to help modernized the classified Airfields database from COBOL 66 to COBOL 77. At the beginning, we used glass tty terminals that were wrapped in faraday cages, and all local printing was done via a screen print function to local thermal paper printers. We could use the line printers, but those were not directly accessible to us, and we had to go up to the Operator window to ask for our output. They later upgraded the terminals to EMF-hardened IBM PC XT computers with removable 5GB hard drives, known as WIS-CUC terminals. That was like 1991. Note that this was PC XT technology from like 1984, not PC AT. The unclassified PC AT type computers we used outside of the classified environments probably had more RAM, larger hard drives, and more I/O capacity than those ancient Honeywell mainframes. So, no, there weren’t any supercomputers at the Pentagon in 1985. Now, if you want to talk about NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, then that’s a different story.

chubot 5y ago

Ironically Barnes And Noble was also a significant computer user in the 80’s and 90’s. They put a lot of local bookstores out of business with superior inventory, prices, and generally being data driven. Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties!

echelon 5y ago
The pattern is that efficiency increases and hyperscale fell the previous incumbent. If the pace of innovation doesn't slow, Amazon may fall to the same forces. Imagine a virtualized army of engineers that the AI or brain upload future may bring. Maybe that won't happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen at some point if we don't manage to nuke ourselves. There are probably a handful of other trends that will cause instability and salients to develop in the fitness gradient.
- DougN7 5y ago
  That sounds scary - a company even more powerful and competitive that could beat Amazon. Imagine what their abuses would be!
tjr 5y ago
I frequently shopped at Barnes & Noble ~20 years ago. But they slowly carried less and less that I was interested in, seemingly shifting from a "store for people who like books" to a "store for people to buy gifts for people who like books". At first I placed online orders with them, but once moving to online shopping at all, it was clear that Amazon had even better selection, prices, shipping, etc. But I still enjoy a good physical bookstore. I might still shop there in person today if their stock was more interesting, even if the prices were a little higher.
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  Chapters/indigo in Canada is like that. Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc. They removed all the tables and chairs they had 20 years ago for you to read at. At least they still exist though, all 4 used bookstores (plus one chapters) near where I live have closed down
  - fzil 5y ago
    > Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc. Yeah this annoyed me to no end, however after a few shops I realized the only reason these are even open right now is because of the high margin gift section. Check the prices on their plushies when you are there. $35 for a small rabbit! and people buy them.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      That's the GE-ification of retail. Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product... ... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store. B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I buy books by the bushel from thrift stores. Can't beat those prices!
WalterBright 5y ago
> Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties! They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  I want to quickly emphasize that they are data driven enough to understand that lots of people buy those books because about 51-54% of the country doesn’t and never did like him.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    But who are those books for? I don’t buy books about politicians I don’t like.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      A non-trivial number of people do across the political spectrum. Political memoirs for instance are usually ghostwritten (outside of the first Obama book and maybe the Pete book given he was a nobody) and are only purchased in order to show support for the candidate. It's a team spirit thing. Plus, I'm sure some have their own niches (satire, exposés like "Frankly we won this election" that have new reporting, etc) and many have their own historical value. I saw an ant-Tom DeLay book in the wild a few years ago well after his fall from grace and considered buying it just as a keepsake of the era.
      - kortilla 5y ago
        No, not books meant to paint politicians in a good light. I’m talking about these “orange man bad” books. Why would I want to spend hours of my life reading more details about a man I don’t want occupying my mind?
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I do. "Don't like" is not the same as "not interesting".

dekhn 5y ago

Um the pentagon didn't have the world's largest supercomputer, and neither did walmart. walmart wouldn't buy a supercomputer to do logistics, as supercomputers are super expensive for modest speed improvements and you didn't need them to do supply chain optimization, and anyway, product tracking is a DB problem, not a supercomputer problem. What's sad is that there probably is some interesting IT story behind Walmart scaling, but not using supercomputers and using PCs or somethign instead.

syshum 5y ago
It would be funny if everyone thinks they used this sophisticated technology or supercomputer when in reality it was just someone with an excel workbook at ton of vba code /s
- bradknowles 5y ago
  An Excel spreadsheet with VBA would have been a huge improvement. I figure the Pentagon probably did that about twenty years later.
14u2c 5y ago
In this context it sounds like supercomputer would more analogous to mainframe.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  In 1985, they did have mainframes at the Pentagon. But they dated from the 1960s. My first job out of college in 1989 was to go to work in the basement of The Pentagon for the Defense Communications Agency, as an Analyst/Terminal Operator for those old pre-Multics Honeywell WWMCCS mainframes. One of my first jobs there was to help modernized the classified Airfields database from COBOL 66 to COBOL 77. At the beginning, we used glass tty terminals that were wrapped in faraday cages, and all local printing was done via a screen print function to local thermal paper printers. We could use the line printers, but those were not directly accessible to us, and we had to go up to the Operator window to ask for our output. They later upgraded the terminals to EMF-hardened IBM PC XT computers with removable 5GB hard drives, known as WIS-CUC terminals. That was like 1991. Note that this was PC XT technology from like 1984, not PC AT. The unclassified PC AT type computers we used outside of the classified environments probably had more RAM, larger hard drives, and more I/O capacity than those ancient Honeywell mainframes. So, no, there weren’t any supercomputers at the Pentagon in 1985. Now, if you want to talk about NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, then that’s a different story.