4 ms·

What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview?

by hiei 5y ago

tablespoon 5y ago
> What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview? My understanding is that the oil and gas industry is pretty heavy needs for scientific computation and data visualization. That's how they discover new places to drill.
- edge17 5y ago
  What year are we talking? I get that is a pretty big use case now, but back then (mid 1980s?) was it also the case?
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    When I was a kid in the early 90s, a nearby university had a Cray 1. We went on field trip to see it. IIRC, they got it because some oil company had gotten a better supercomputer and didn't need it anymore, so it was probably originally purchased sometime in the 80s or earlier. Also a quick search found this from 1985: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400506?journalCode=simb https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400...: > Supercomputers are becoming a useful and important tool in the finding and developing of oil and gas reserves. Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry involve two important aspects: enormous computational power and massive data management. Vector computers are being used in petroleum engineering to simulate the flow of oil and gas in a reservoir, the faster performance of the vector machines making many, heretofore, unmanageable calculations possible. In exploration for oil and gas, supercomputers are being used to store, classify, and interpret huge amounts of geophysical seismic data.
    - edge17 5y ago
      Funny, I just found that link myself. I guess it makes sense, there was data and there was a need to comb through it. Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        "Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data" And since we are visual beings, managing large amounts of data is best done in a graphical way. But it is not easy to do that right. You can create super beautiful looking, but total missleading visualisations.
    - tudorw 5y ago
      My father worked in the sugar industry, his first computer came with an operator :)
  - gumby 5y ago
    When Fairchild got out of the computing business (84/85 ish) it was the huge oilfield services company Schlumberger that bought the AI lab run by Marty Tenenbaum. IIRC S had some Crays and a Connection Machine. Schlumberger Palo Alto was across the street (other side of Foothill Expwy) from PARC. IIRC they had a lot of interesting visualization work; I turned them down (despite their excellent research staff) for PARC because I wanted to work on theory of computation.
- yardie 5y ago
  Oil and gas industries are data crunching monsters. While I thought it was impressive I got to work with < terabyte datasets I’ve met so many data scientists crunching petabyte seismic datasets that could give backblaze a run for their money. I’m convinced if SV hadn’t happened in SV it would have happened in Dallas or Houston.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > I’m convinced if SV hadn’t happened in SV it would have happened in Dallas or Houston. Part of what attracted investors and innovators to the bay were the non-compete laws and counter culture of the time.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Some blips of that alternate timeline: Schlumberger buying Fairchild, which had FLAIR (Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research), then opening SPAR (Schlumberger Palo Alto Research) and moving FLAIR into that. Also long forgotten CPU-Architecture called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture later sold to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph https://www.slb.com/who-we-are/our-history/1980s https://www.slb.com/who-we-are/our-history/1980s Closing of SPAR, and moving parts of that to Austin. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-18-fi-4498-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-18-fi-4498-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Martin_Tenenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Martin_Tenenbaum Some leftovers, via acquisition of Applicon and Bravo3!VLSI: https://www.staticfreesoft.com/electricHistory.html https://www.staticfreesoft.com/electricHistory.html Steven M. Rubin, Computer Aids for VLSI Design https://www.rulabinsky.com/cavd/ https://www.rulabinsky.com/cavd/

What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview?

by hiei 5y ago

What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview?

> What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview? My understanding is that the oil and gas industry is pretty heavy needs for scientific computation and data visualization. That's how they discover new places to drill.

edge17 5y ago
What year are we talking? I get that is a pretty big use case now, but back then (mid 1980s?) was it also the case?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  When I was a kid in the early 90s, a nearby university had a Cray 1. We went on field trip to see it. IIRC, they got it because some oil company had gotten a better supercomputer and didn't need it anymore, so it was probably originally purchased sometime in the 80s or earlier. Also a quick search found this from 1985: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400506?journalCode=simb https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400...: > Supercomputers are becoming a useful and important tool in the finding and developing of oil and gas reserves. Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry involve two important aspects: enormous computational power and massive data management. Vector computers are being used in petroleum engineering to simulate the flow of oil and gas in a reservoir, the faster performance of the vector machines making many, heretofore, unmanageable calculations possible. In exploration for oil and gas, supercomputers are being used to store, classify, and interpret huge amounts of geophysical seismic data.
  - edge17 5y ago
    Funny, I just found that link myself. I guess it makes sense, there was data and there was a need to comb through it. Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more to do with being able to manage large amounts of data" And since we are visual beings, managing large amounts of data is best done in a graphical way. But it is not easy to do that right. You can create super beautiful looking, but total missleading visualisations.
  - tudorw 5y ago
    My father worked in the sugar industry, his first computer came with an operator :)
- gumby 5y ago
  When Fairchild got out of the computing business (84/85 ish) it was the huge oilfield services company Schlumberger that bought the AI lab run by Marty Tenenbaum. IIRC S had some Crays and a Connection Machine. Schlumberger Palo Alto was across the street (other side of Foothill Expwy) from PARC. IIRC they had a lot of interesting visualization work; I turned them down (despite their excellent research staff) for PARC because I wanted to work on theory of computation.
yardie 5y ago
Oil and gas industries are data crunching monsters. While I thought it was impressive I got to work with < terabyte datasets I’ve met so many data scientists crunching petabyte seismic datasets that could give backblaze a run for their money. I’m convinced if SV hadn’t happened in SV it would have happened in Dallas or Houston.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > I’m convinced if SV hadn’t happened in SV it would have happened in Dallas or Houston. Part of what attracted investors and innovators to the bay were the non-compete laws and counter culture of the time.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Some blips of that alternate timeline: Schlumberger buying Fairchild, which had FLAIR (Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research), then opening SPAR (Schlumberger Palo Alto Research) and moving FLAIR into that. Also long forgotten CPU-Architecture called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture later sold to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergraph https://www.slb.com/who-we-are/our-history/1980s https://www.slb.com/who-we-are/our-history/1980s Closing of SPAR, and moving parts of that to Austin. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-18-fi-4498-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-18-fi-4498-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Martin_Tenenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Martin_Tenenbaum Some leftovers, via acquisition of Applicon and Bravo3!VLSI: https://www.staticfreesoft.com/electricHistory.html https://www.staticfreesoft.com/electricHistory.html Steven M. Rubin, Computer Aids for VLSI Design https://www.rulabinsky.com/cavd/ https://www.rulabinsky.com/cavd/