OMG...My law partner and I drove to the factory to pick up ours. If memory serves--mine has turned a little “floppy” over the years--it was serial number 101...the same as the highway we travelled to get there. As Bob Hope always closed...thanks for the memories🙂
Professor, how can a musical note be a dimensionless point, considering the strict difference between a half note, a quarter note, and so on? Even a note played staccato has some length. You obviously took Taylor's advice to heart but what did he mean by it?
Great question. Basically, greater precision in when to strike the key. You depress the key at a particular instant, and then you manipulate it no more, other than to release it. If you think of the note as a blur in time, there can be a tendency to strike the key a bit early or a bit late—mentally, you have greater leeway in tricking the key. But if you imagine it as a dimensionless point, then you tend to strike the key at the precise moment. In the movie “Whiplash,” which I just saw for the first time, the jazz instructor, played by J. K. Simmons, essentially makes the same point over and over and over in a dozen different ways. Only, whereas Livingston Taylor was polite and encouraging, Simmons’s character made the same point in a brutal, terrifying, abusive manner.
I think I get it. The dimensionless point is at the beginning of the note, when you certainly need to be on time but not early. How long you hold it after you strike it depends on the length of the note in the score, but you need to begin it exactly on time when the metronome tocks.
Yup. That’s how I read his advice. Thinking of it as dimensionless means you have one precise strike at it. It does not afford you the opportunity to be awkwardly early or fashionably late.
In 1997 I showed a bird webcam feed to a brilliant businessman in medtech. His reaction was, "I can't see the value of this Internet thing". Today he's driving a medtech startup that combines telemedicine, holography and AI to help plan and perform vascular surgeries. On a similar note, didn't Paul Krugman once say something similar about the Internet? Or the USPTO commissioner declaring in the late 1800s that everything that was going to get invented had already been invented? Or the CEO of AT&T in the early 1900s saying that there would never be more than one telephone per town, shared by everyone? Or the CEO of IBM in the 50s confirming that the total market for computers would be less than 10?
Love the bird cam story. I’d love to write that story up if you can share some additional details and a contact with your friend. Fantastic story. … Yes, Krugman said it would be apparent by 2005 that the internet’s impact would be no greater than that of the fax machine. But, he has spent most of his career trying to persuade people that his Nobel was a fluke or an error. … The USPTO quote is almost certainly apocryphal. I found one source that said it was a joke in an 1899 Punch magazine. … I don’t know the AT&T quote. I found one figure that said that there were 5.8 million telephones in 1910. Phone companies were springing up everywhere in the 1890s and 1900s. So I’m doubting that quote—at least in that form. … The alleged Thomas Watson (IBM) quote is also likely to be apocryphal. I’ve seen a quote, supposedly from the IBM website, saying that Watson told a shareholders meeting in 1953 that the company had thought there was a market for around 5 computers *of a particular model* but that to their surprise, they had sold 18. IBM apparently suspects that is the source of the dubious quote. … But it’s not hard to document quotes at least that outlandish from famous people. Look through my substack essay on Woozle Hunters (November 30, 2022). I have loads of authenticated examples.
Kaypro! In the early 1980s my first husband was a grad student in molecular biology and one of the other students had a Kaypro II. They figured out some way to rig the parallel port to control various pieces of lab equipment. Nothing terribly sophisticated -- along the lines of running a magnetic stirrer for X hours and then shutting it off. But it relieved them of having to get up and go to the lab in the middle of the night. I suppose some of those guys ended up running scientific device start-ups. Bob became a truck farmer, but that's a separate story.
That's a fantastic story. It was quite a versatile little machine. The truck farmer part sounds like quite a story! A fine blogpost for you sometime. :)
In about 1976, a friend of mine who was an electrical engineering student at Princeton told me about a project they had going where you could type a paper onto a computer screen, edit it at leisure, and then print off a copy as perfect as you cared to make it. As the owner of a cheap Smith Corona portable typewriter I could only imagine such a thing.
at that stage, I was doing occasional work on mainframes with punch-hole paper tape as the storage medium. Best thing about it was that you could collect the residue from the tiny holes that were punched out, and you could throw it at people’s hair. They’d be combing it out for weeks. Glad you like the mental popcorn. I try to provide extra mental butter for better flavor!
Think for a moment about the latest time you had to wait *impatiently* for your computer or the network to complete something. Our 'impatience' button takes about 8 seconds to press itself. We expect completion in from three to five seconds.
Now think about the when it was that you first became capable of doing the thing you were impatiently awaiting.
The fact is that an astounding portion of the things we do every day with our computers, hell, our cell phones!, was *impossible* to do not that many years ago.
In 1978, the directors and senior management of a public corporation, I then worked for, were *completely* blown away by the editing capabilities of a Xerox 850 computer system. Re-writes of a quarterly report were turned around in minutes. Mirabile! Now we kvetch about autocorrect. on our phones.
In 1984, my wife was entirely unable to complete an international telephone call from Bombay to Toronto. Tried over three days. It took 21 seconds from last digit, to an answer, for that same call from Singapore to Toronto. The transmission delay was a little disconcerting. The clarity was as if the call was local. It was exactly 40 years ago: my birthday, as is today.
Change is inevitable. We just tend not to see it happen.. Like watching paint dry, it is slow and inevitable.
Happy birthday. Great memories -- and yes, impatience has changed. At Columbia, one of my professors was on leave in Italy. I wrote to ask whether he would consider sponsoring my dissertation. In a letter I received perhaps two months later, he said it was too distant from his field, so I should find some other sponsor. After months of similar delays, I said to hell with it and gave up the idea of finishing my doctorate. 15 years later, I had reason to reconsider. By then, I was leaving 350 miles away. I went on the web, found the name of a professor who looked interesting (whom I had never heard of). I sent her an email introducing myself and wondering whether she might be willing to talk to me about the possibility of supervising my dissertation. Maybe 10 minutes later, she wrote back and said no need to talk--she'd be glad to sponsor me. And so she did. I would submit chapters by email to her and to the other four committee members. Generally, within a week, all would have read my chapter and critiqued it. Astonishing change in technology and in the work ethic of my committee.
You have a better memory than me, but I do remember a couple of moments. When I started library school in 1970, I worked in the undergraduate library at the U of Illinois. During vacation periods we graduate assistants filed new cards into the card catalog. What a tedious job. These cards were purchased from the Library of Congress which produced them. When I started my first “real library job” I encountered the Ohio College Library Center that allowed for shared cataloging, but we were still filing those cards and using the card catalog. The Ohio Center expanded to today’s OCLC that operates WorldCat, a shared catalog with records of materials from around the world and accessible to everyone. And it’s augmented by websites such as Internet Archive and Google Books that provide actual copies online of books that are out of copyright.
It was in the 1980’s that I first heard the idea of electronic books booted about. I thought, who would want to curl up with a computer to read a novel? My boss at the time said that it would have to be a device that looked like a book and was easy to hold. He was right. A relative got a Kindle in the early 2000’s and told me how she could store so many books on it. I wasn’t convinced. It took until my first iPad, around 2010(?) to convince me that reading books on a device was a good thing. Now I read almost everything on my iPad and adjust the print size for my aging eyes.
Finally, I remember going to an office supply store in downtown Dayton, Ohio, with my boss to buy the very first PC for the U of Dayton Library. We bought the IBM XT, figuring we could use the added features. We hooked it up via modem to a company called DIALOG that provided searchable indexes to journal articles. We paid by the minute of online time, so we carefully composed our search strategy before dialing up. The results printed out slowly onto a roll of paper. We thought it was really cool! Little did we know that cd-roms, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and mobile phones were ahead!
This is all familiar to me. My wife was a librarian at Columbia. She was part of the team that developed the first online catalog for the university. I read her your first paragraph and she interjected that the other big part of her job involved DIALOG and BRS. She had to train the librarians and faculty on how to do the searches, and she noted that they cost real money. While at Columbia she also got the first Apple Mackintosh and started a desktop publishing operation for the university’s 23 libraries. In the 1990s, living near Richmond, VA, she was the central figure in setting up an online catalog and search system for residents of the county—so they could browse the catalog at home. Later, she designed and oversaw the construction of two state-of-the-art high school libraries, dealing the whole while with architects and designers who still thought in terms of c.1955 libraries—tall shelves with books, books, books; uncomfortable tables and chairs; dark spaces, and silence. She designed them to have low shelving, fiber optics, PCs, Starbucks-style seating, spaces where students could collaborate outloud. And heavy-duty instruction on how to make the most of your phone.
Hah! How to make the most of your phone! IIRC correctly, when in 1992, I purchased an HP-48SX, I held in my hand more computing power than went to the moon in 1969.
My HP-48SX was a successor to, sequentially, an HP-65, HP67, and HP41CV, each being an order of magnitude more competent than the predecessor. When HP announced the end of production of the HP48GX, I ran out and bought a second one! Today I run an emulator on my Android phone as well as having 2 working units.
Computerized 'whatever' is everywhere.
Just my wife and I in the house, yet I had to add an 8 port switch downstairs as the 4 ports on the router cannot handle all the cables plus at that end of the house plus there is another router at the other end of the house, and I had to run an extra feed from the switch as I needed 5 ports there. And that doesn't include the wifi!
Didn't say what I came to say! The present young generations just accept that what is, has ALWAYS been. A fact which we know is not true and not even close. And the vast majority have NO idea how a cell phone actually works. (Those that do, are derided as 'nerds'). Quick question: how many different transmitter/receiver sets can you find in today's cellphones. Ignore different frequencies, just the different formats. Answer below.
Minimum of 4 trans/receiver sets, plus one or two separate receivers:
Cellphone (multiple frequencies), wifi (multiple frequencies), bluetooth, and NFC (like bluetooth but different), plus GPS receiver only, and possibly FM radio (higher end units). Not sure is wireless charging counts in this. I don't think so.
OMG...My law partner and I drove to the factory to pick up ours. If memory serves--mine has turned a little “floppy” over the years--it was serial number 101...the same as the highway we travelled to get there. As Bob Hope always closed...thanks for the memories🙂
That’s great! I neglected to mention that Arthur C. Clarke used one for writing science fiction: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/16/349027131/the-kaypro-ii-an-early-computer-with-a-writers-heart
👍🙂
Professor, how can a musical note be a dimensionless point, considering the strict difference between a half note, a quarter note, and so on? Even a note played staccato has some length. You obviously took Taylor's advice to heart but what did he mean by it?
Great question. Basically, greater precision in when to strike the key. You depress the key at a particular instant, and then you manipulate it no more, other than to release it. If you think of the note as a blur in time, there can be a tendency to strike the key a bit early or a bit late—mentally, you have greater leeway in tricking the key. But if you imagine it as a dimensionless point, then you tend to strike the key at the precise moment. In the movie “Whiplash,” which I just saw for the first time, the jazz instructor, played by J. K. Simmons, essentially makes the same point over and over and over in a dozen different ways. Only, whereas Livingston Taylor was polite and encouraging, Simmons’s character made the same point in a brutal, terrifying, abusive manner.
Re: charts A and B
So many plants! So little etouffee!
By these charts, the world is damn-near vegan.
👍😊
I think I get it. The dimensionless point is at the beginning of the note, when you certainly need to be on time but not early. How long you hold it after you strike it depends on the length of the note in the score, but you need to begin it exactly on time when the metronome tocks.
Yup. That’s how I read his advice. Thinking of it as dimensionless means you have one precise strike at it. It does not afford you the opportunity to be awkwardly early or fashionably late.
In 1997 I showed a bird webcam feed to a brilliant businessman in medtech. His reaction was, "I can't see the value of this Internet thing". Today he's driving a medtech startup that combines telemedicine, holography and AI to help plan and perform vascular surgeries. On a similar note, didn't Paul Krugman once say something similar about the Internet? Or the USPTO commissioner declaring in the late 1800s that everything that was going to get invented had already been invented? Or the CEO of AT&T in the early 1900s saying that there would never be more than one telephone per town, shared by everyone? Or the CEO of IBM in the 50s confirming that the total market for computers would be less than 10?
Love the bird cam story. I’d love to write that story up if you can share some additional details and a contact with your friend. Fantastic story. … Yes, Krugman said it would be apparent by 2005 that the internet’s impact would be no greater than that of the fax machine. But, he has spent most of his career trying to persuade people that his Nobel was a fluke or an error. … The USPTO quote is almost certainly apocryphal. I found one source that said it was a joke in an 1899 Punch magazine. … I don’t know the AT&T quote. I found one figure that said that there were 5.8 million telephones in 1910. Phone companies were springing up everywhere in the 1890s and 1900s. So I’m doubting that quote—at least in that form. … The alleged Thomas Watson (IBM) quote is also likely to be apocryphal. I’ve seen a quote, supposedly from the IBM website, saying that Watson told a shareholders meeting in 1953 that the company had thought there was a market for around 5 computers *of a particular model* but that to their surprise, they had sold 18. IBM apparently suspects that is the source of the dubious quote. … But it’s not hard to document quotes at least that outlandish from famous people. Look through my substack essay on Woozle Hunters (November 30, 2022). I have loads of authenticated examples.
Kaypro! In the early 1980s my first husband was a grad student in molecular biology and one of the other students had a Kaypro II. They figured out some way to rig the parallel port to control various pieces of lab equipment. Nothing terribly sophisticated -- along the lines of running a magnetic stirrer for X hours and then shutting it off. But it relieved them of having to get up and go to the lab in the middle of the night. I suppose some of those guys ended up running scientific device start-ups. Bob became a truck farmer, but that's a separate story.
That's a fantastic story. It was quite a versatile little machine. The truck farmer part sounds like quite a story! A fine blogpost for you sometime. :)
In about 1976, a friend of mine who was an electrical engineering student at Princeton told me about a project they had going where you could type a paper onto a computer screen, edit it at leisure, and then print off a copy as perfect as you cared to make it. As the owner of a cheap Smith Corona portable typewriter I could only imagine such a thing.
Great article. I love mental popcorn like this.
at that stage, I was doing occasional work on mainframes with punch-hole paper tape as the storage medium. Best thing about it was that you could collect the residue from the tiny holes that were punched out, and you could throw it at people’s hair. They’d be combing it out for weeks. Glad you like the mental popcorn. I try to provide extra mental butter for better flavor!
Think for a moment about the latest time you had to wait *impatiently* for your computer or the network to complete something. Our 'impatience' button takes about 8 seconds to press itself. We expect completion in from three to five seconds.
Now think about the when it was that you first became capable of doing the thing you were impatiently awaiting.
The fact is that an astounding portion of the things we do every day with our computers, hell, our cell phones!, was *impossible* to do not that many years ago.
In 1978, the directors and senior management of a public corporation, I then worked for, were *completely* blown away by the editing capabilities of a Xerox 850 computer system. Re-writes of a quarterly report were turned around in minutes. Mirabile! Now we kvetch about autocorrect. on our phones.
In 1984, my wife was entirely unable to complete an international telephone call from Bombay to Toronto. Tried over three days. It took 21 seconds from last digit, to an answer, for that same call from Singapore to Toronto. The transmission delay was a little disconcerting. The clarity was as if the call was local. It was exactly 40 years ago: my birthday, as is today.
Change is inevitable. We just tend not to see it happen.. Like watching paint dry, it is slow and inevitable.
Happy birthday. Great memories -- and yes, impatience has changed. At Columbia, one of my professors was on leave in Italy. I wrote to ask whether he would consider sponsoring my dissertation. In a letter I received perhaps two months later, he said it was too distant from his field, so I should find some other sponsor. After months of similar delays, I said to hell with it and gave up the idea of finishing my doctorate. 15 years later, I had reason to reconsider. By then, I was leaving 350 miles away. I went on the web, found the name of a professor who looked interesting (whom I had never heard of). I sent her an email introducing myself and wondering whether she might be willing to talk to me about the possibility of supervising my dissertation. Maybe 10 minutes later, she wrote back and said no need to talk--she'd be glad to sponsor me. And so she did. I would submit chapters by email to her and to the other four committee members. Generally, within a week, all would have read my chapter and critiqued it. Astonishing change in technology and in the work ethic of my committee.
You have a better memory than me, but I do remember a couple of moments. When I started library school in 1970, I worked in the undergraduate library at the U of Illinois. During vacation periods we graduate assistants filed new cards into the card catalog. What a tedious job. These cards were purchased from the Library of Congress which produced them. When I started my first “real library job” I encountered the Ohio College Library Center that allowed for shared cataloging, but we were still filing those cards and using the card catalog. The Ohio Center expanded to today’s OCLC that operates WorldCat, a shared catalog with records of materials from around the world and accessible to everyone. And it’s augmented by websites such as Internet Archive and Google Books that provide actual copies online of books that are out of copyright.
It was in the 1980’s that I first heard the idea of electronic books booted about. I thought, who would want to curl up with a computer to read a novel? My boss at the time said that it would have to be a device that looked like a book and was easy to hold. He was right. A relative got a Kindle in the early 2000’s and told me how she could store so many books on it. I wasn’t convinced. It took until my first iPad, around 2010(?) to convince me that reading books on a device was a good thing. Now I read almost everything on my iPad and adjust the print size for my aging eyes.
Finally, I remember going to an office supply store in downtown Dayton, Ohio, with my boss to buy the very first PC for the U of Dayton Library. We bought the IBM XT, figuring we could use the added features. We hooked it up via modem to a company called DIALOG that provided searchable indexes to journal articles. We paid by the minute of online time, so we carefully composed our search strategy before dialing up. The results printed out slowly onto a roll of paper. We thought it was really cool! Little did we know that cd-roms, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and mobile phones were ahead!
This is all familiar to me. My wife was a librarian at Columbia. She was part of the team that developed the first online catalog for the university. I read her your first paragraph and she interjected that the other big part of her job involved DIALOG and BRS. She had to train the librarians and faculty on how to do the searches, and she noted that they cost real money. While at Columbia she also got the first Apple Mackintosh and started a desktop publishing operation for the university’s 23 libraries. In the 1990s, living near Richmond, VA, she was the central figure in setting up an online catalog and search system for residents of the county—so they could browse the catalog at home. Later, she designed and oversaw the construction of two state-of-the-art high school libraries, dealing the whole while with architects and designers who still thought in terms of c.1955 libraries—tall shelves with books, books, books; uncomfortable tables and chairs; dark spaces, and silence. She designed them to have low shelving, fiber optics, PCs, Starbucks-style seating, spaces where students could collaborate outloud. And heavy-duty instruction on how to make the most of your phone.
Hah! How to make the most of your phone! IIRC correctly, when in 1992, I purchased an HP-48SX, I held in my hand more computing power than went to the moon in 1969.
My HP-48SX was a successor to, sequentially, an HP-65, HP67, and HP41CV, each being an order of magnitude more competent than the predecessor. When HP announced the end of production of the HP48GX, I ran out and bought a second one! Today I run an emulator on my Android phone as well as having 2 working units.
Computerized 'whatever' is everywhere.
Just my wife and I in the house, yet I had to add an 8 port switch downstairs as the 4 ports on the router cannot handle all the cables plus at that end of the house plus there is another router at the other end of the house, and I had to run an extra feed from the switch as I needed 5 ports there. And that doesn't include the wifi!
Skynet is Winning!
Didn't say what I came to say! The present young generations just accept that what is, has ALWAYS been. A fact which we know is not true and not even close. And the vast majority have NO idea how a cell phone actually works. (Those that do, are derided as 'nerds'). Quick question: how many different transmitter/receiver sets can you find in today's cellphones. Ignore different frequencies, just the different formats. Answer below.
Minimum of 4 trans/receiver sets, plus one or two separate receivers:
Cellphone (multiple frequencies), wifi (multiple frequencies), bluetooth, and NFC (like bluetooth but different), plus GPS receiver only, and possibly FM radio (higher end units). Not sure is wireless charging counts in this. I don't think so.
Delightful column that I shared with many!
So glad you liked it! Hope they'll subscribe, too. :)
Really interesting - if I find some time I may try a similar road map.
Thanks for posting it.
Hoping you’ll post your roadmap. Let us know when you have it.