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?
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.
Mar 14, 2023·edited Mar 14, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
Re: charts A and B
So many plants! So little etouffee!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
Delightful column that I shared with many!
Really interesting - if I find some time I may try a similar road map.
Thanks for posting it.