HP, Apple, and thoughts

 So, here's a sample of what's wrong with American Education

Gurman works for Bloomberg; the San Jose Mercury-News just ran the story.   But the SJ Merc added the headline, which is demonstrably stupid and wrong.   Graduate of a local Bay Area school?

Moving past that faux pas, I was in a conversation with noted MIT researcher Charles Leiserson this week, and we were discussing his role in the CM-5, the first supercomputer to ever head the Famous Fifty list, cited in the last post re Rattner's key machines of the 1996 era.   The CM-5 debuted in 1992, architected by Danny Hillis and Leiserson.   It was the computer used for the movie Jurassic Park, even though the book cited Seymour Cray's X-MP.

Here is a Web quote re the CM-5

The surprise for me was when Leiserson held up his i-Phone 10, and said "this little baby outperforms that CM-5 in every dimension except size, weight, and cost.   The first CM-5 cost $45 million, he averred, but the performance metrics of the $1,000 iPhone 10 exceed the CM-5 'significantly.  WOW!

And I woke up this morning thinking about the combinatorics here:

1. The HP 35 handheld calculator was the "first mobile computer" of consequence, thanks to Hewlett

2. Wozniak worked for HP (and handhelds) and we struggled to see that this PC idea was valuable

3. My Logic State Analyzer team built the tools for HP Computer design, but also provided 50 of our top-end HP 1610As to Danny Hillis for the CM-1.   It was our largest order to date, in 1978. $500K.

4. Rattner (an old HP guy) worked with Hillis and the CM-5, in designing the RED machine for NSF .

5. And now HP, with notable attempts and little success, in mobile computing platforms (e.g phones) is about to deliver a competitive supercomputer for $40 million, shades of the CM-5 in its day

And that reminded me of an Intel friend, Nathan Zeldes, who visited our horse ranch last year, and met my sister-in-law, who asked "what did you do at Intel?"   He pulled out an iPhone, and said "ever seen one of these?"   She was, like, "duh, of course" to which he said, "I helped design the first Intel chips for these things, and this computer in my hand has more compute power than the nation of Israel when I went to work for Intel.   And now, with 900 million of these marvels in the world, we use them to argue with strangers and show pictures of cats."

This, some assert, is amazing progress