A visit to Silicon Valley

I worked in Silicon Valley during its glory days, but today it's kinda sad. The home prices are outa sight but the job base is struggling to recover. There has been some improvement in the past year because OFFSHORING CREATES JOBS (dammit) but there still seems to be a lot of unused office space, etc.

I went to the Computer Museum in Mountain View, near the sweet-smelling salt flats in the old Silicon Graphics building. They have a super collection of Old Stuff.

Highlights, for me, include TWO 1401 mainframes (this an IBM midrange introduced in 1959 on which I learned machine and assembler programming in the early 1970s).

The nonworking 1401 is from Germany and the backlit, 2001 A Space Odyssey style keys have forbidding German labels, but it was hard for me to not to press Start Reset, Check Reset, and Load. For this is what you did when you put your card deck, its lead card a bootstrap loader that in some cases you wrote yourself, to start the fun.

At the end of the tour, I was conducted into a real time warp, for the Computer Museum now has a partly working disk/tape 1401 installation with a "real" false floor, where mainframes to this day require this for cabling, power and air conditioning.

However, the docent, I could see, was a Basic Hardware Guy who'd grown up as I had with many generations of technology, but who as a Basic Hardware Guy would probably find Weird Software Guys like me a Pain in the Ass if I asked too many questions or God forbid, corrected him. By the time we were in the computer room, I sensed his anxiety for my instinct was to barge right over to the keypunch and start programming machine language right then and there!

One finds that if memory becomes, as a consequence of so many long nights on the computer, deeply embedded, that you remember the opcodes enough to be dangerous. M001120!

Therefore I exercised iron self-control. Perhaps I can "sell" a screenwriter friend on the idea of making a movie about the young Elvis Costello in the Computer Museum's retro installation. Costello was, you see, a computer operator before stardom and his early work shows the curious form of anger I encountered in Chicago operators and programmers, who were always fighting management for the ability to do their jobs.

I guess the experience brought back some of my early anger when I was seeking work as a programmer in Chicago only to be offered work mounting tapes IF I gotta haircut. I sought work as a programmer because on my Mom's side of the family, you sought safe jobs and did not take risks, such as going on to graduate school in computer science, so the drama involved that low self-esteem with which I later became familiar as a teacher.

I had just enough self-knowledge to remember "Otto", a student of mine in a C class who was an expert mainframe assembler programmer and resented what he considered the insult to his expertise implicit in the transition to C. Otto asked silly questions with abandon and I had to gently steer him away from disrupting the class.

I guess what was lacking, for me, in the Computer Museum was any celebration of the human. I mean, I would have liked to see mannequins in period dress in front of the machines. Perhaps a nattily dressed dog of the Gay Nineties manning the Hollerith punch, or Grace Hopper in uniform in front of Eniac.

One most amusing device: a Honeywell minicomputer sold by Neiman-Marcus in 1969 as a Stepford Wive's kitchen computer, in which the lady of the house, dressed I am certain in moon hat and Balenciaga boots, would gaily tap in HONEYWELL MACHINE LANGUAGE to monitor her recipes for Bouef Bourgninon and reminders for white wine with fish.

She'd use HONEYWELL MACHINE LANGUAGE despite the fact that in my experience, in the better sort of homes in the late 1960s, all the grown-ups were in the bag by dinner time courtesy of vodka marts, and all us crazy kids were out back blowing dope: cf. The Ice Storm.

"Ooooh, Honey, thanks for buying me a computer! How does it work! Read the manual? OK, but let me fix myself another drinkiewinkie first! Have you seen my Lark pack?"

"Eddie, look what Daddy bought us! A computer! Can you help me with it?"

"Why....uh.....SURE, Mom....I think so....let me see the manual....oh, wow, this is cool..."

But had this scenario played out, I would have dragged Mom's computer into the basement and lured my kid brother into being a human assembler, toggling my code into the console...which was the only way of programming the Needless Markup 1969 computer.

Needless to say, and according to the droll label for this baby, no record exists that any one such device ever sold, although perhaps some couple bought one for a lark during an Acid Trip.

The styling is Kubrick inspired late-1960s space programming, tending towards Acid Trip, and it is no wonder that today's crazy kids look with shock and awe on the detritus of my generation in books of images from Taschen, of men's hairstyles, asking, what were you thinking of.

But basically, Silicon Valley made me sad, in part because it seemed to me that under the absolutely top level, the sort of people that did well did not do so in the way I'd dreamed, in the 1970s, I would: by performing ever more creative and/or demanding technical tasks while improving their practice of the art.

Instead, in my experience, by the middle of the 1980s, the successful Players BELOW the top were successful primarily in the real estate game, that famously zero-sum pursuit. It seemed to me that people willingly worked predefined and in some cases moronized tasks while focusing for surcease on their acquisition of a large amount of government-sponsored debt, and in the complexity of their arrangement (made so because even in 1985, housing prices in the Bay Area were sky-high in relation to rationality) losing touch with any real accounting of their actual financial situation.

[Me, I KNOW I'm broke which is a Great Mercy.]

I miss China already and look forward to return, for in China one gets the feeling that pretty much everybody (with the exception of a sliver of the superrich on the Peak) is Just Getting By, putting a little aside, and working their nuts off.

This is in contrast to a Valley in which absurd inequality and incommensurability of condition creates bizarre life-styles including The Big House With No Furniture, and my coworkers at Strategic Solutions who lived in hotels from week to week.

To me, the American tension is between a sort of projected media psyche which is represented as Reality but which is instead an aspiration, and the statistical reality.

The projected media psyche is in control of her finances and looking to buy a house. The statistical reality is that MOST of us are in such debt that adding debt, even government sponsored debt, makes no sense. The realities are reconciled by narrating defects of individual character.

The result is that thousands, or even millions, of Americans are strictly speaking without political representation of their real interests when the DEMOCRATIC candidate is a millionaire.

I came to the Valley in 1981 because I wanted To Program. Period. I found myself immersed instead in the American narrative, from which the almost mittelEuropean character of Chicago, its Catholic majority, and its leftish remnant had protected me before. The Eagles said you can check out but never leave, but I proved 'em wrong.

Perhaps the reality is that prior to the first oil shock, California represented what Adorno characterized as genuine material hope for a halfway decent life, represented by its merciful weather for me when I arrived from Chicago. You could RENT an apartment without dressing in a three piece suit for an interview with its landlord.

The idea had a hold over me in 1981 unchecked by my wife's dry observations about comparative home prices, and I did find much to like and love about the place. But, its future in software development, I think, is almost exclusively as a network node in which people who kin write gude and speak on da phone transmit user requirements to the lads in far off lands.

Check out the new Taschen book of historical computer images! I regret that I cannot find an Amazon pointer to this book.

Two VERY interesting images are a group of engineers in China, in 1949, wiring a Chinese model electronic computer. China's late 1950s development of the atom bomb more or less demonstrates that under Mao (who came to power in 1949) there was some sort of mainframe computer development going on, and we can tentatively theorize that this wasn't Russian technology, since the Russians stole their mainframe designs from the US, and after 1956, China broke many technical relations with the Soviets.

Furthermore, the Maoist phenomena of both backyard iron furnaces and paramedics (the famous "barefoot doctors") may mean that there was a lot of interesting invention going on in China in computers.

Another very interesting image is of the first successful IBM mainframe, the IBM 701, taken in 1952. What's VERY interesting is that one of the two men in front of the computer is African-American.

African-Americans didn't start to be placed in corporate advertising, except as Pullman porters, until well after Brown v the Board of Education in 1954 and Dr. King, so it was daring of IBM to make this a press release. One sense the curmudgeonly mid-century FDR new-dealism of Tom Watson Sr at work. It was HIS bigod company, and no crackers were going to tell HIM who could appear in his publicity.