[ih] Review: Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley"

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 8:47 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> You have my condolences for having had to work under such harsh conditions.
>

Clem just about nailed what I was heading for, but this I don't understand.
What's harsh about being given wide latitude to work on interesting and
novel problems using hardware and software subsidized by a big organization
with deep pockets and an interest in letting you come up with something
cool?

We were pretty much on our own. It got to the point that we finally had to
> fire 3 of our bosses.
>

Ha! That's neat.

But the original point was contrasting "two guys in a garage" to "two guys
in a well-stocked lab funded by a major research organization/large
corporation." For the former, I think of two dudes with a door thrown over
a couple of saw horses, using a dumpster-dived 'scope to design a new
circuit out of self-funded discrete components and they gotta do it in 6
months or they'll burn through their personal savings and default on their
mortgage. The latter have many more resources to draw on (professional
grade, well-calibrated equipment, for one) and the security of a paycheck.

        - Dan C.

On Jul 5, 2018, at 19:48, Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> John.  I semi beg to differ. I think Dan got the basics right.  I lived
> those same times and yes management did not look at everything I did.  But
> they owned the system, the terminals, the media, even the printer
> paper/consumables.  While we had a lot of latitude what we were doing had
> to at least consider the corporate values/plans/goals.  Yes we all had what
> were refered to as G-jobs on the side.  I would even say Tektronix and HP
> were noted for encouraging them (Woz is said to have built the prototype
> Apple 1 on his bench at HP as an example).
>
> But I really could not have done much serious computing in those days with
> using equipment and software licensed by my employer. I would not haven
> been able to afford it otherwise and I was getting paid to do it.  That was
> Dans observation which I think is spot on.   I don’t think most  people in
> those days were really in a much different position.
>
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
> quite.
>
> On Jul 5, 2018, at 5:24 PM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> One needs to be careful how one defines ‘something that would have been
> accessible to an individual’ in those days.  ;-)  The same with the PDP-11.
> (It didn’t have the /20 designation yet.)  Was the machine bought and paid
> for by an individual? No.  Did an individual have free access to do
> whatever they wanted with the machine on company or your own time? Not
> uncommon at all.  We had a PDP-11 in 1970 it pretty well belonged to us.
> Management had no idea what it was.  ;-)
>
> snip
>
>
> Ken Thompson wrote the first "Unices" kernel on a cast-off PDP-7. While
> perhaps antiquated for 1969, is that really something that would have been
> accessible to an individual? 1st Edition was on a PDP-11/20; almost
> certainly out of the reach of individuals in the early 1970s. And the fact
> that they were getting *paid* to work on this is not a small point.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
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