Presumably graduates from other institutions are much the same.
Would they have behaved in a similar manner 20 or 30 years ago?
Bertrand Russell (I think it was he) once said "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." but I don't think that is the mechanism at play here.
I'm 55 years out, but probably. The majority of MIT graduates _aren't_ EE's... all kinds of pansy degrees... even "Humanities"
Now-a-days there seems to be no hands-on experience along with a college education. I grew up in a Radio/TV repair shop... had I been approached at graduation with such a question I would have answered, "Current will flow, but not sufficient to 'light' a 110V light bulb".
In addition, MIT is no longer any different from any other university, full of pansy snowflake leftists with no brains whatsoever. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.
UConn engineering has a huge co-op program with United Technologies, so that sort of thing does still exist.
The death of Route 128 hardware makers does make it more difficult in Mass.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
I usually ask the intern candidates, ee seniors or grads, to explain a
2-resistor voltage divider. Maybe that's too hard; I'll start with the light bulb test next time.That big dark guy seems to naturally get it. Some people do, but that's rare, even in EE grads.
Electronic design isn't just math and theory; it's driven by instinct.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
There are still plenty of tech companies here, though, and a few hardware manufacturers but most of their products involve fiddling with DNA.
I agree; students need to start doing projects very soon after they have the fundamentals down. And not "one project a semester" bullshit group exercises. Starting year two there should be like, one project every week or two. With no right or wrong answer - you get points for meeting the specifications with style.
Most of the time I spend around MIT these days it feels a lot more like being in Seoul than in Massachusetts. The Boston University area is much the same.
It's okay though, MIT has a couple nice free car chargers next door to the nuclear reactor.
I got my Masters on Motorola's dime (and time :) I found it great that course work and job work could be lined up nicely. I designed my first OpAmp just two years out of MIT... and it's still selling (MC1530/31, Lansdale).
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.
Is the diner still there next to the reactor? We affectionately nicknamed it the "Radioactive Grille" ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.
DEC, Data General, Wang, Polaroid, Sun, Apollo, Prime, ....
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Was it the F&T Diner? It was gone by the late 1980s IIRC though I believe there's another 1950s-style diner in a different location nearby now.
All of Kendall and Central Square is hot real estate these days; you can't walk 15 feet without bumping into a diner, coffee shop, bar, restaurant, lounge, nightclub, or something. It's always hopping on weekends even in winter; ravers, club kids, clean-cut college students, goths, freaks, drunks, panhandlers, derelicts, gawking tourists, the usual.
Condo developers are desperately trying to get some of the smaller properties to sell, though - the Middle East nightclub's landlord, the venue, and developers got into a three-way bidding war over the property. The nightclub owners bought the property out, and rumor has it the condo developers went on to offer them a bunch of money if they could build two stories of condos _on top_ of their property. They declined.
Some of the smaller bars on side streets sold out though, a couple places I remember from 15 years ago are all low-rise condos now.
I'll still never understand why people line up outside of a nightclub to get in at 1 AM when Cambridge makes them shut down at 2.
Also the Cambridge police department is the highest-paid police department in the state; the top 6 most senior officers _each_ make more money than any public employee in the state, even Charlie Baker. Like $320k/yr or something
Good grief, I guess people will be moping about the loss of DEC for centuries. Seems to me like they were a dinosaur whose time had come - they were on their way out before I was even born.
My amateur analysis of their business strategy in the early 1980s is that it was flawed; they could've continued to be a player if they had devoted resources and focused either on the high-end Alpha architecture and played to the supercomputing market, or the low end with MIPS.
But they had their fingers in too many pies
As I say, there are still plenty of tech companies on Route 128, but it's mostly pharmaceutical research, DNA sequencing, genetic engineering and other "Big Biotech" stuff.
"I saw one job listing recently where the requisite skills listed were something like:
PhD in biology, life sciences, computer science/computational biology or similar
10 years experience developing computational biology software for sequence analysisIndustry experience in writing massively-parallel optimized C/C++ for cluster compute systems
Experience with scripting languages such as Python for front-end a plus
Regular published research on computational biology in major peer-reviewed journals required"
I was thinking "Yeah, there are probably about a dozen people in the world with the CV for this opening...and definitely none of them are going to do this job for the salary on offer"
But they did great stuff and taught a lot of people about computers. My first computer was a PDP-8, and I immediately used it to simulate steamship propulsion systems. Sadly, they were too afraid of destroying their own product line, so they let other people do it.
They had some great OSs. RSTS, VMS, Tops10, and arguably Unix. C is basically a fancy PDP-11 assembler. DEC was key to spreading Ethernet.
We wound up with the Wintel mess, which is unfortunate.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
The only silver lining is that Wintel thought they were going to play Apple and the Android phone manufacturers the same way they had been playing Compaq, Dell, HP, for decades, and they said "Fuck you very much" and threw in with ARM.
It's a small bit of schadefreude for the suffering caused by Win95, Win98...etc. etc. Windows 10.
I haven't run Windows in anything but a virtual machine in several years now. Feels great! Windows XP can be a pretty solid OS, so long as you never let it out of its little VirtualBox sandbox.
The PDP-8 is a fun machine to play around with even nowadays; its ASM is very straightforward and you can learn it in about a day. Storing the return address from a subroutine in the first address of the subroutine is a pretty clever hack to get around not having a dedicated call stack, though unfortunately its lack of said stack or any addressing modes capable of emulating a stack very well make it a machine that's difficult to write any higher level compilers for.
You can have an emulated one in Java these days with a nice looking virtual front-panel with the lamps and switches and everything. A modern
8 bit micro would probably be too sluggish to emulate it at full speed, mainly because there isn't any good way to pack and unpack two 8 storage locations cells into a 12 bit word quickly, but I'm sure an ARM Cortex could do it okay.
Alan Kotok (middle in this photo)...
MIT Class of '62, was a good friend of mine during our years together at MIT. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.
Rick Merrill wrote the FOCAL interpretive language for the PDP-8, which was what I used for my ship simulations. In 4K of 12-bit core! He simulated a proper stack machine, and his concepts contributed to the PDP-11 and subsequent 68K architectures. The PDP-11 sort of taught me how to think. x86 is repulsive by comparison.
The story is that IBM almost selected the 68K as the CPU for the PC. Too bad they didn't.
CP/M and DOS are basically modeled after DEC's RT-11 small os.
The 8 was a klunky architecture, page oriented, no stack or indexing, one accumulator, no condition codes, conditional skip. Pioneer of RISC!
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
DEC didn't "think big". From their initial assessment of the market's size, the narrowness of its projected scope, etc. If you look at their designs and implementations, its obvious they expected much lower sales numbers than the market would produce -- even through the Alpha's!
[I had a small *desktop* Alpha that felt like it was made from #12 AWG steel! And, "memory modules" that were 18" long...]The attitude you take towards your market effectively limits the role you will *play* in that market. Expect it to be small and your "share" of it will be small (because you will approach your designs, service, sales, etc. with that same mindset). It's, effectively, a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I worked for a firm many years ago that had a "flagship" product that sold for ~$30K. They'd sell a dozen or so each year. Meh.
I showed them a design that would replace the product with one that *could* (no reason it *had* to) sell for $500 -- with the same % margin. Get rid of all the custom "manual" fabrication, etc. Commit to technologies that cut the manufacturing costs to a few dozen dollars (instead of thousands of dollars in labor, alone!), increase the accuracy, reliability, maintainability, etc. WinWinWinWinWin!
But, their mindsets had already accepted the idea of the smallness of the market. They saw shrinking costs as equating to shrinking revenues. They couldn't wrap their idea around the idea that their customers might be willing -- EAGER -- to have one, two or TEN "spares" on hand... even if priced at *$2K*/each (leaving them ample margin in case their competitors caught on to the true size of the market)!
[Not likely to have many $30K "spares" lying around the organization! And, as any "repairs" necessitate a visit *to* the customer, maintaining *those* "spares" is expensive.]Athena was an interesting concept: lets pretend computers (VAX's) are inexpensive enough that (at least SOME) people can have their own PERSONAL computers. What could you do with that sort of processing power at an individual's fingertips?
Done 10 years earlier it may have given the likes of those as DEC to truly rethink their ideas re: the market AND their place in it.
[Lots of early hardware manufacturers made similar mistakes -- incl IBM]ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.