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Not likely with Nancy and Harry steering the ship.

It would have looked different and possibly quite more costly, if the telephone operators would have got their way as the main stream.

Any trunc lines would still be TDMA and the capacity would be expressed in telephone circuits (i.e. multiples of 64 kbit/s). E-mails would be delivered with the hierarchical cumbersome X.400 addressing. Any packet switching would still be handled with X.25 with 64 byte segments.

Apart from telecom company greed, I see no problems, implementing HTML and more modern services upon this infrastructure.

Yes, the commercial success of PC-DOS/MS-DOS may have retarded the devolpoment somewhat.

16 bit mini computers used used multitasking in the 60/70's on a regular basis, I have used and maintained various real time kernels in the 80's with 8 bit processors such as 8080/8085/6809.

PC/MS-DOS is quite similar to the program loaders used in the 1970's on Intellecs and Excorcisers microprocessor development systems.

What is wrong with MS Windows ?

IMHO, NT 3.51 was the best OS Microsoft has ever produced, kind of a nice toy VMS.

I am still thankfull that I invested two extra 16 MiB memory cards, when upgrading from WfG 3.11 to NT 3.51 instead of waiting a few weeks for the Win95 release :-).

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No sale, by the mid 1970s Ethernet style network connections were becoming preferred for computer to computer (except IBM which was and still is SNA). True, much of it was high priced 9800 baud to 56k leased lines, major corporations and government mostly. As for the biggest before DARPAnet, NSFnet, FIDOnet and some others were merged into the original Internet about 1980(?) IBM SNA networks seem to have been king, providing Tymenet, and its competitors.

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Yup, pretty nearly; and still cripples it today. Lots of eye heroin.

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I think I found your problem.

The calculator is central and essential to net energy.

-- Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073 Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552 rss:

email: snipped-for-privacy@tinaja.com

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at

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Actually, a great deal of that pyramid-building energy still exists today - in the form of stored kinetic energy.

-mpm

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I would probably re-phrase this as: Lasers weren't successful right out of the gate. (And they still aren't, if we're talking about them in terms of missile defense, etc...) Semiconductor lasers on the other hand (different beast), are commonplace today. They are not "laser pointers", they're LED pointers. The latter technology was highly successful, pretty much right out of the gate.

As to your fuel example, I would argue you should look at all those fuels as a group. Hydrocarbon fuels took off over steam pretty much right away. The technology was easy. Drill, pump, use. Some of that stuff you don't even need to refine - even to this day! (Note: By extention, you could even consider McDonalds' french fry grease to run a car.) But solar-cars, electric or electric-hybrids, or even nuclear-powered cars -- all are possible, but none have proven to be instant hits.

But to your specific gasoline example, one could say this was tied to the success of the personal automobile (another big hit over the horse & buggy!). As engine technology improved, the need for hydrocracking came about, and the rest is history. That gasoline didn't "take-off" sooner as a specific fuel is a bit of a "Rivers in Bolivia" argument, since prior to more advanced engine technologies, such fuels were unnecessary. That said, the TECHNOLOGY that produces gasoline is definitely an example of what I'm talking about here.

I also disagree with your Internet example, though that may be just an exercise in agreeing to what exact timeline constitutes something taking off like a rocket. I'm sure you'll agree that (as a whole), the Internet has been a huge success. Much like the gasoline example above, Internet pervasiveness tracks pretty well with the success of the IBM Personal Computer. Which technology led and which one followed, may not matter.

Switching gears, let's look at (2) specific technologies that HAVE NOT taken off. One is photovoltaic utility power generation. Industry has been working for decades to perfect this, and have made impressive strides. But my position remains: If utility PV was ever going to be successful, you would see the signs early and often. This has not been the case, and indeed, utility PV has yet to see the light of day (no pun intended).

Another example is wind energy. Again, no technological hurdle, but can you really claim it's taken off? Certainly it is no cheaper that other energy. And absent government subsidies & mandates, would we even see wind power? I don't think so. In that regard, one might argue government subsidies are an instant hit! :)

To sum up: Successful technologies tend to be instant hits. That does not preclude invention and innovation applied to some previously unsuccessful technology. My point is that "instant hit" and "time to invent, innovate and prefect" are opposite ends of the spectrum. Further, it would be the invention/innovation that would be the instant hit, and not the underlying "whatever".

-mpm

They had telephones back then?? :)

You cannot be serious! :)

On a sunny day (Sat, 24 Apr 2010 08:52:02 -0700 (PDT)) it happened mpm wrote in :

Many farms here have windmills, they have their own power, and feed some back into the net. Just up the road are 2 huge ones, If you drive around you see them everywhere. They are noisy though, in the evening you can hear chop chop chop from the blades. And they do not always run. So you still need the grid, or a RTG :-)

There is only ONE number that matters: Avoided cost utility peaking costs six cents per kilowatt hour and sells for ten cents per kilowatt hour. This is the de-facto standard that establishes ALL alternate energy economics.

Any new net energy source MUST go well beyond parity.

Which translates to twenty five cents per peak pv panel watt.

There is no rocket science here. It is plain old amortization. A present kilowatt hour is worth a present dime. And vice versa.

The two are fungible and interchangeable commodities.

--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster                          voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics   3860 West First Street   Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml   email: don@tinaja.com

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com

The problem with huge government subsidies is that it kills all innovations.

Take for example Germany, with huge subsidies for wind and solar energy. Why would anyone improve your product, when you can get a decent income by selling a mediocre product.

Toyota seems to be making plenty of money on Priuses?

I think PV cells are like LCDs once were: They have plenty of nichey applications already as LCDs have had since about the '70s, but just as no one knew how to build a 1920x1080 LCD array (with a transistor for every single pixel, no less!) in a cost-effective manner up until the late '90s and yet today such a device is But to your specific gasoline example, one could say this was tied to

It's interesting to consider what technology would become porminent if, somehow, all the gas stations and oil refineries suddenly disappeared over night -- bet we still had all the technological know-how as of 2010. I'm thinking the replacement infrastructure might include a lot more diesel automobiles...

Yes, I'm just suggesting that government dollars created the thing we call the Internet (and the methods we use to access it) likely some years sooner than if there hadn't been a DARPA or similar product. As others have pointed out, BBSes were already getting themselves networked (e.g., Fidonet) and the idea of hypertext has been around for many decades, so clearly something like the Internet would have still happened anyway -- I just think it likely would have taken a "significant" amount of extra time, which I'd guesstimate to be perhaps a decade.

PV needs some fundamental breakthroughs in manufacturing costs and (to a lesser extent) cell efficiency. I think you can fairly argue that those sorts of breakthroughs are more likely to be produced in some "basic research" lab somewhere (relatively cheap funding) than from dumping a much larger amount of money into subsidizing production of the existing technology and hoping that what commercial competition remains will spur enough R&D spending by the existing producers to create it.

There sure seems to be a lot of interest in it, but I'm not knowledgable enough about it to speculate on whether or not it would be viable sans government sunsidies/mandates.

I do have a relative who interested a sizable chunk of change in a wind energy company and so far has only lost money on it. :-)

---Joel

It doesn't kill innovation for a couple of reasons:

1) Since companies still have to compete for contracts, if they can improve their product, making it more efficient or cheaper to build, the company's bottom line is still better off -- that's an incentive. 2) You make the common mistake of assuming that all companies and their employees are primarily motivated by the almighty dollar. Which this is certainly quite often the case, there are plenty of people who will always do the best job that they can, even when they're well aware that they can "get by" with less. (As an extreme example, look at the Apache web server -- the most popular web server on the entire Internet, that's constantly being improved and upgraded, despite few of the programmers making any money whatsoever off of it.)

I would give you that government subsidies can tend to *decrease* innovation: If a product you normally sell for a dollar and make $0.20 profit on is being subsidized by the government to the tune of $0.25 per dollar, in a sense you're now making $0.45 profit instead, and even if you can shave another nickel off your costs, going from $0.45 to a $0.50 (~10% increase) profit isn't nearly as impressive as going fro $0.20 to $0.25 (25% increase).

---Joel

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I'm not sure what allowed all this to change in many schools, particularly at the elementary/high school level. Crap food is just cheaper than good food and so it was an easy replacement when funding became tight?

It's truly amazing and a bit scary what you can get at Taco Bell for $0.99 these days... :-) I guess it's no surprise that there's an unfortunate positive correlation between cities with a lot of poverty and diet-related illnesses. Hmm... seems like that's kinda what the mayor of Huntington -- down to 223lbs. from 300lbs. post-stomach-stapling! --is suggesting:

. Interestingly, it suggests that diets really weren't that much better decades back, just that, e.g., a coal miner can eat pretty much whatever he pleases due to all the physical labor involved, but that now such jobs are gone or heavily automated.

Quote: "The Huntington phone book lists more pizza places (nearly 200) than the entire state of West Virginia has gyms and health clubs (149)." Wow! Our local Pizza Hut actually went out of business some months ago now (the nearest one is a good 30-minute drive now), although I think that's more related to the place constantly being dirty than anything relating to the food itself.

The smart kids leave, don't they? ;-)

---Joel

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So, let's take these one by one: First - Electric cars Circa 1902, we had the Wood's Electric Phaeton Carriage. Before that, 1832 and 1839 (the exact year is uncertain), Robert Anderson of Scotland invented the first crude electric carriage. I'll grant you that 178 years later, things look a little rosier for electric cars, but even now, they still don't outsell internal combustion models.

Second - ...nobody knows how to build [insert item name here]. Obviously, anything here proves my point. Magnetrons are perhaps another good example. Invented in 1920. Microwave heating discovered (accidentally) in 1945. First successful product in 1967 (Amana Radar Range) Total time: 47 years.

Third - Wind power Google T Boone Pickens. 'nuff said?

Fourth - PV Solar I predict that other technologies will suppress innovation in utility- scale PV solar. Namely, solar-thermal. The only true obstacles there are land use, and of course, the oil industry lobby. Did I mention solar-thermal works well in the desert!? It will either be that, or nuclear that seals the deal on utility- scale PV. And that is not to say that more efficient PV does not (and would not) maintain a superiority in certain niche applications.

-mpm

No, the kiddies weren't eating the "real food", so instead of going out of business they served food the kiddies would eat. I couldn't stand that slop either, so brought my lunch. Other parents didn't care. Still don't.

A lot of that is biological/genetic, too.

Absolutely. Po-Boys (South) and Pasties (North) make a Big Mac look like diet food.

Pizza has an absolutely huge profit margin. A manager of a Pizza Hut once told me that it cost them less than $1 to make a $15 pizza.

WV isn't the only state that chases the smart ones away.

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What's even more amazing is that people will eat it!

I'll stop now before this thread morphs into a discussion on that new KFC bunless wonder.... :)

Oh wait, I guess this is supposed to be an engineering forum. I'm relatively certain we could come up with an equation to relate present-day obesity to the amount of processing (in terms of kWh) that goes into the modern day diet. By that, I mean if you grab a jar of applesauce out of the cupboard and start chowing down, the energy to sow, grow, pick, peel and smash was all done by machines other than the human body machine. In summary, the food energy was obtained without all the effort.

No one said that there *wasn't* a sucker born every minute.

PVs have had the same time frame *and* technology advances and *still* are a couple or orders of magnitude short of break-even.

A silly what if. So what?

You do know that IBM wasn't allowed to bid on the DARPA contract because they already *had* such a network (several hundred nodes, worldwide). There is nothing mystical about the Internet. The need was known and the technology existing. It *would* have happened, and already was in progress.

Perhaps some time, but hardly "significant".

After forty years of trying (at least), what makes you believe it's possible to jump a couple of orders of magnitude ($/W).

Of course it is. Drop subsidies and every wind turbine will grind to a halt in a year.

He will continue too, and likely feel smug about it until his death. Of course smug could turn to bitterness when he finds out that they buried the answer to efficiency next to the 200 MPG carburetor.

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Back in college, the Pizza Hut I worked at had a profit margin of about $0.72 on every dollar collected at the register. It would have been even higher were it not for the salad bar. (spoilage, etc..) It was lucky to make $0.50 on the dollar. And rarely did so.