306 lines
8.6 KiB
Plaintext
306 lines
8.6 KiB
Plaintext
From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan 7 17:24:28 1991
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To: wordy@Corp
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Subject: chapter-25
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SILICON VALLEY DELIGHTS
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#25 in the second online CAA series
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by
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Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
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Palo Alto, CA; 11,729 miles.
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(c) March 10, 1987
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Eyes wide, steadying myself against a massive redwood high in the Santa
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Cruz mountains, I stare at the distant campfire. Sparks soar into the trees
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through a column of suffused smoky light; black shadows stab the sphere of
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fireglow with every human movement. I hang back, watching, my woman silent and
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alert beside me.
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The rhythm is intoxicating: three drums, maybe four: deep bass and
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articulate congas. The vibrations settle in my chest, touch the forest with a
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feeling primeval, send technology skittering into its neat burrows. The bass,
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thundering deep, sets the pace -- steady, potent, unstoppable -- while through
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it dances higher percussion, counterpoint, call-and-response... the cycle to
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cycle variations at once subtle and profound. Flying fingers backlit by fire,
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faces intent and sweaty, backs bent over taut skins. Somewhere in a second of
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silence barks a dog, in seeming harmony with the resonance of the land, as
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eerie as the sound, THE sound. The whole mountain, all of it, is alive and
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pulsing with the beat of this moment, this moment, timeless, endless,
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relentless.
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It doesn't stop; it evolves -- now a new passion... now an old lament. We
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gaze enchanted through ancient trees, and I finger my flute, fingers itching
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deeply, lips tightening in unconscious embouchure, the cry straining at my
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throat. A branch cracks under my step, and yes, yes, I see I've begun walking,
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walking toward the fire, drawn irresistably into this evocative oasis while
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probing the rhythm, finding the niches, sensing the power, breathing deep,
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seeking a point from which to leap...
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And in a violent, primitive pas de deux I explode from the undergrowth and
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flash through the clearing in a blaze of silver. I find the changing
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interstices of the syncopated heartbeats and dart between them, taking insane
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chances, flirting with one only to leap aside at the last moment and embrace
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another. Crazy, crazy, I circle the fire, stopping here and there, my
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passionate brainsound spiraling skyward amidst the rhythmic pounding, sound and
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spark, spark and sound, matter into energy into the dazzling radiant
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magnificence of pure music unleashed...
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Thanks. I needed that.
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Later, at the bottom of a 10,000 gallon column of air, I stand in
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semi-dark with Maggie, toying with cistern sounds, probing the acoustical space
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with broad-spectrum mouth clicks. Then the flute, of course... as well as some
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playful A CAPELLA scatting locked spectrally to the resonant peaks of this
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giant chamber. Suddenly an unexpected voice fills the night: a deep soulful
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bass from Maggie. I stand in quiet awe, eyes locked with hers, as "Swing Low,
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Sweet Chariot" emanates smoothly from this soft creature whose behavioral space
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I thought I had fully mapped.
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Those are nice surprises. Also nice is soaring over a valley on a 78-foot
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swing, cane-clambering through a redwood forest, becoming a human tether ball
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on the Columbian "columpio de vuelo," and generally taking a day off. I needed
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it, this retreat to our host's 8-acre playground in the mountains. I needed it
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very badly. It's easy to forget amidst all the deadlines that this is, at its
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heart, a life of travel and adventure.
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There have been other treats as well, for the layover in Silicon Mecca is
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beginning to yield true enlightenment (except, perhaps, where gravity is
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concerned: I keep adding new toys to the bike). Freshest in my mind is
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yesterday's visit to NASA's Ames Research Center.
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Standing before a CRAY-2 is a sort of religious experience. (Mathematics
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is music for the mind -- music is mathematics for the soul.) 268.4 megawords
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of 64-bit-wide, 80 nanosecond main memory. A 4.1 nanosecond clock. 15 miles
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of wire. 195 kilowatts dissipated by a waist-high, 2-ton cylindrical
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computation engine 53" across. Towers of circulating fluorocarbon cooling
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fluid. This Cray (named Navier) doesn't mess around with terminal I/O -- it
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talks through optical fibers with a roomful of subservient Amdahls and VAX's
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(named Amelia, Fred, Orville, Wilbur, Meyer, and Prandtl) which handle the
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minor chores like communications and file management. It also has wide-
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bandwidth links directly via satellite (not dial-up nodes) to research
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computers around the world. This thing is a number cruncher, big time,
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dedicated to airflow modeling, finite element analysis, computational
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chemistry, and other things that we personal computer users seldom get to take
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very seriously.
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I stood there in conversation with one of the resident system wizards,
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trying to intellectually grasp the notion of a 28-million determinant array --
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or the system's raw computing speed of 1.72 billion floating-point operations
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per second. "It's the most fun place I've ever worked," he said lightly, eyes
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twinkling.
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In the time it takes this box to do a 64-bit ADD, light travels less than
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the length of my tent. "A system user's level of expectation is always about
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20% greater than the available capacity," I said, quoting somebody. "Is that
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true here?"
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"Oh yes. It only took about two weeks before 'wow' turned into 'come on,
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come on...'"
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We saw other fast and interesting devices at Ames... watched the Harrier
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Jump-jet leap off the runway, pause in the air, rotate slowly, fly backward for
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a few hundred feet, then streak off at 650 knots. We wandered through an 80 X
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120 foot wind tunnel driven by a 136,000 horsepower air mover, saw a hypersonic
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test chamber, and poked through the instrumentation bay of an infrared airborne
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observatory. These people definitely know how to party with technology.
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Of course, that goes for a lot of people around here. A friend retrofits
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pianos with key-velocity sensors and MIDI outputs. Another designs machine
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tool interfaces based on subtle finger movements and amplified feedback. Yet
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another dabbles in spread-spectrum data communications, and everybody I meet
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seems to not only be computer literate but also have some little AI consulting
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enterprise or cottage industry going on the side. And I've FINALLY hooked up
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with Stanford.
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In chapter 23, I noted the strange flavor of the Stanford campus. Now I'm
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beginning to see it as an insider: I've crawled into bed with the Mechanical
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Engineering department. In exchange for doing a few design seminars around my
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bike, I have full access to the CAD systems, numerically controlled Matsura,
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various machine shop tools, and so on... so of course I immediately scanned my
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project list for a good place to start. I now pedal over to campus at about 11
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at night, when the mad end-of-quarter rush is beginning to thin. By 3 AM
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Saturday morning, the dual header for my hydraulic brake master cylinders was
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fully defined as a Pascal program on an HP CAD system, with the tooling path
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looking quite lovely on the graphic display. We plot the parts in aluminum
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this week.
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Play, play. Someone should make a mantra out of that. At about 3:30
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Sunday morning on a borrowed Mac Plus with 20 meg Data Frame, staring
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bleary-eyed into Pagemaker, I tried to remember that this was not just a flyer
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layout, it was a learning curve. (Those, in general, are self-justifying.) I
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signed on to GEnie, needing a break, and found a piece of email from a reader
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in Michigan....
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"I envy you from here in the frosty midwest, where we plummet from 72
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degrees to 27 in a day. Hmmph! I crank out the odd short story here at the
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University of Michigan, but certainly nothing like the reality you're getting.
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Must be nice!"
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Ah, thanks for the reminder, Chris. It IS nice. I signed off, smiled,
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glanced over at horizontal Maggie breathing slack-jawed in the fringes of my
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desklight, and breezed through a few Mac music and graphics programs before
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returning to the ever-finer details of laying out my ambitious first attempt at
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desktop publishing. Somehow, it made a difference.
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So. There seems to be a lot of TRAVEL inherent in this layover, doesn't
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there? Physical movement may be at a minimum, but that of the intellectual
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variety is running rampant. The clutter of my room is dynamic; the social
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calendar is crammed with company visits, speaking engagements, and evenings
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with new friends. Good signs.
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For if you consider the essence of travel to be the energy that precedes
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the knee of a learning curve, then we be CRUISIN'!
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-- Steve
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