The 8008 was: Blinky lights WAS: The SR71 Blackbird was designed ENTIRELYwith slide rules 701

This was a spectacularly Tom Wolfeish post. You should collect this stuff, edit and publish it.

Sadly, my main well developed professional skill is making computers and the humans who produce and support them run fast and that isn't in great demand for some reason. I can't recall ever working at a place where the management had any sense of something remotely resembling vision, including HP. OTOH, I'm not a bad manager, I just don't enjoy it. If Seymour Cray had me at his side (well, probably more likely kicking his butt) at CCC, he wouldn't have bet the farm on the Cray-4 in a bad market, would have outbid HP on the Convex acquisition, and might not have died like the SUV version of James Dean because we would likely have been sitting in the treehouse at Megatest smoking a doobie and reflecting on our success.

I just wanted to be the Owsley to some visionary company who would drive computing to the next level. The slightly nerdy guy in the back room optimizing the process who still enjoyed the culture. God knows it's not from lack of trying. I tried to pound sense into both Convex and Cray to no avail. NIH all around. Slightly amusing since I worked at NIH in the early '90s. Same thing there. All about not disturbing the accepted dogma.

There's a huge amount of unrecognized truth in Greg Lindahl's posts about solutions that are just good enough to get the job done, but which don't advance the state of the art, thus starving visionaries of venture capital.