cold war was : Cray1

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You and he mean Soviet style. 25% of the world still is: PRC, PRNK, Cuba, Vietnam, 2 more left leaning Latin American states. etc. Is this a political comparison or a technical comparison? If they were going to do everything from scratch from the ground up, they would have (and nearly did) design everything including the software (well, they used Fortran, and these other countries (who knows about North Korea, but likely) use C-C++, Java, etc.).

Your gender doesn't matter. But the salt does for every one. We all have our biases, but the telling question is to know what questions to ask.

It's not about the people. It's about the ideas propagated forward. There was a lot of duplication of effort in the past because many of the ideas in computing are based on neglect of details.

We just have to cut thru the BS of your language. 8^) You are like Gordon in that respect. He curses all the time.

Computers are still toys. As as telescope, particle accelerators, etc. It's the method of play. The problem is that despite their smarts, most physicists are unable to make really major advances (elegant science). So they shout louder. (That's a joke.) These are the guys who claim that their field started the Web (but burns up Berners-Lee because they dumped on him at the time, but so too von Neumann in our field to Backus and Hamming to Knuth). This is why Hamming made his comments about insight.

I lunch and conference with a few. A friend used to publish Physics Today. Why they even know chemistry and biology (and improved both).

It's like this quote from a book friends contribute to:

The approach of this book emphasizes physics, combined where necessary with mathematics. No apology is made for introducing mathematics. In the author's opinion, a mere handful of mathematical physicists, who may seldom set foot on a glacier, have made contributions far more to the understanding of the subject than a hundred measurers of ablation stakes or recorders of advances and retreats of glacier termini. This is not to say that the latter is unimportant; in glaciology, as in other branches of science, there is a place for the theoretical and the experimental approach. But the two should be coordinated, the experiments designed to solve specific problems. Too often in the past, glaciological measurements have been made on the premise that the mere acquisition of data is a useful contribution in itself. This is seldom the case. The Physics of Glaciers, 3rd ed. W. Paterson

Already obsolete.

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