The Death of Midwestern Computing and What Might Have Been

Posted by James Bowery on Thursday, 18 December 2008 21:23.

I’ve uploaded a video blast-from-the-past showing one small example an analogue of Leif Erickson’s discovery of Vinland, or the Apollo Moon landings: Midwest computer networking.

As for what might have been: Imagine the Internet arriving in the home 15 years earlier than it did, completely bypassing Bill Gates and the standalone computer. Imagine a Midwest able to retain its educated boomers who might have been able to afford families there. Imagine independent engineering leadership breaking free from NASA’s stranglehold on industrialization of space, not in the 21st century, but in the 1980s.

As I previously wrote for VDARE:

A Reader Reminds Us That It Wasn’t Immigrants Who Invented The Computer Industry

Re: Norm Matloff’s Tamar Jacoby–”Silicon Valley Would Not Exist Without Immigration.” Wrong!
James Bowery .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) wrote:

Matloff ignores the obvious fact that Silicon Valley would not exist without the Midwestern middle class WASPs. As Tom Wolfe documents in his Forbes article:, Robert Noyce and His Congregation,[August 25, 1997] virtually all of the essential inventions upon which Silicon Valley was founded were created by the much-derided, non-“vibrant”, “white-bread”, “middle class” of “fly-over country”. Last month I asked the aging Bob Johnson—former CTO of Burroughs Corporation when it was a leading mainframe company in Minneapolis where he developed the magnetic ink you see on the bottom of your checks—what he thought caused the loss of the Midwestern high tech leadership to the coasts, and he said it was the financial dominance of the coasts. That squares with what I observed while at Control Data Corporation/Cray Research, Inc. The reason Bill Norris and Seymour Cray were able to start CDC thence Cray Research was because they violated SEC regs and went around selling stock at PTA meetings, making a lot of middle class people retire very comfortably. My late father bought some Cray stock early on which helped greatly with his retirement. When I was at CDC in Arden Hills, MN attempting to deploy the mass market version of the PLATO network with Internet-like capabilities (the system that Ray Ozzie (Bill Gates’ replacement at Microsoft) cut his teeth on) in 1980 the primary resistance was from a middle management that, due to the financial press’ hostility toward Norris’s vision of a society disintermediated by computer networking, small high-tech farms and locally produced and consumed essentials—had itself grown hostile to Norris. My proposed solution is simple to state but will perhaps require a war to institute:

Replace all taxes on economic activity with a tax on net-assets, assessed at their in-place liquidation value, at the risk free interest rate (which according to modern portfolio theory is the short-term US Treasury rate) so as to extract all economic rents from the private sector, and then, to prevent public sector rent-seeking in pork-barrel politics, disperse those funds evenly in a dividend to all citizens, as the beneficiaries of the land-trust called the United States. That will not only stop the vicious centralization of power in the private and public sectors, but it will clarify the role of immigration—it is a dilution of the benefits intended for the Posterity of the Founders of the land trust called The United States of America. James Bowery’s previous letter is here.

PS: I am available for consulting at $8/hour.

Tags:

Comments:

Posted by snax on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:19 | #

I read once that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the Federal Reserve, for all practical purposes, the other eleven Banks serving more as regional branches than equals.

Why this “central bank” sees fit to disperse so much of its funds to New York, rather than to the productive heartland is anybody’s guess. Couldn’t have anything to do with New York bankers’ fear and loathing of flyover country, though…. I’m sure of that.

Posted by snax on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:27 | #

If anybody hasn’t read this 1982 article by JB, it’s a zinger:

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/vnatap.html

Posted by Riley The Wiley on Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:30 | #

The NY Fed is and always has been the biggest bear in the woods. This is by design; the other “regional” banks have always been window dressing, a sop to Main Street.

I live in Seattle, and on Third Avenue stands a squat, brutalist stone building: the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Seattle Branch. The building’s entrance is protected by car bomb barriers made up to look like planters; the doors are locked; the windows, shuttered.

I have never seen a single human being enter or leave the building, and I have spent hours in front of it waiting for buses during rush hour. It is the only building in expensive, bustling downtown Seattle that does not draw traffic.

They are not only quiet in there, but discreet: The only clue to it’s identity was a logo affixed in steel letters to the outside of the building. I never took much notice of the building except to note it’s odd silence, but when I became interested in Ron Paul and the Fed, I glanced back at the facade only to notice that the lettering had disappeared. Sometime around the time Paul was a front runner, someone scaled the side of the building and removed the only visible clue to it’s purpose. Now the only way to tell what the building does is to press your nose up to the glass and read lettering painted on the glass on an interior door.

Strange ...

Posted by Gonzar on Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:22 | #

Perhaps the building sits as is because the Fed Reserve Bank in Seattle actually moved to Renton - http://www.thenewstribune.com/business/story/329507.html

Posted by Dope on Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:59 | #

Tamar Jacoby–”Silicon Valley Would Not Exist Without Immigration.” Wrong!

Really? In an alternative timeline, without any immigration, the native Indians would have advanced technologically, eventually creating a “Silicion Valley” much like the one we know today? Interesting.

Posted by Englander on Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:08 | #

I live in Seattle, and on Third Avenue stands a squat, brutalist stone building: the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Seattle Branch. The building’s entrance is protected by car bomb barriers made up to look like planters; the doors are locked; the windows, shuttered.

This place, I’m guessing.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode;=&q=federal+reserve+bank+seattle&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=33.847644,56.601563&ie=UTF8&ll=47.605349,-122.335285&spn=0,359.997253&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=47.605428,-122.335351&panoid=7-lTCyuNk1-PK2aImZDBQA&cbp=12,258.0697257596263,,0,-10.568019317770553

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:11 | #

Yup, the car bomb barriers are there all right, disguised as planters, exactly as Englander says. What a sinister-looking monstrosity of a building. Looks like not a living soul has set foot inside in fifteen years except FBI, BATF, and MOSSAD agents.

Posted by Meeta Kaur html on Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:57 | #

The reason why there would be no Silicon Valley without immigrants is because of culture.

Asians by and large value tight and strict family bonds. That combined with pressure to excel and outdo your ancestors as well as your peers, to better your life and the life of your family, and the emphasis on math and science in our curriculums is the reason why we excel in math and sciences (hard) and not the “soft sciences” like (pop) psychology.

A liberal arts curriculum is valued over math and science in the West.

If the United States could somehow undo all of the damage to family values over the last 50 years, and bring math and science back in a dominant way into it’s schools and universities, then maybe this could be reversed and there would be no need for immigrants in Silicon Valley.

However, in Asia, another contributing factor is poverty. Math and science is seen as a way to get out of it. When you grow up in a country that is by and large “comfortable”, you don’t have any drive to excel in order to get out of a sorry condition, such as poverty, because even if you choose a much easier path in life, you will still remain comfortable.

Asians are driven by many factors - financial, familial, cultural.

There is not much pressure of any of these 3 in the lives of middle class Americans.

Perhaps this current financial crises can serve to at least put some financial pressure on Americans to excel and better themselves? Money talks. Familly and culture don’t seem to have much pull in USA anymore.

Best of luck!