Handhelds and Handing Off
By Bob Kaehms, Editor in Chief
When I was seven my father, an electrical engineer, gave me my first transistor radio. Because of his interest in technology I was the first on the block to have one. The San Francisco Giants were in the World Series that year, and my second-grade teacher let me listen to the games with an earphone and report back to the class. Basking in June sunshine a few years later, I pressed my ear to that same radio in between innings of a game of street-ball to hear Bobby Bonds' first time at bat in the major leagues. Bonds didn't get to first base, but instead hit a grand slam! To me, that radio was enabling technology.
Many years later I took my first college FORTRAN class and submitted punch cards to be batch processed. Then I'd hang around the computer lab until late into the night to get the output and make corrections, while dreaming of the day when I could once again sit in the sunshine with my technology close at hand. Little did I know at that time that Englebart and others were working on such technology, or that IBM would soon release the PC.
At Lockheed the workstation and desktop helped move strategic data closer to the source. While working there, I used and extended the technology through software to help technicians understand the systems they were calibrating and designing. No longer were they relying solely on Chi-Squared statistics and the quantitative analysis of physicists, but they could actually see for themselves what was going on with a measurement process in real-time.
Open Systems became the buzz of the early 90s, and at a one conference in 1990 Arno Penzias was the spokesperson.
