
Before Silicon Valley got nasty the Pirates of Analog Alley fought it out (2014) - smacktoward
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/before-silicon-valley-got-nasty-the-pirates-of-analog-alley-fought-it-out/
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pattusk
This was a fascinating read overall but I found the effort to translate
everything into modern big-tech terminology very distracting. Furthermore the
Gates/Jobs or Microsoft/Apple analogies seem tenuous at best and gives the
impression that the author is misrepresenting a story that is already
interesting enough on its own.

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mcnichol
I liked how he wove it together (or attempted to).

Agreed that he made points which appeared to stop you and think up the story
to draw a parallel but I believe there is a cyclical nature to this.

I like seeing the story behind great rivalries, Tesla and Edison, Marconi and
Maskelyne, Einstein and Hilbert. Arguably you could say it parallels across
the mere premise of rivalry.

In any case, that was a new one for me!

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madengr
Kelvin bandwidth model only accounted for the RC dispersion of the undersea
cable, hence it had horrible dispersion and a sub-Hz bandwidth.

It was Heaviside that introduced the loading coil via his solution of
telegrapher equation and coaxial cable that made the undersea cable practical.
Of course he died a pauper.

He is the father of RF EE, if you ask me.
[https://ethw.org/Oliver_Heaviside](https://ethw.org/Oliver_Heaviside)

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Stratoscope
Oddly enough, Heaviside's name has been heard in song by tens of millions of
people in recent years.

In the musical _Cats_ , every Jellicle Cat hopes to be the one chosen to
ascend to the Heaviside Layer.

This may be a metaphorical place in the play, but it is also an actual layer
of the ionosphere. Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly (working
independently) predicted its existence in 1902, and it was confirmed in 1924
by Edward Appleton.

 _Cats_ is based on the 1939 book _Old Possum 's Book of Practical Cats_ by T.
S. Eliot. Shortwave radio was a big deal at the time, and anything to do with
radio signals and propagation caught the public's attention.

Today, the Heaviside Layer is known as the E layer, and is much beloved by
amateur radio operators for its unpredictable propagation known as "sporadic E
skip".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_layer)

[https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Heaviside_Layer](https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Heaviside_Layer)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Possum%27s_Book_of_Practic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Possum%27s_Book_of_Practical_Cats)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation)

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mr-ron
For people interested in this part of Computer history I highly recommend the
book "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the
Digital Revolution" [https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-
Created-R...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-
Revolution/dp/1476708703)

Gets deep into this part of history, and goes deep into what was shared
between companies and research as well.

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pinewurst
An excellent book on this subject (without any of the heavyhanded Big Tech
comparisons) is “Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing
before Cybernetics”, by David Mindell who also wrote the great “Digital
Apollo”.

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pfdietz
I'd also like to see a historical tech article about magnetic amplifiers.
These were used for gunnery also.

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zeristor
I never realised Kelvin took over from Babbage

