[Info-vax] Don't worry, HP's project Moonshot will save us

[John Wallace]

On Apr 16, 2:21 pm, koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob
Koehler) wrote:
> In article <asydnYU5vd_qGPHMnZ2dnUVZ8qidn... at bt.com>, chris <m... at devnull.com> writes:
>
> > Development pace was ragged edge and exciting when I first started
> > in computing and there were new developments and applications every
> > week. Now, everything has coalesced down to commodity and there's been
> > no real development in decades, just continuous refinement of existing
> > technology.
>
>    That depends on what part of the industry you work in.  When you
>    work close to custom hardware, typically one-off, there is no off
>    the shelf application.
>
>    In scientific computing, folks have to come up with new algorithms
>    to test new theories and analyze new data every day.
>
>    In accounting, nothing new has happened since the origin of the
>    row and column paper "spreadsheet", except that it has become
>    electronic.
>
>    If I'm running a business, I probaly want an off the shelf
>    application to track inventory, accounts recievable, ...
>
>    When the fellow down the hall was working on his Nobel winning
>    research, he might not have had a COTS product that could do the
>    analysis.

Unbeliever! You can do everything in the lab with NI Labview these
days without writing a single line of code, just pointy clicky draggy
things. DECrti (where rti = real time integrator) did a bit of that
pointy clicky data acquisition and dataflow programming too at one
time, and unlike generic Labview not just on Window boxes either, but
is presumably long gone from this earth (iirc, it transitioned from
DEC to Kinetic Systems in the mid 1990s).

NI still even get away with charging premium prices for premium
product and premium support and the customers are allegedly still
mostly happy, just like DEC used to at one time. It must all be true,
I've seen it in their monthly magazine, the IEE News. [OK it's called
IET Magazine now and it's much less techy than it used to be, which
includes not being as NI-centric as it used to be, but not too long
ago...]