Rand and Rickover; Interesting Similarities

Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 9 months ago to History
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For some reason, this popped into my head while listening to Ayn from khalling's post.

Both Rand and Rickover were very intelligent, sharp, cutting, and spoke with blinding clarity. Both from Russia (Rickover from Poland, at the time occupied by the Tsar). Both jewish heritage. Both wildly successful in establishing a philosophy, Rand's Objectivism and Rickover's Nuclear Navy.

Do others see the parallels and/or have other observations about their similarities, or other connections?

I knew another much older engineer, while working early in my career, who was also from Russia, It shocked me to hear it. Absolutely no accent, whatsoever, and he came to the US at 14. Also very, very sharp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G...


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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I know what you mean, but I travel all the time and don't want to carry another thing. I have a 48G and an older, but much beloved 28S. I love that 28. My ex wife got it for me when I graduated undergraduate. It could do symbolic differentiation and integration back in 1987! I think it had a symbolic/LISP engine. Just amazing, and an indication of what can be done when resources are limited (necessity)!

    Totally agree with you about the feel of the keys and the weight of the calculator.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    A few years ago downloaded a free app for the HP48, and I realized an era ended. I bought that calculator in the 90s on a credit card with money I didn't have. If I could go back in time I'd tell myself to stick with the 32S until I actually had a positive net worth.

    When the 32S was discontinued, it acquired value as a collectible. I sold it and its box and bought a 33S. I still like the feel of an HP with real buttons much better than any app.
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Agree. Much prefer modern computers, calculators (which I do on my phone now...still RPN!), and my Raspberry PI2!
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Did you ever read the book, Longitude, about the impact the timepiece has on navigation? You might like it.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "The good old days. Glad they are gone, glad they were here."
    That's how I feel about the good old days: glad they were here but even gladder they're gone.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I slid around slide rules in High School and College but upon entering the Army....Western Abacus and no batteries needed. They sent us to school to learn how things were built so we could learn how to unbuild them. The next year portable calculators were all the rage, Useful tool like my sextant.
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I used to work in an IBM Mainframe shop for corporate IT as a summer job. I never used punch cards myself. One day a guy had a huge program he needed read in from a big deck of them. We moved an old punch card machine, hooked it up, read his deck in and wrote it to tape. Back to the corner it went.
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    It is amazing how sloppy we become, when necessity isn't there. GB of RAM, TB of HDD, GHz processors, but I'm not sure I can do that much more with a desktop than I could with an old 68000 Mac. Slide rules themselves will never make a comeback, but the math used in them will always be valuable.

    BTW, I'm pretty sure you can run OS9 on a Raspberry PI. Cool little OS.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    My first the Kaypro was 64K Ram and only floppy drives but two of them at DSDD seemed a huge amount. I just ordered up a new one with 12 expandable to 16 GB RAM and 2 TB hard drive with a companion 2TB external. One of my freckles has more than 64K how ever did we do it? 1984 32 years ago this September. it was a portable too. small suitcase size and arounmd 50 pounds as I recall.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I used to type in rheology data into a flexawriter(?) which out put punched tape for a PDP8 vacuum tube computer that blew a tube quite often back in 59 and 60.
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  • Posted by dukem 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    IBM 1620, punched paper tape, GoTran, "reset, insert, release, start".

    The good old days. Glad they are gone, glad they were here.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I started the PC thing with a one Kbyte (memory chips with 1000 bits were about $25 in those days) Altair 8800 kit computer without a keyboard or monitor. Had to do everything in machine language through toggle switches and LED readouts. Had to modify a old TV for a monitor and add an old airline keyboard for input. It grew and grew eating all my extra cash. Then a used IBM PC followed by Radio Shack Color Computers. The Color Computer 3 was interesting for having multitasking with multiple windows in a UNIX like OS9 operating system but only a one MHz 6809 CPU.
    Things have really improved, though so much of my stuff has gone obsolete with no way to use all those floppy disks and DOS stuff. I wonder when DVDs will go obsolete for some new storage system? All to the good though. I do number theory and sometime need to do million digit math which would be way to slow on previous generations of computers. It is amazing how far things went back before electronic calculators where there were slide rules and some sometimes fun to watch mechanical calculators doing multiplications and divisions. I recall photos of some guys at the Skunkworks with slide rules working on the Blackbird stealth spy plane. That was back in the days when log tables were still useful.
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Is that a request, or a comparison you are making? Elsewhere here, I noted he was a little like Hank Reardon.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I don't do code I just use computers. When we had a shop for such stuff I was known for the ability to crash any program written for customers within an hour. Secret was it had to be MS and a new version. Little harder when years later they got the bugs fixed.
    The worst example was the three dimenisonal filing program i forget which company they bought to get it. Foxpro i think. Excellent. THe MS Version featured a sample and if you didn't need many changes could be used as is but for most businesses no. Building your own eventually bogged down the computer and it crashed for no space available. You may remember the little lines you drew from one device to another which decided where whatever was to be stored, upgraded, cached, archived etc. THe MS version did not erase the lines when you erased them on the screen. Soon it was a mass of straight line spaghetti. Their answer was hire a programmer. We thought about it and did. Two high school kids. they worked with the small mom and pop businesses and then up to one's more advanced in needs and paid for college Wasn't that big a deal IF you knew what you guys know but for a veteran computer crasher it was Audie Murphy time. Two years i ran into someone suffering through that same program manual on the London subways. Same problem. she was a programmer. but had missed that solution. But she bought me dinner! Ha ha her company sent me a check. So that's my whole career in your career field. Must have been the demo dude background from the Army. Fire In the hole! And I never envied you bubble heads. parachutes don't work underwater.
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  • Posted by lrshultis 8 years, 9 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I got interested in FORTH because of an interest in threaded interpreter languages. That was back in early PC days. Back then, the interpreter was fairly short but when later CPUs came out, the interpreter could be written in one machine instruction.
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