Indy and Calculators

As you can probably guess from the title, I'm going to cover multiple (unrelated) topics in this post... But, before I start, here's a quick recap of where we are in "the story":

At the beginning of 1973 (at the age of 19) I got fed up with being unemployed, so I enlisted in the Air Force (for 6 years) with a guaranteed job code of "30331" (Air Traffic Control Radar Repairman)... I chose that field because it had one of the longest tech schools of any career in the Air Force, and on April 6, 1973 I arrived at Keesler AFB  (after completing basic at Lackland AFB) to begin that training...

But before I get around to tech school I want to (not so quickly) mention the 1973 Indy 500:

Less than 2 months after my arrival at Keesler a bunch of us got together in the day room (multiple times) to watch the race. I remember that there had been a fatality during qualifying, and in the pre-race interviews some of the drivers expressed concerns about the safety and condition of the track. That was prophetic...

The race didn't start until mid-afternoon on Monday (due to rain delays), and on the 2nd lap "Salt" Walther's car somehow got airborne, careened off the grandstand fence and turned into a fireball (causing an 11 car pileup). He suffered critical burns and a number of spectators were injured... Then before they could clear the wreckage it started raining again and it didn't let up for almost two days. At that point they should have realized the race was cursed and cancelled it - but they didn't...

They restarted the 500 on Wednesday and on the 57th lap Swede Savage's car twitched, veered hard left, and smashed into an infield wall almost head on... There were flaming pieces of the car (including the driver's seat with Swede strapped in) bouncing all over the track. I was so horrified I almost threw up... Then a few moments later there was a collective scream from the grandstand as a firetruck hit and killed a crew member on pit road... At that point I couldn't take any more and went back to my room... According to Wikipedia there were only 10 cars left running when the fiasco was finally ended (due to rain) on the 133rd lap... I still get queasy whenever I think about that race. I couldn't bear to watch another 500 for years afterward...

Aside: That was also the year Secretariat won the Triple Crown and I have a vague recollection of watching a couple of those races as well... Thankfully, no horses caught fire or anything :-)

And on to tech school:

I'm sure I've mentioned this many times before, but when I graduated from high school (in 1970) I was pretty well convinced I was stupid and useless. (Thank you school system!)... The issue wasn't my test scores - those were generally pretty high (I attributed that to having an unusually good memory)... The issue was that everyone else always seemed to understand exactly what was going on whereas I was generally so confused I could barely function... I figured I must be a serious dumbass not to be able to grasp what seemed so obvious to everyone else..

So when I got to Keesler and they told me I qualified for the self-paced Basic Electronics program I was jsutifiably apprehensive - but I needn't have worried... Unlike high school textbooks (written by PhDs trying to demonstrate how smart they are) the Air Force training materials were written as if they actually wanted you to understand the subject matter. (What a concept)...
But the thing that really struck me was the stunning absence of ambiguity. Yes - when you are running a military operation that last thing you want is for "grunts" to be confused about anything. So the education process assumed nothing and built from there. Step by step, every term is defined and every concept explained...

Now - I'm not saying it wasn't a challenge. There was a lot to absorb and it was the kind of technical stuff that many people can't grasp... But for me the whole thing was a revelation. For the first time in my life I was in a classroom and everything made sense. Yeah - apparently high school was just too slow-paced and I was just too easily sidetracked... Definitely a match made in hell :-)

But the main thing I remember from that self-paced Electronics course was the hand-held calculator one of the instructors had on his desk. He had purchased in kit form for only $100 (roughly $500 adjusted to 2013) and I had never seen anything like it. Not only could it add and subtract, but it could multiply and divide as well. I was totally blown away!! ... Only a few years earlier an equivalent desktop calculator was as big as a suitcase and cost roughly as much as a new car... The implications of being able to carry something in your pocket that could do math (other than a slide rule) were staggering...

Aside: I used to get a kick our of watching people the first time they held a calculator. More often than not they tried something like "2+2" (as if they hoped it would give the wrong answer)... Of course, the "geekier" types would run some complex calculations and check the result with a pencil and paper. It was incredible to discover that the device had gotten it right... Yeah - I don't think anyone envisioned the extent to which hand-held devices would eventually change our lives...

I suppose someday one of my descendants might be reading this (trying to understand where the "weirdness" came from) and he or she will have access to technology that is eons beyond "finFETs" (state of the art in 2013). Maybe biological computers??? Who knows...
But please tell me that we (as a society) eventually realized that having all of mankind's accumulated knowledge (not to mention millions of pictures of cats doing funny things) at our fingertips every hour of every day is not necessarily a good thing... And please tell me that the researchers finally stopped trying to make"wearable technology" happen... You know - your fridge tells your left shoe that you are almost out of milk so it can remind you when you pass a store - because our lives would be so much better if we never had to think about anything :-) :-)

So yeah - that's where it all started (me and technology) - back in the early 70's - in the days of "stone knives and bear skins"...