Picking The People Of Progress

I ENJOYED EDWARD SOREL’S DEPICTION of the century’s “People of Progress” in the Winter 2000 issue, and I do not disagree with the selection. There is a trio, however, that I feel should have been included: Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley, the inventors of the transistor, which made possible the computer age.

Roger L. Gaefcke
Playa del Rey, Calif.

Picking The People Of Progress

THERE is ONE INCONSISTENCY IN YOUR otherwise excellent picture and article about the great inventors of the twentieth century. Nineteen of the individuals portrayed discovered, developed, or invented something. The obvious exception is Rachel Carson, who did none of these. I do not wish to underrate her contribution to the environment, but it just does not fit in with the accomplishments of the others depicted. If in this era of political correctness it is necessary to include persons of this ilk, Upton Sinclair, Jane Fonda, and Ralph Nader should be there too.

Lary Harris
Wilderville, Ore.

Picking The People Of Progress

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING THINGS about reading “People of Progress” is that if the great men of the nineteenth century could have read the descriptions of those of the twentieth, few, if any, of them could have understood what they were reading. That is a testimony to the huge technological achievements of the last century.

Jim Ridings
Herscher, Ill.

Picking The People Of Progress

I QUESTION WHETHER YOU WERE IMPAR tial in naming William H. Gates III among the likes of Einstein as one of the 20 American innovators of the age. Gates’s primary innovation seems to be the use of pressure and intimidationto succeed as a predatory monopolist.

Robert J. Hess
New York, N.Y.

Picking The People Of Progress

I HAVE FOLLOWED GATES’S LONG CAREER closely, and progress is simply not a word I would associate with him. He is most noted for Windows, a crude and shoddily realized mishmash of previously existing technologies. Perhaps the designer of the Edsel deserves some I&T recognition.

Tom Barta Evanston, Ill.

The editors reply: We regret that for reasons of space we had to cut the following explanation from the text that accompanied “People of Progress”: “Gates was a tough choice, as certainly the most widely disliked man in the picture, but he represents the extraordinary harnessing—or rather unleashing —of the computer as not just a technology but a force that is transforming life everywhere at the end of the century.”

Why Y2k?

I WAS PLEASED TO SEE “WHY YOU Need to Understand Y2K,” by Robert Friedel, in your Winter 2000 issue. There certainly has been a lot of silliness in the popular media about the so-called bug.

As a young engineering student in the 1960s, I worked the swing shift at an AT&T/Southwestern Bell dataprocessing center in Houston. We had two IBM 1401 mainframes. Input was by IBM card, and the room full of cardhandling equipment was fully 10 times the size of the computer room. The size of the 1401 was about by five feet by eight feet by five feet, yet it had such limited processing capability that we did not waste computer time sorting input data. All the data was presorted using hand-loaded IBM card sorters. The 80-column cards were sorted column by column. If you were sorting by telephone number, for instance, then you had to make a minimum of 10 passes for area code, exchange, and line number, while dealing with thousands of cards. Usually even more data fields had to be sorted.

One tried to contain all the information required for a particular transaction on a single 80-column card. This as much as anything else drove the decision to limit the year to two digits, or columns. I have cards from that time in which Bell Telephone used either a one- or two-digit code for the year, or even simply eliminated the year.

Robert B. Stout
Anchorage, Alaska

Why Y2k?

YOUR ARTICLE GAVE THE MOST COM plete history and explanation of the Y2K problem that I have seen. However, the author left out the most important and decisive element, I think, that allowed the defect to last so long and build up to such gigantic proportions. The computer industry perceived, correctly as it turned out, that there would be no adverse financial consequences to them. Virtually the entire cost of equipment and software replacement and repair was borne by the user, whether governmental, institutional, business, or individual, and with much comment but surprisingly little complaint. I haven’t heard of large-scale software recalls or free replacements or so on. How the computer industry pulled this off would make an interesting study. I’m sure that if they had anticipated that they would have to pay for correcting the problem, it would have been fixed many years earlier.

Richard L. Bernard
Champaign, Ill.

Why Y2k?

ROBERT FRIEDEL REFERS TO THE QWERTY layout of the typewriter keyboard as an example of the past living in the present. That reminds me of another horrible example that I have fumed over ever since it raised its ugly head. That is the two different layouts of number pads, one on telephones and the other on calculators and computer keyboards, the former with 1, 2, and 3 at the top, the latter with them at the bottom. I rue the day the design of these keypads diverged, apparently without any communication between telephone and computer designers.

Sydney T. Fisher
Erdenheim, Pa.

Why Y2k?

LESS THAN 8,000 YEARS REMAINS UNTIL the Y10K problem makes itself known. With computer programs being revised to accommodate dates after December 31, 1999, will those programs have to be rewritten to accommodate the five-digit years after December 31, 9999? I’ll not worry about the sixdigit years after 99999. Who knows if mankind will still be around then?

Robert Friedel’s article should be archived and tagged for republication in the year 9900 to give ample warning against recurrence of the problem.

Martin A. Snyder
Concord, Calif.

The Perils Of Pesticide

JUST AS A POINT OF INFORMATION, IN your article “The Short-Lived Miracle of DDT” (by Darwin H. Stapleton, Winter 2000) there is a picture of Mrs. Gee Goldstein of Brooklyn spraying her Brooklyn apartment with Army DDT in 1945. The caption says, “Her young son is present to demonstrate its safety.” It may not have been so safe. That baby grew up to be the porn mogul Al Goldstein, publisher of the newspaper Screw.

Shell Reinish
Westlake Village, Calif.

The Technology Century

IN “TECHNOLOGY AT THE END OF THE Century” (Winter 2000), Frederick Allen writes, “It is fair to say that the greatest technological revolution of our century—and still at this end of this century and going into the next one—is not in information and communication and computing at all; it is in health.” Yes, but it should be noted that the technological advances that have improved our health include not only the medical ones Allen mentions but also, perhaps more important, advances in pure drinking water, sewage disposal, refrigeration of food, and better living conditions. Such low-tech improvements have been of the first importance in the United States and worldwide.

Professor Leonard X. Finegold
Department of Physics
Drexel University
Philadelphia, Pa.

The Technology Century

FREDERICK ALLEN CALLS TRACY KIDDER’S The Soul of a New Machine “the story of the development of a new computer chip.” Kidder’s wonderful book concerns the development of a new minicomputer, not of a new integrated circuit.

Imaging Before X Rays

T. A. HEPPENHEIMER’S INTERESTING article “Medical Imaging: The Inside Story” (Winter 2000) begins with an incomplete statement. Magnetic detection actually predates X rays by nearly 15 years. Alexander Graham Bell used an induction-balance metal detector to find bullets in the human body just as archeologists today use magneticanomaly detectors to find buried sites. His induction balance did not produce images, but it did scan in a manner similar to Damadian’s MRI scans in his 1972 patent application.

Bell’s machine was developed in 1881 to find one specific bullet in one specific individual: President James Garfield, who had been shot shortly after taking office. It did not work well in the initial stages, but soon Bell was finding many bullets in Civil War soldiers who still retained them. It was a limited technology, soon displaced by the X ray, but an interesting precursor nonetheless.

Frank Markham Brown
via e-mail

Ellen R. Kuhfeld
Curator
Bakken Library and Museum
Minneapolis, Minn.