Only about half of the workforce is now concerned in any direct way with physical goods, whether actually making them, selling them, or managing the people who do those things. An increasing proportion are like university professors, dealing in ideas with no direct link to the goods economy
The article holds up pretty well. One problem is that social and political organization lag technology. The Industrial Revolution started making people wealthy in the late 18th century, but the benefits of that wealth didn't start trickling down for half a century, and, even then, it took another hundred years for institutions to catch up and spread the wealth more broadly. The Information Revolution has been similar. It started making people wealthy in the 1950s, but we're only recently starting to see its real promise with paperless offices, wireless connectivity, micromanaging apps and the like. Will it take another century for the benefits to penetrate society more broadly? I hope not, but I know better.
Were VAXs ever that cheap? The only time I used them, they cost at least ten times what a desktop PC cost and required special wiring, air conditioning and noise isolation. The software wasn't all that good either, at least not for things like printing letters, running spreadsheets and manipulating databases. It wasn't until the latter part of the 1980s that VAX networking software became reliable. (FTP was wretched. I could usually drive down to MIT, write a 9 track tape, haul it back to Fresh Pond and load it in less than time than it took to do it on the network.)
Only about half of the workforce is now concerned in any direct way with physical goods, whether actually making them, selling them, or managing the people who do those things. An increasing proportion are like university professors, dealing in ideas with no direct link to the goods economy
1) Could I buy a Vax and have it shipped to my house for under $2000 and just plug it in and run Visicalc?
2) You might add what is called the enshitification process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) Another gift of modern capitalism
The article holds up pretty well. One problem is that social and political organization lag technology. The Industrial Revolution started making people wealthy in the late 18th century, but the benefits of that wealth didn't start trickling down for half a century, and, even then, it took another hundred years for institutions to catch up and spread the wealth more broadly. The Information Revolution has been similar. It started making people wealthy in the 1950s, but we're only recently starting to see its real promise with paperless offices, wireless connectivity, micromanaging apps and the like. Will it take another century for the benefits to penetrate society more broadly? I hope not, but I know better.
Were VAXs ever that cheap? The only time I used them, they cost at least ten times what a desktop PC cost and required special wiring, air conditioning and noise isolation. The software wasn't all that good either, at least not for things like printing letters, running spreadsheets and manipulating databases. It wasn't until the latter part of the 1980s that VAX networking software became reliable. (FTP was wretched. I could usually drive down to MIT, write a 9 track tape, haul it back to Fresh Pond and load it in less than time than it took to do it on the network.)
:-)