Bishop Hill Crossroads
Apr 2, 2014 Climate: Parliament Royal Society I've gone on record in the past as saying that the Royal Society is little more than a political campaigning body, a criticism that I understand has not gone down too well at Carlton House Gardens. I was therefore interested to see the SciTech Committee's reminder that the Royal benefits from considerable quantities of public funding, and a suggestion that it might like to pull its weight on the public relations front (although Sir Paul Nurse's considerable campaigning efforts are noted approvingly):
89. The Royal Society receives the majority of its funding, £47.1 million a year, from the Government. Block 2 of its delivery plan up to 2015 is for Science Communication and Education but, of the £515,000 a year allocated to science communication since 2011, very little appears to have been spent on communicating on climate science. The public profile the Society has on this issue is due to the ongoing debate about climate science taking place directly between Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, and Lord Lawson from the Global Warming Policy foundation. This debate has been widely reported in the press.
90. Sir Paul Nurse has very publicly engaged with prominent climate sceptics in the past. But the same is not true of the Royal Society as a whole. The launch of its joint report with the US National Academy of Sciences could have been used better to promote and communicate accurately the most up-to-date science to a non-specialist audience.
Faust sold his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly pleasures and unlimited knowledge. Robert Johnson parted with his soul at the crossroads at Clarksdale Mississippi in return for mastery of his guitar. The reward for the Royal Society, meanwhile, was a steady stream of future government funding. However, like those that went before, the great minds at the Royal have discovered that the price really does have to be paid. The government machine wants action and the Fellows have little choice but to jump.
Reader Comments (55)
Richard - we agree except for my last sentence. Unix broke the mould for computer makers. Suddenly anyone (eg Pyramid) could produce a high-end risc minicomputer and sell in the same marketplace as DEC. Likewise, anyone (eg Sun, Apollo) could produce workstations using Motorola chips and sell them, without the investment needed to produce their own OS.
Ken Olson called Unix 'snake oil' (and pulled the rug from under the feet of his own salespeople who at that time were trying to flog Unix on DEC hardware to customers who were looking for Unix minis and who had decided that VMS was not for them). DEC was by then on the skids. They could only win deals by selling at a loss and you can't keep that up for long.
Unix workstations were coming into use by 1982 but were beyond the means of ordinary individuals. But if the PC had not appeared, I think there can be little doubt that Unix workstations would have downpriced to fill the niche. Or perhaps Apple would have dominated the universe - who can say?
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I'm sure you know that, if you increment by one each of the letters of VMS you get WNT = "Windows New Technology" = Windows NT
Yeah, as Dave Cutler said when someone asked him about this, "How come it took you so long?"
It's fascinating history. For me the personal workstation (and thus PC) came out of Xerox Parc. Smith and Alexander called their book on the subject Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. What Alan Kay and the rest of the bright sparks didn't foresee is that the spreadsheet (invented in the form of Visicalc for the Apple II by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston right outside the Parc magic circle) would make much less powerful devices than they envisaged incredibly useful to the ordinary person. Once the genie was out of the bottle there was no going back to do it all in a 'neater way'.
If someone had taken more of a gamble with Unix earlier perhaps it would have come off. But I think it needed open source, as we have with Android, and many more years of Moore's Law to boot. Software culture takes time to change but we are in the midst of some truly satisfying change at the moment.
LevelGaze wrote:
Consider the influence of the PC on today's asymmetrical global warfare. Much greater, for example than that of small, portable, high frequency radios so important in clandestine activities during WW2 and the few following decades. Marconi worked independently!
Actually Marconi had quite a lot of support from the British Post Office, thanks to the Welsh engineer William Henry Preece He had himself carried out experiments in wireless transmission before Marconi, but realised that Marconi's technology had much greater promise than his own.
William Henry Preece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Preece
Dunno if he really sold his soul to play like that. I've heard better zither players.
Vic 20 and Commodore 64, later Amiga 500 really ruled in those days?