The 80's

As the 70's ended and the 80's began, software began to evolve very rapidly. With UNIX and C on minicomputers and Basic and Pascal on microcomputers, along with spreadsheets, and with projects like Numerical Recipes and other FORTRAN library projects, individual end users could begin to write very sophisticated software. Even more importantly - the APRANET began to evolve to a point where software and ideas could be exchanged between scientists, much more easily.

BUT, large calculations required large mini or mainframe computers and these were still in the the control of campus computer committees and others. I tried to find software that would work on a computer I could control. In 1982, I contacted Professor Veltman (who incidentally won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics I am very pleased to say). He told me about a researcher at Caltech who had written something called SMP in C for the VAX that might be something I could use. His name was

Stephen Wolfram

I contacted Wolfram and a few months later took a trip to Caltech to find out more about SMP and what the chances were of moving SMP from a VAX (since my local computer committee refused to let me use it to run SMP) to a microprocessor based machine. I found out that a Motorola 68000 based machine might be able to run it. While at Caltech I noticed a talk announcement on the bulletin board. The president of a computer company was to give a talk on their new 68000-based workstation. I had missed the talk, but noted the name and address of this new company.

I flew from Caltech to Silicon Valley and drove up and down 101 visiting every company making any kind of 68000 product. In every case, I either never got past the receptionist or if I did, I got puzzled looks when I tried to explain quantum field theory and SMP. The most memorable response I got was

"This is not a business application, is it?

(That company - Fortune Systems - went out of business just a few years later.)