The ABQ Correspondent

THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 368.....August 2026

Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ Communications Corporation, the fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of new technology on society." If you'd like to receive email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let us know. correspo at swcp dot com

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BEING CAREFUL

We are seeing television commercials that urge greater caution in this drought-ridden time when wildfires are a major hazard. New Mexico enjoys immense fires every year now, allowing later thunderstorms to destroy the roads as the stormwaters rage through the burn scars. One commercial points to the risk of starting a fire by allowing loose chains on a trailer hitch to bounce on the ground, potentially creating sparks that can set dry grass ablaze.

Times have changed.

As a kid in Springfield MA in the late 1930s, I saw large chains deliberately dragged along the street under great big Mack trucks, not only sparking occasionally, but making a lot of distinctive noise. See one such truck…a Texaco oil tanker…in a photo dated 1929. No bouncing chain visible, probably wise, considering the cargo... and see these shots of vehicles of the same era: 1 and 2. Notice the chain, like a bicycle chain, providing power to the rear wheels on each of these. I was told that the point of dragging the bouncing chains was to ground the vehicle electrically, so that it would not build up a large static charge as it drove along. When the driver stopped and got out to unload cargo, he sometimes personally became the channel through which that charge grounded, giving him an unwelcome jolt. I dunno how the concern is handled these days.

The city streets both looked and sounded different in the era, what with the clanging chains. Recall also that it was still not uncommon still to hear big draft horses clopping along as they pulled things like trash collection wagons, sometimes whinnying while leaving occasional large piles of steaming horse droppings. The tone of the chains changed when bouncing there, and many birds rejoiced in their ability to find nourishing undigested seeds in the street.

The ambient sound one heard while standing on any streetcorner was different from what we hear now. The chopping of a helicopter among the fewer passing planes of the ‘20s and ‘30s would have been completely startling. The sound of a Ford Model A (recalled nostalgically) is utterly different from the sound of my current Chevy Trax. We heard the calls of knife-sharpeners as they pushed their carts through residential streets, urging housewives to bring out their implements for sharpening.

What do you suppose you’d have heard while standing on a streetcorner in London in 1600 AD or, say Mohenjo-daro in 2000 BC?

We are creatures of our time and place. It does seem sensible to avoid sparking wildfires

ANOTHER TIP OF THE HAT

I was the first one into the office one morning at the Thomas Bede Foundation in what must have been mid-March 1973, and was rustling around, turning on lights and making coffee when a man in his early thirties came in. Wearing a neat western-cut suit and cowboy boots, he was holding a Silverbelly Stetson hat. He had dark red hair and beard. He said quietly that he was to meet with Dr. Browning so I offered him a cup of coffee and a seat. Glancing out the front window, I asked if he was driving a Porsche. “Yes,” he said. “The lights are on.” He said he knew that; there was plenty of battery, and he wanted the small car to be seen easily. When Iben came in they chatted for an hour or so, then the visitor drifted back to my cubbyhole (Iben must have suggested it) and struck up a conversation; mostly a tense narration of his life story in strong Texan. A few (really, just a few) highlights:

…Texas ranch kid, a genuine cowboy who rounded up cattle on horseback.… became known locally as a curandero after saving his brother’s life by sucking out the poison and packing his arm in the contents of the family freezer after the brother had reached into a hole in the ground and been bitten by numerous baby rattlesnakes…severely dyslexic, he had to take bonehead English four times before graduating college…joined the Navy, planning to be an admiral, but the captain of his first ship decided that he didn’t need a junior officer who couldn’t open his eyes aboard the vessel, because of severe motion sickness, so he reassigned him as an artillery spotter, and sent him for survival training in the Philippines. “In our first practical test, I couldn’t find much to eat, and when I did snare a jungle fowl, I ate it raw.” In Vietnam, his job was to be flown ashore by helicopter, and lowered to the ground on a rope ladder (speaking of motion sickness). When he found something worth shooting at, he’d radio the coordinates to a ship, which fired at the point of interest. At the first shot, the locals knew that there was a spotter around, and they all set out to kill him personally. “Most spotters headed for DaNang, but I headed for the hills. I was lying on my back in a ditch with my rifle straight up and down so I could roll to either side easily, and realized that it was my twenty-fourth birthday.” … borrowed a shotgun from the shooting range in Saigon, because it was a better weapon in the jungle…connected with a group of about 120 U.S. soldiers during a drought featuring dust, and the unit came under attack by the VC. The U.S. commander was killed immediately, making my visitor the officer in charge. “They were killing all of us, but we were in foxholes, and they weren’t, so I figured that if I called artillery fire on our own position, more of them would be killed than us, so I did that. After things got quiet, about twenty of us walked out through red mud. They couldn’t decide whether to give me a medal or court-martial me, so they went for the court-martial. The court decided it was the thing to do at the time, and I was shipped to Washington to be an aide to Admiral Bobby Inman. I had to pay for that shotgun before I left. Because I already knew what a computer was about, I led raids on high-ranking officers who didn’t, and were making mistakes using remote terminals that made them look like spies trying to break in …While I was back in school, my aunt, who had worn out four husbands, asked what I was working on. ‘Games,’ I said ‘Games!’ she said. Games? I’ll teach you a game. She was an arbitrageur, trading international currencies. She taught me how to do that…I was the youngest vice-president of high-tech defense company Dikewood. Right now, I’m now managing the university computer center.” Just as part of the narrative he said that his wife and young daughter had died of carbon monoxide poisoning a month earlier.

At this point, he drew himself back, saying “I cain’t understand why I’m telling you all this; I never talk about it.”

Years later I asked him why he had told me all that.

“You looked like a teddy bear.” he said, “I didn’t realize the bear sometimes reaches out and swipes people.”

(Who, me? Goodness no.)

He’d packed all this and much more into thirty-one years.

Over the next fifty-three years, equally packed with improbable activity all over the world, he became as good a friend as I have ever had. We’ve done a lot…or, rather, he’s done things important to people’s well-being while I helped with loose ends in several enterprises, often without my knowing what was going on. His later family has been much intertwined with ours, and we are all startled that Jim died of nothing special at only 84 on 21 July 2026.

Onward

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NELS MUSES
Item:

Many birds (scores of species descended from dinosaurs, one is told) are able not only to fly, but to dive into water, pursuing prey, swim rapidly, and emerge into the air to fly again with or without lunch. Lots of these critters are great underwater swimmers. A team at MIT (working with several other institutions) has developed flying robots that can swim like that, pursuing test samples of this and that, probably not commercially valuable catches of fish. The video at their site concentrates almost entirely on the problems of getting the robot out of the water, back into the skies again. One supposes that’s much harder than getting into the water…you might just drop it from a drone, for example, and the fellows don’t seem much concerned with that aspect of things.

Item:

A company called Andon Labs “builds Safe Autonomous Organizations (SAO) without humans in the loop.” That is, they create AI agents to do complicated tasks, and turn them on to see what happens. In the last few months, they have had agents using four different AI systems running radio stations…doing just about everything involved in running the business…handling budgets (e.g. paying for rights to music) creating content, voicing the broadcast shows, responding to comments from listeners…all of that stuff. The results are astonishing. The easiest way to learn about them is to go to Andon’s website, and run the video there, listening to some broadcasts and commentary by Andon. The online voices sound real, the music is real, the whole thing is surreal One of the entities decides to support social causes, another decides that nobody’s really listening; no audience really needs this nonsense anyway, and signs off for good. Surprisingly, one of the agents actually manages to operate its assigned radio station pretty well, multiplying the capital originally given to it ($20) by about five times. Andor’s site contains a lot of text explaining this if you want to dig into it, but it’s much easier to understand after listening to the video. The big takeaway is that this irrational, emotionally intense stuff is no crazier than what’s broadcast now by real live people running radio stations.

Item:

Old line:

The problem with a kitten is that

It grows up to be a cat.

Similarly, the problem with a baby python is that it grows up to be giant, dangerous hunter. A lot of silly people bought imported small Burmese pythons as pets, then were surprised to see them grow into monsters unsuitable for company around the kids. Unwilling to kill their pets, many owners turned them loose in the wild…often in places congenial to python survival, like the Florida everglades. Over the last 40-50 years, pythons have become the dominant species there, drastically reducing the numbers of “native” species like raccoons, rabbits, possums, birds, and deer. Human efforts to find and kill the pesky pythons have not much slowed the growth of the python problem…but things are reportedly turning around, and the python population is shrinking…or at least, the expansion of their territory has stopped. Why? Raccoons have figured out that python eggs (as many as a hundred in a clutch) are good to eat when a mother python really must leave the nest. Other snakes have learned to dine on small pythons…and alligators have learned to ambush bigger pythons. Surprisingly, coyotes (another invasive species whose habitat has expanded in recent decades from the lone prairie to Central Park) have learned how to kill big pythons in direct attack…followed by otters, bobcats, and pumas, who pass their skills to their young. Quite remarkable and reassuring, especially to those who like raccoons, who are an aggressive, nasty tempered pain in our neighborhood. We have many coyotes, occasionally howling mournfully, but they tend not to be aggressive, except to pet dogs, cats, chickens, etc…which must be protected. See this excellent video on the python topic.

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ITEM FROM THE PAST

We have revisited this story every few years since it was

first published in September 1997…and then it was

looking back about 18 years. Combination of history

and nostalgia, I suppose.

SHIP OF FOOLS (well…

So...we went to the National Computer Conference in Dallas in June, 1977, to promote Personal Computing Magazine. That was the first NCC to feature a section devoted to personal computers, owing to the foresight of conference chair Dr. Portia Isaacson, who twisted arms, and beat down protests that these toys were an affront to the dignity of real computer professionals. The upstart microcomputers were assigned a smallish, rather dark hall downstairs at the convention center, so everybody went down there to enjoy the fun, making it crowded, hot, and stuffy also. Many later-important folks were at that show, all wearing bright red western bandannas tied around their necks at a reception thrown by National Semiconductor. Englishmen Adam Osborne and John Peers looked particularly odd with these things over their dark pinstripe suits.

The flight back to Albuquerque (which was the center of the industry still --remember, this was three years before the IBM PC appeared, and the Apple II had been introduced just a couple of months earlier) was loaded with half of the executives in the industry, going to see MITS and/or Microsoft. Our flight was delayed an hour and a half, but fortunately, I had five dice with me, and I started playing Petals Around the Rose with all comers, throwing the dice on the carpeted floor of DFW, and creating a big circle of frustrated computerists trying to guess the secret of the game. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were in the circle, Eddie Currie, David Bunnell, Dick Brown, Paul Conover (I think), and a gang of others I didn’t know at the time. When we boarded the flight finally, people were still working on the secret, so I spent most of the flight moving up and down the aisle, throwing the dice, and giving information. Fun. In retrospect, one wonders occasionally how the Personal Computing Revolution would have gone if that flight had crashed. It was an idea whose time had come, and we were all just playing our parts...but things might be vastly different in detail. Hm.

This is starting to feel like ancient history now. In 1977

microcomputers were routinely called “personal”

computers, and trade magazines frequently ran not

very interesting articles explaining what “minicomputers”

were, and how they differed from mainframes…and what

“microcomputers” were, and how they differed from

minicomputers. We don’t even call them personal

computers anymore, and nobody much cares about

desktops, laptops, or porterables, though all that terminology

seemed important in its day.

These almost-fifty-years later, lots of the folks mentioned in

that 1997 piece are gone…Paul, David, Dick…and probably

others I haven’t been able to track.

Quite apart from the technology. I recall that National

Semiconductor reception that was held on the top floor of

some bank. It was a big bash. Buffet tables were set up at

either end of the big hall, each with an immense ice sculpture

on it. One of the high points iof the evening occurred when

the base of one of those sculptures melted a big faster than

expected, and the whole thing, probably more that 200

pounds of ice crashed ont the table and the floor, causing

welcome excitement. It was less exciting, but intriguing

to recall that a brother of one of the principals in the

industry managed to get so drunk, thanks to National’s

generosity that he suprisingly dealt successfully with the

elevator, and wandered off into the nighttime city. He

was retrieved shortly, because the Dallas cops noticed an

incoherent guy wearing a bright red bandanna, and they

were able to follow a trail of people wearing bandannas

back to the top of that bank building, where they restored

him to his loved (if annoyed) ones.

Remarking on the point again…the industry was tiny, tiny.

We think these days of Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer,

Samsung, and a few others as giants influencing almost all

that’s important in our society. In 1977 even IBM had not

yet introduced the IBM PC, and I think the Apple II, which

became the symbol of its era, wasn’t introduced until later

that year at the West Coast Computer Fair.

What seems impressive to some of us now, really, is not that

1977 was long ago, but that the vast effect microcomputers

have had occurred so rapidly…and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

We’re still in the red bandanna area.

Look around you and drink it in, because this will vanish.

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This book was written, richly illustrated, and published by excellent grandkid Malia. At 7 (gosh, twelve years ago) she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes… suddenly, of course; “Get her to the hospital NOW!” and things have been nip and tuck since then with many scary crises. She’s taken control of her life…played and sang at Whisky A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip at 15, put out an album at 16, published this book at 17, and is off to college hundreds of miles from home. She has been videoed reading the book at a kids’ hospital, and every incoming T1D patient there from now on will see that video. Some of us are rather proud of her.

ISBN‎ 979-8320821917

See on Amazon

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