[TUHS] Re: Demise of AT&T

One good attempt at answering this is in "Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970", by Christophe Lecuyer; it's also a very good history of the early Silicon Valley (before the mid-1960's). Most of it's available online, at Google: https://books.google.com/books?id=5TgKinNy5p8C I have neither the time nor energy to comment in detail on your very detailed post, but I think Lecuyer would mostly agree with your points. Same thing for the work-station industry (with Sun being merely the most notable example). I have a tiny bit of second-hand personal knowldge in this area; my wife works for NASA, as a structural engineer, and they run a lot of large computerized mathematical models. In the 70's, they were using CDC 7600's; they moved along through various things as technology changed (IIRC, at one point they had SGI machines). These days, they seem to mostly be using high-end personal computers for this. Some specialized uses (various forms of CAD) I guess still use things that look like work-stations, but I expect they are stock personal computers with special I/O (very large displays, etc). So I guess now there are just supercomputers (themselves mostly built out of large numbers of commodity CPUs), and laptops. Well, there is also cloud computing, which is huge, but that also just uses lots of commodity CPUs. Noel