A young Nebraska farmer's son went to war against Germany and came back with code-breaking skills, as well as good DoD contacts. His name was William Norris. He started Control Data Corporation with a young engineer named Seymour Cray and, with 34 people out on Seymour's farm in Wisconsin (only one of whom was a PhD and he was a Jr. programmer) built what is widely regarded as the first supercomputer <http://drdobbs.com/184404102>-- even as IBM's armies of PhD's and unlimited resources foundered in the effort much to the dismay of IBM's CEO, Thomas Watson, Jr.
Somewhere along the line, they hired me. What I learned was that both Bill and Seymour had very strong feelings about the national security implications of an increasingly urbanized population. That's one reason Seymour had his lab out in the north woods of Wisconsin. Bill, as CEO of CDC, had made this allowance for Seymour while keeping CDC HQ in Minneapolis St. Paul (right across from the airport). The reason I signed on with them was the promise that I could fulfill part of Bill's vision for America: National security through dispersed population structure -- both its preservation as an American heritage and its promotion as recovery from the recent urbanization that threatened that heritage. Basically, its virtually impossible to take out a decentralized society -- whether you are a nuclear superpower or an international terrorist organization. My particular part in this effort was that I was to prototype a mass-marketable version of the PLATO network, which I did circa 1980. I won't go into the details of that network except to say that the contribution it would have made to national security would have been to connect "smart" rural homesteads with information, education and business resources that would contribute to their self-sufficiency. Yes, I know, this is starting to be realized today, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1980, no? The rest of Bill's vision was that these smart homesteads would be energy and food self-sufficient. The reason you never heard of these things is that they were in direct conflict with Wall Street's interests and Wall Street made no secret of its hatred of Bill's vision. I succeeded in prototyping the mass market PLATO system and it was quashed by a mutinous middle management more identified with Wall Street than the "crazy old koot" in the executive suite. Unlike many of Bill's other technology directions in support of decentralized population structure, the PLATO system was poised to make immediate profits and roll out mass produced Macintosh equivalent network computers for a service that would have cost $40/month in 1980 dollars -- and that includes terminal rental. So it was particularly egregious that this technology was killed for the noble purpose of making America vulnerable to 9/11 type attacks. Bottom line, as technology advances, there is an increasing call for oppression to maintain the centralized population structure, just as there was to create it by moving the boomers out of their small midwestern towns, through universities and into the sterilizing urban environments in which they could not afford children <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A> -- but the attack on national security was conducted by Wall Street against the traditional American way of life. Any discussion, nowadays, about the threat to national security represented by attacks against centralized symbols like the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 is utter misdirection.
