When Grandpa graduated from Yale, the first job he got was a job working for Sperry Gyroscope Company, known as Sperry Corporation, designing inertial guidance systems for bombers. Even though it was awesome doing something to help the war effort, he really didn’t like this job, and it was never going to have a high demand because the people didn’t need a B-58 Hustler, that’s for sure. The B-58 Hustlers were the first supersonic jet bombers capable of Mach 2 flight, and it had killer accuracy. He liked that every Tuesday they would fly planes gracefully from long island to Boston to “bomb” the Harvard Bridge with hydrogen bombs. They never missed by more than 100 feet. Ironically, grandpa would live about 100 feet away from the Harvard Bridge in ten years when he went to Harvard Business School. When he finally got out of working on the B-58 Hustler, Grandpa and Bama (my grandmother) packed up their things, and moved up to Boston to work for Honeywell. The engineering job that interested him much more, the digital computer, was now his. He worked on these before anybody even knew what they were. They were worth an astonishing amount of over $1,000,000 a piece. Working with highly trained coworkers, just like him, they created the first portable computers. These monsters weighed 25 pounds and were invented long before the Internet; instead of connecting through the Internet they had to use phone lines to call other phones or computers, and this was called timesharing. This is all very complicated and bizarre to me. “What do you mean they where $1,000,000 for one gigantic 25 pound computer?” |
Evolution took its course though, and eventually off of these first prototypes that Grandpa worked on, the computer I’m typing this on today, was born. Apart from being far more interesting in Grandpa’s opinion, working for Honeywell was much better because in the three years he worked for them, before his baseball accident, the sales rate went up from $10 million to $300 million, as the market was far greater in computers than bombers. Unfortunately Grandpa had a “brain cramp” after his baseball accident and decided he no longer could work in the engineering business because of his flaky memory after his head injury.
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