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Khrushchev's 1959 Visit To IBM
harrymcc (1641347) writes In September of 1959, Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, spent 12 days touring the U.S. One of his stops was IBM's facilities in San Jose, which helped to create the area later known as Silicon Valley. The premier got to see the first computer which came with a hard disk, which IBM programmed to answer history questions. But what he was most impressed by was IBM's modern cafeteria. Over at Fast Company, I've chronicled this fascinating and little-known moment in tech history, which will be covered in an upcoming PBS program on Khrushchev's U.S. trip.
Kind of off topic but we have a picture of my father, Jack Harker, walking on water in front of the sculpture. He was manager of "The Labs" and was working with manufacturing to introduce their first Winchester disk drive. The technology was not moving successfully from the lab to the shop. There were some tremendous technical problems in mass producing the drives. Manufacturing gave a very aggressive schedule for solving the problems. My father replied that if they could meet the schedule, he would walk on water.
Manufacturing meet the schedule and the disk drives were delivered. My father had a plywood platform built and painted dark placed just under the surface of the reflecting pool. True to his word, there he was walking on water with the sculpture in the background.
A picture I did not understand fully until after his death.
Jack Harker, one of the fathers of the disk drive industry, a manager's manager, a great dad.
A big factor in the demise of the Soviet Union was Stalin. It was never supposed to happen that way. I don't think Lenin really foresaw such a scenario when the Bolsheviks established the government of the Soviet Union. Stalin was really just a power-hungry egomaniac who would have changed his colors to facilitate his rise to power no matter the political situation. He would have been a staunch advocate of the monarchy in Britain, or of representative democracy in the United States. Anything to get to the top. Stalin is every political system's nightmare. How do you weed out the imposters and select for the "benevolent dictator" type? They exist, but the personalities associated with benevolence do not fare well in the vicious world of politics. Look at how things turned out for Jimmy Carter. I don't know the answer, but knowing the solution isn't necessary to recognize the problem.
In sort of a mirror image of this story, some U.S. scientist was led on the usual dog & pony tour of Soviet space facilities (a publicly available one at any rate). Of course the tour included a display of huge rockets, advanced sattelites, etc. etc. to trump up the superiority of Soviet science.
Interestingly enough, after the tour the scientist came away convinced that the Soviet Union was hopelessly behind. It had nothing to do with the rockets though. Instead, he noted that when they ate lunch at the cafeteria, the cafeteria workers had to total up their lunches using an abacus. Big propaganda show-pieces are impressive, but it's the little things that show you what's really going on.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.