[ExI] pointy end up, fiery end down

[spike at rainier66.com]

...> On Behalf Of MB via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] pointy end up, fiery end down



On Mon, May 8, 2023 13:08, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:
...
>> For getting rich, not such a good place to work.  If one wants to learn 
> everything about engineering, Lockheed was a great place to work.
> University of Lockheed it was.
>

>...We're a generation ahead of you, spike. :)  Working for a Big Company
was a job for life.  Uncle Lockheed (or Atlas or Dupont or Hercules) would
look out for you as long as you behaved.  Pension, health care, the works.
 Not rich, but solid.

>...Indeed it was a university, too.  They'd take you, train you, and keep
you. :)

Regards,
MB
_______________________________________________

It was a great place to learn about controls engineering.  I think a lot of
spin-off companies formed because of Lockheed in Sunnyvale, such as Apple if
you think about it.  The father of Steve Wozniak stayed on at Lockheed, but
Jerry taught his son a lotta tricks of the trade.  A lot of our controls
guys ended up over at Apple.  I ran into one of them Saturday.  I suspect
Apple is building robots, which need good controls guys.

I worked with a guy at Lockheed who did the calculations for control system
requirements for the first practical body-on-body anti-missile system when
he was a PhD candidate at Stanford.  He did the initial control system work,
figured out what would be needed to intercept an incoming nuclear weapon,
put it all in a PhD thesis in 1968.  It took 30 years for electronics to
catch up to what he calculated in 68.  His work eventually became the THAAD
missile, which is still being produced.  Naturally he was a tech god to the
Control Freaks group.

spike