February, 2013 —
We stand today near the beginning of the post-PC era. Tablets and smart phones are replacing desktops and notebooks. Clouds are replacing clusters. We’re more dependent than ever on big computer rooms only this time we not only don’t own them, we don’t even know where they are. Three years from now we’ll barely recognize the computing landscape that was built on personal computers. So if we’re going to keep an accurate chronicle of that era, we’d better get to work right now, before we forget how it really happened.
Oddly enough, I predicted all of this almost 25 years ago as you’ll see if you choose to share this journey and read on. […]
I received an e-mail last week from someone who is sure to become one of my heroes — an electrical engineer turned high school math teacher. He was concerned about the proper use of technology, especially iPads, in the classroom, and had quite specific suggestions for what to do. We’ll probably get to that in my next column but here I’d like to consider his more fundamental idea, which is that technology in schools can be, in many ways, more a distraction than a solution.
This column started out being titled “Is Goldman Sachs Evil?” until I realized the issue is far more broad. It began with a 
This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. If you are old enough you may remember where you were at that time and what it was like. I remember VERY well because I was on my way to the crippled plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our President at the time, Jimmy Carter, was also a micro-manager and a former nuclear engineer: he wanted his own eyes and ears on the scene. Our little group eventually coalesced into the Presidental Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, who was also the co-author of BASIC.