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[Department of deja vu] In USA Today for October 27, 2004, Kevin Maney’s Technology column takes us back….

The highlights:

There was another election season, back in 1952, when a presidential contest seemed too close to call, America worried it was vulnerable to attack, and a single company dominated computing.

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The Republican candidate was Dwight Eisenhower. The Democrat, Adlai Stevenson. Polls showed them in a dead heat.

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By 8:30 p.m. ET — long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes — Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 93 — a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn’t believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.

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In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that’s pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.

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(more…)

Amy Gahran’s weblog, Contentious, reports at the top of its This Week’s Grab Bag on Oct 10, 2004:

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TOP OF THIS WEEK’S LIST: Why can’t a newspaper be more like a blog? This is a brilliant and thankfully blunt series published June 2004 in Barry Parr’s excellent blog MediaSavvy. Here is an index to the series, with a brief excerpt from each article:

1. RSS: “Newspapers are treating RSS as a threat to their core business. …”

2. Comments: “Newspapers demand registration and acceptance of advertising email as a condition for reading their news, but none use those registrations to create a community [by allowing comments]. …”

3. Archives with permanent URLs: …

4. Trackback:…

5. Community and karma:…

6. If newspaper Web sites aren’t like blogs, at least they’re not like Fox News:…

7. Conclusion: “News sites have been wringing their hands about whether blogging is journalism and whether newspapers should let their reporters blog. They’re missing the most important point about blogging. Suddenly, millions of their readers now have better-managed web sites that are better integrated with the Web than any online news Web site.”

No wonder Silicon Valley area STC membership took a big drop in recent years.

According to an article by Scott Thurm in the Wall Street Journal of October 8, 2004,

More than half of the people working at technology companies in California in early 2000 had left the technology field or the state by the end of 2003, and more than 40% experienced declining incomes over that period, according to a study on the impact of the tech bust.

The study, by the Sphere Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Burlingame, Calif., think tank, found that the fate of tech workers during the bust depended largely on whether they stayed employed at a tech firm. Those that did enjoyed rising incomes — up 11% after accounting for inflation. But workers who left tech for other industries saw their wages stagnate or decline. Those who shifted from semiconductor makers to health care, for example, made 31% less in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared with the first quarter of 2000, after accounting for inflation.

…Nearly one-third of the tech workers in California in early 2000 weren’t even working in the state in 1995, and an additional quarter were working at nontech firms. Those who weren’t in tech in 1995 were more likely to leave the industry, or the state, after 2000, the study found

The full text of the article is behind the WSJ subscription wall, but was brought to my attention by a mailing list. A fairly simple Google search turned it up here.