I was in Nassau working between FSG/PM and the ACA/CORBA team. Recall many trips to the WRL, they always had the coolest stuff; network tunnels and firefly. Back then who you hated said a great deal and I recall several other CEs playing the silver bullet game to perfection.

I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain?

>> I'm curious the relation to the corporate blockchain?

I think its the idea of companies seeing new tech and trying to leverage it somehow in their own businesses and failing - badly.

Here's my own anecdotal evidence with blockchain:

I work in a very large health care company. For about four months, there was a huge buzz around the company about how to leverage block chain in health care. The main idea was using block chain to manage patient accounts and PPE.

We had all the execs bring in to do huge presentations. They brought in people from IBM to talk about Hyperledger and other block chain companies. They posted videos and articles about how this going to transform healthcare, we were all told this was going to be huge. They told people they were going to form a new team, hire developers and this was a going to be a huge focus in 2020.

Six months later? You couldn't find a single resource on any of it on any of the internal company sites. All the presentations stopped, the execs stopped talking about block chain seemingly over night and it was like poof! the idea of block chain, or any mention of it or the "revolution" that supposed to follow? Completely disappeared into the abyss, never to be heard from again.

I have no idea how much they sank into the notion that block chain could be used for health care, or how many people they hired or the contracts they signed with IBM, but I can only assume they lost a lot of money before they finally realized it wasn't going to work out.

Would blockchain have been useful for healthcare?

As I understand it, the main reason to use blockchain is having multiple parties intact without any party being trusted, so if you do have some central trusted authority it's pointless. There's also the requirement that the network has enough participants that no single party can gain a majority of the network's compute power, which seems a very iffy assumption with private/permissioned blockchains.

So I don't see how blockchain is useful in a healthcare context. Please correct me if I'm wrong and enlightenen me if I'm missing something.

That flowchart is from the United States Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate, not NIST.

>> Still looking for a cheap MicroVAX or a PDP-11/93.

LSI 11/73?

Hopefully, the SoL has arrived, I bought my 1st uVAX II motherboard, KA630 from a Field Service Engineer I Played Lax with for $500. Pulled out the 1/2 width PDP board, made a few console changes and voilla, VMS magic. In between was the interminable tape drive but it messes up the story.

I left for Maynard/Nassau a few months later, the 6 best/worst years of my life. Watching us piss away the WS market to salvage big iron was the worst but as GB much later pointed up -- VMS was the gold and we had no idea how to mine it.

Though Ritchie has portrayed the similarities as coincidence,

http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/docs/chistory.html

The influence of the 11's indexing [Bell] versus the 8 on C/Unix abounds, whatever your perspective on 'Macro' move instructions, they were certainly the obvious follow on rage, witness the Movc3/Movc5 in the Vax.

I've always enjoyed the notes K&R made following a non-disclosure presentation of the Vax, the most prescient I recall being a comment on the 512 page size.

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/vax1.html

I revered the 11, had Qbus machines which could be assembled with superior 3rd party components in places, scattered through my apt/basement as a student from the 23 through the j11 all the way up to a MV2.

Everything since has been anticlimactic :)