A mouse, beer and land surveying

Ah, the world of cause and effect. Random occurrences that somehow collide and ultimately create some sort of fusion that changes our world. Drastically and right under our nose.

So I pose the question: What does Mickey Mouse have to do with land surveying? And what in the world did beer have to do with either? This is fascinating.

Not long after Walt Disney had successfully staggered our senses with animated cartoons he discovered public stimulation needed a constant dosage increase of wow. His creation of Mickey Mouse was indeed popular, but interest was waning. To stay on the wave crest of entertainment Walt needed a home run. Not just a base hit. He needed to knock it out of the park.

Walt ran into a prominent orchestral composer, Leopold Stokowski, in a burger joint in Hollywood one evening. Stokowski was fascinated with cartoons. Walt was helping foster a fledgling technology of stereophonic sound reproduction in theaters (his home run) called Fantasound. It would surround the audience with such high fidelity sound tracks it would seem as though the orchestra was right there. Stokowski wanted in on it. After a sampling at Walt's shop, Stokowski was in. He agreed to compose the score for Walt's latest and greatest feature-length animation Fantasia.

Still no connection to land surveying. Read on.

In the ten years previous to this theaters had popped up all over America. Anybody that could afford a projector was raking in the dough. But the quality lacked. Walt and his buddies had determined that not just any old corner movie house was going to be able to profit from his production. They wanted the best of the best. You had to have the right equipment to show Fantasia. Simply put, the theater sound equipment had to qualify.

We had now entered into a technical era in entertainment. It wasn't going to be as easy as someone judging whether it sounded good or not. Data was needed. Hard facts.
And data and hard facts are produced by testing. Testing with equipment.

Although publically popular, the science of sound reproduction was still in its infancy. Test equipment was almost non-existent. And expensive. Walt needed some test equipment. He needed more than one or two. Some of it could cost a month's salary, if it was available.

In Palo Alto, California there were a couple of Stanford graduates that were eating Ramen and looking for something to do. Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett saw a chance to make some real money and put together some equipment for Disney. They did. It worked flawlessly and cost a third of anything else on the market; a precision audio oscillator, the Model HP200A. Disney bought all they could make.

Dave and Bill were a couple of no-nonsense fellas. Probably could have jumped in to the entertainment industry and made it rich producing sound equipment. They didn't. Dave and Bill were scientists. Remember these men studied under starchy horned-rimmed bespectacled professors who had actually rubbed elbows with the likes of Marconi and Tesla. Their firm continued to develop some of the finest electronic testing and measuring equipment the world had ever seen. They were very successful, but no entertainment, no siree.

What about beer? It's coming.

By the middle and late sixties Hewlett Packard had grown to become a standard in the industry. It was no surprise that when silicon digital logic was developed they were some of the first to hop on the wagon. Things were good for HP. The first hand held calculator that I ever laid eyes on was an HP. With the speed of a deity it would produce trig functions, to eight places. Squares and roots were child's play. These things worked!

Around this time HP had a young employee, Steve Wozniak. HP was his day job, however. Steve was a geek, but the word hadn't even been invented yet. His main focus was on partying and the night life. And Steve discovered what we all have. If you don't look like a Greek statue, you don't get the girls. Steve looked more Neanderthal than anything. So Steve discovered something else we've all learned, beer helps blur the ladies' vision.

He ran into a popular beer joint quarter-slot game called "Pong". Being the geek it wasn't long before he had glued up his own version at his apartment. He was a whiz.
One of his lower classmates, Steve Jobs, had become a good friend and at that time was employed by the Atari Corporation. Jobs had told "Woz" Atari had offered a cash bonus for each expensive memory chip that could be eliminated from their games. He agreed to split his bonus with Wozniak if he could help. The "Woz" recreated the process and eliminated most of the extraneous chips. Money was made. Beer was quaffed. And Steve Jobs and Wozniak formed their own company. The rest is history, right?

Wrong. Here's where random and flippant acts change the rotation of the world.

Woz was developing and refining (five years ahead of everybody else) the video interface of micro-processing. Nobody in a beer joint is going to find a micro-processor interesting unless you can entertain them with it. In an effort to give drunk college kids new and improved video games (into which they pump quarters) he hammered out the digital path to the video interface. So we could be ooo'd and awed by the bright pretty lights. God bless him.

Jobs wanted Wozniak to quit his day job at HP and hurry up and make history. While still a partier at heart, Woz was loyal. After all, he actually developed this process while an HP employee. Profiting from this kind of stuff has created SCOTUS level litigation. He offer the "first right of refusal" of his baby up to his bosses at HP, five times. Five times they declined. HP was iconic in the research, development and manufacture of electronic testing equipment. The had contracts with NASA. No thanks, sonny, take your tv set that has a ball bouncing across it and have fun. Woz resigned from HP, partnered with Jobs and they shot lightning through the sky.

About the time this was happening HP was actually developing some equipment that us surveyors are very familiar with; reflective time epoch distance measurement. In a few short years it literally revolutionized the surveying industry. 100 year old text books had to be rewritten.

We dodged a bullet. What if Wozniak's bosses at HP had actually picked up on his work? What if they had seen the possibilities of actually having a desktop personal computer? What if they had strangled (or killed) the budget on Electronic Distance Measurement and jumped into PC development? I get palpitations thinking of a world without EDMs. And it was this "close" to happening...whew.

Thank the good Lord above for the stuffy ivy covered conservatism and love for pure science that Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett displayed over the years. While a game of Pong was always fun; I wouldn't have any quarters to drop in the slot if I hadn't been surveying. And like Bill and Dave, my love of the science of surveying transcends entertainment.

Regarding the missed opportunity, HP co-founder Bill Hewlett reportedly said once in an interview, "You win some, you lose some." And I know he smiled.