by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-01 04:27:25+00:00
Well, in 1980 when I got my hands on the first "powerful" benchtop computer that I had complete control of, I started a project to do a little machine learning so that I would one day have some of the foundation I needed to handle the data more intelligently in the future.

That's what I always wanted to have a computer for and why I took Fortran in college to begin with.

I knew I wasn't going to reach the "intelligence" part within a short number of years, for one thing I had figured out it would be much faster on a more specialized chip than a CPU, plus it would require megabytes of memory when I only had kilobytes, and way more storage space too.

I couldn't be spending years concentrating on this while waiting for hardware technology to progress, and for survival otherwise I gravitated to a niche within a natural science career that would not be replaced by the AI which I expected to be rapidly approaching from those who had a much better head start both financially as well as in computer science.

Now by the time the late 90's rolled around, I already had my own company for a number of years (knew that was going to take decades too so I had started in that direction as a teenager) and by then had more than one computer. Woo hoo!

And megabytes! Oh Yeah!

Plus Office '97 which put the "paperless office" within reach even though paperwork was my primary deliverable product.

With Y2K looming I decided to use some of the megabytes in the more powerful PC to try a bit of the old ML again, with much more of a bent for AI this time. I had already been pitched in the early '90's by neural net vendors but I wasn't ready for that. After a few more years of consideration I had a much better idea of the groundwork I would need, separated the raw automation from the intelligent input I was making and that was a good milestone in efficiency right there. I was barely able to get a bit of my concept from 1980 put on to a "powerful" DOS/Windows platform when it crashed and set me back a couple months before starting to get hammered into eventual submission by years of stacked natural disasters.

Growth had been halted but by this time I was pretty mature and charge enough per page that I personally wasn't going to be the one that needed any more automation than I already had. When I first started I could afford to type each page manually on a (intelligent) typewriter to begin with, and I could make even more at today's prices now doing that again if I had too. This was another marginally positive trend that was not very obvious, and it was so marginal that was when I accepted that I would have to actually outlive most of my contemporaries if I was going to make very much of it.

Whew, that wasn't easy and it took a while too.

Even if total automation doesn't make me any more than total manual effort, it is the kind of thing that the bigger multinational groups could really take to the bank. So I've always kept it in mind, I knew about it all along, that's where I got started.

Anyway, there's still a blank tab on an XLS spreadsheet where the tabs to the left are all the "very important" data which I ruminate about then do a little typing accordingly before hitting the button. Then the tabs to the right get populated sequentially and filtered until the final tab spits out a file that gets emailed to the client. It comes straight from Excel with letterhead and fonts virtually indistinguishable from Word. At the beginning with MS-Word I was faxing with a dedicated land line plugged directly into the PC, now email or not when the client prints it there are very few ways to tell the difference from when I would fax them a signed page from my typewriter too.

It took quite a while to reach the point today where AI might be getting close enough in my lifetime to where I could train it to fill in that blank tab for me.

It would have to be about perfect though.

Patience, my friend.