Re: Don Ecker on Corso & Marrs Books

From: "ric carter" 
Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 08:33:15 -0800
Subject: Re: Don Ecker on Corso & Marrs Books


> Such debate will pale into insignificance with the new blockbuster of
> a book The Day After Roswell, by retired Lt. Col. Philip Corso...  The
> secret that Corso says he releases is concerned with the Roswell
> incident.... How Corso was detailed to pump alien artifacts into the
> industrial pipeline to jump start many areas of today's current tech-
> nology! Some of the items he links to ET-inspired  R&D are ... silicon
> computer chips which have revolutionized computer technology.

Semiconductor junctions, diodes, the basis of transistor and IC
technology, were known and in production in the 30s at least,
quite a while before the "Roswell incident".  The earliest diodes
AND transistors were made of germanium, closely related to
silicon - the move to silicon semiconductors was no big thang.

>      Ok, so far so good. Anyone who lived through the 60's like
> myself can vouch for the mind-bending technological leaps made by
> industry. Just look at where computers are today, and it has
> been just 20 years since the old Altair chip was introduced where
> someone with some electronic skill could solder together his own
> primitive computer.

The Altair was a microcomputer kit, not a chip.  The chip involved
was the Intel 8080, the outgrowth of a calculator chipset designed
for a Japanese manufacturer.  Bit-slice CPUs, DEC's LSI-11 chipset,
and other mid-70s technologies allowed one to build significant mini-
computers at the time the Altair was released and marketed.

The  Altair/8080 package is hardly a good point to mark the birth of
computers - the IBM 360/370 family of machines [now available on
single chips and boards] were commercialy successful by then, and
these were hardly the most powerful systems around.  The Altair
wasn't even the first kit-based computer - that honor goes to the
Heathkit analog computers of the 1950s.  Somebody needs to do
a bit of reviewing of the history of systems development, eh?

> But the real bottom line was the race our
> military was in. No, not the one with the Soviets (although it
> was with them also)-- no, the one against the aliens! Corso
> claims that high in the military and government the real fear was
> of the aliens becoming openly hostile! According to Corso, all
> those years of covert alien incursions into secure military bases
> and nuclear weapons storage areas, buzzing aircraft, jet
> pursuits, and even interference with our and the Soviets' space
> shots are all proof of a covert hostility.

Had there really been a competition between US/alien technologies,
it would have been NO race, eh?  Anyone with the capability of
interstellar travel could have whomped our little butts into the mud
without too much trouble, whether with energy-beam weapons, or
just by dropping some rocks on us, ala Heinlein's THE MOON IS A
HARSH MISTRESS.  Any "competition" would've resembled the
fight between Tibetan spears and matchlocks vs British artillery
and Maxim guns in 1902.  Try again.

 Ric Carter
 ric@sonic.net
 www.sonic.net/~ric