Sputnik I. October 4, 1957. We were all hearing the pings 48 years ago. And probably will be making a big thing of this in two more years.

I remember 1957, that year we had big cars and the first Mall. The Russians had Sputnik. We invented the shopping mall and tail fins for cars. The Russians only had space ….

48 years later shopping malls are everywhere and we watch TV shows featuring people wanting to build more. Who would watch Apprentice if it featured people trying for a job designing telemetry compression algorithms?

ping, click

I had a friend who went to work at NASA. At twelve he planned to work for the Department of Agriculture, but Sputnik pinged, and he answered. He designed and wrote code for the first space missions. He’s dead. A few years. Brain tumor.

ping. Sputnik has been dead much longer.

And the mall rocks on.

Yeah for Americo.