 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. Very excited to still be at COFES, the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, with our second annual partnership with them. We are very excited to now have the president of COFES Institute, Vincent Caprio. Hello. Thank you, so Alan, I've loved being with you the last two cycles here at the event. Thanks. And so many of our sponsors and speakers, just, you're a great interviewer. You really not handle things. I'm very honored that you said that. Thank you. And it's, this place is loaded with, it's a big brain trust, this, you know, we've had some epic conversations that people that have sat here. Vince's background is awesome. Not only has he been the president of COFES Institute, he's also a technology historian and a technology event producer over the last 30 years. And the conversations that we've had, he's just been dropping lots of wisdom on me. Let's talk about your life. Let's talk about this journey. How did you become who you are when you were younger and it slowly built you up? My grandfather was a civil engineer. My grandfather believed in education. My grandfather put himself through night school and he graduated from NYU. Took him seven years. My grandfather believed so much in education that he put his other seven siblings through college. One of them became a cardiologist, three of them were teachers. So another engineer. So my grandfather believed so much in education, having, you know, been from Italy. And then my father was, my father was in the Korean War and came out of Korea and he graduated from Seton Hall in accounting. And my grandfather, even in the earliest days of Univac, loved computers and he started working with computerization when he went to the IRS in the 50s. And so my father, from an early age, talked, had me go into, you know, the computer room at the IRS and the tapes and the whole bed. And so he worked for the IRS for 40 years. And I then went off to Villanova in 1975 to study accounting and MIS and data processing. And I loved all that. And while I was at Villanova, I've read in Fortune magazine and Wall Street Journal about these two fellows in the Silicon Valley, Jobs and Wozniak. And then I said, gee, this is really cool that someday you can have a computer on your desk. And then I got out of Villanova and I went to work for the IRS and I was working, you know, with the big mainframes, the IBM mainframes. And then so I got involved with really looking at the mainframes and then the minis and the LSIs and the VAX machines. And then in 1981, when IBM introduced the first PC, I went out and bought one for $4,400. And I was recently telling somebody that story. They said, $4,400, you bought an IBM PC and you were making $15,000 in 1981 or 82. That'd be like spending $20,000 now. And I said, I never really thought about it because when I heard about the IBM PC, I really wanted one and it had an 8086 chip. And I really embraced technology. And what was really great is my grandfather and my father loved history and I loved history. So I started making sure I understood who the giants in the history of technology. One of the first things I remember reading was about IBM and how IBM in 1959 worked with ADP. ADP, most of you get a paycheck. It's called ADP now, but it was called Advanced Data Processing. In 1959, they did a partnership and that was the first time people got automated paychecks. And I had known about that by 1968 when I was in fifth grade. So I always looked at the history of it. My fifth grade project was on computers that I won the science fair in fifth grade for. And of course, I won the science fair in seventh grade, sixth, seventh and eighth grade. So I loved science, but I always loved the history of science. It was always interesting for me to read the biographies of the men and women that brought us this technology. So what's really been cool in my 40 years is that I've seen this whole revolution. I was there when Gates and Paul Allen had Microsoft and I bought Microsoft when they went public in 1986. I was a stockholder. So I always followed everything. I followed Wozniak and Jobs and Apple. And it's really been interesting to live the history of it. And it's very rewarding to be able to explain the history of it to some of the younger people that are in their 20s now. Yeah, there's so many things that you brought up there that are crucial. First is the grandpa. It's crazy that he worked to put the other seven siblings through college as well. Because when you realize that when the mind is so young that it has the potential to absorb stimuli and then become at another whole level of understanding reality, a higher level, a more powerful level, that's why it's so important to get at a young age these really powerful knowledges. No, it's just because those people that have come up to me and I've spoken at hundreds of conferences. I've spoken at NIST and DOD and I've spoken at Cybersecurity conferences sponsored by the FBI. And obviously I've spent I've spoken at over a hundred colleges and universities. And many times somebody, you know, we'll get done and we'll go to the cocktail hour. And the student will say, Well, you're self made. And I said, No, I'm not self made. No, who knows? I said, My grandfather and father made me. I'm not self made. They it wasn't and no one gave me money. But no, they provided the platform. And they provided for me to understand that I needed an education. And my father and grandfather. It's interesting. My grandfather and father told me Christmas is for women and children. My grandfather believes so much that every Christmas my grandfather gave me two gifts, a $25 savings bond for me to have for when I went to college and a book. So I never received like toys and things like that. It was here's a book and here's a bond. So that's why people say you're self made. You started out at the IRS making $10,000 a year. No, no, I'm not self made. My family made me my grandfather and my father's belief. My grandfather and father used to say, You know, America is all this opportunity. You are what you're perceived to be. Yeah, this this notion that we stand upon the shoulders of giants a lot of the time that the giants are within our family, right helped us get to where we are. And a lot of time, then you read all those books. And then the giants are also in those books. And so those components are really critical to to your growth. And then as you as you ended up indicating there's this, there was a strong desire for you to read about what Wozniak and jobs we're doing and what Paul Allen Bill Gates were doing. And when you did that, you really started absorbing what technological revolution was happening. And so this is this, this is this critical notion that for young people, that to be able to really find these sources of the most signal during time periods and the least noise, the the ones that are ramping up, you know, who are the ones that are driving the synthetic biology age, who are the ones driving the neuroscience and AI neural network age, the cloud computing age, the engineering software age, who are those drivers? Latch on to them, read about them, hang out with them, do all these things that will then drive you to best understand the transitions that we go through. Then it's also interesting that from from this perspective of technology history, you've really been around like you said, you were young, but you saw when paychecks became automated, right? And now all the way to to cryptocurrencies now. So so now you're really good at explaining this technology history. Why has technology history in your eyes just been something that you know, even that you're giving us example 20 year olds when you're hanging out with us, right, you know, we're just like jaw dropped, listening to you. Well, you know, and speaking at these colleges, universities say the student is 22 years old. I know that they've been on the internet their entire life. Now, look, I'm 62. Do you realize all my friends, none of us were on the internet until Netscape came with the browser? Okay, and it was an unbelievable revolution because one day, there's this browser. And we've heard about the internet. And we might have friends that, you know, got onto a worldwide web. I mean, look at it. Most of the younger people don't know what WWW. So I was at a time that people would say, What's your website? Oh, my website is World Wide Web Vincent Caprio.org. So could you imagine when I first got my website, instead of saying WWW Vincent Caprio.org, I'm saying World Wide Web Vincent Caprio.org. So then one day, we have a search engine. And within six months, everyone's on the internet. Okay. And so it was that adoption was that quick. Yes, this was 9594 to 95. And so PCs at home, okay, it went from 20% market penetration. So by the end of the decade, everyone had a PC everybody had a device, a laptop. And at the same time, the convergence of the browser and then AOL, letting you get online AOL within two years at 35 million users. That's why they got to be the largest company they bought out time Inc. So to think about it, before 90, early 94, I'm at home using that IBM. And it's not even Microsoft. It's not even Windows 95. There's no GUI in it. That's another thing I use terms like GUI. Nobody knows what that means. Graphics user interface was brought to us by Apple products. Windows 95. Windows was all text driven. I'm at home in 1992, you're working on a laptop. It's all text driven. There's no icons. You know, you know, you push the thing. And even to this day, my daughter laughs, I hit print. You know, I don't even know where's the icon from the print. So all of a sudden, the convergence of now you can go on the internet with AOL. Now you have a browser. Now everybody's on the internet. And they're in a chat room. There's I want to be in fantasy baseball. I mean, fantasy football. Oh my gosh, I can go on ESPN.com and look at the score. I don't have to like stay up until 1125 to watch the local station see if the Mets or Yankees one or if the Red Sox one, you know, you difference. Yeah, it all happened. So you go from not being able to use the box to the box being extremely intelligent, the box, you know, looks like with me, Vincent Capra. Next thing I know, I figured, I want to find every person with my name in the world. So I'm like, Hey, wow, man, there's like 20 people with exactly the same name. And I'm sending them emails. Hey, I'm Vincent Caprio from, you know, you know, Boston, I'm this I'm that I'm there. You know, it's kind of cool to think all of a sudden and the democratization of it, you're communicating with people all over the world and all over the United States. It was really cool time. It the these these little the pockets of wisdom that you're shedding these awareness expansions for us is that, you know, when so many people are coming online, you're you're able to then query the internet with whatever the the question is like, what was the score of the game or what's the weather like tomorrow, you can now get these data points in without needing to send a message through instant messenger to someone else across the world in in in like that rather than needing to wait for a paper to arrive. And this is this is a very important advancement time period. How did AOL lose 35 million users? That sounds crazy that they blew that opportunity. Well, and so then when they when they acquired Time Warner, it was the largest deal in the history of deals. And what it happened is it had to do with and most people who don't remember, if you had AOL, you know, you had it was dial up. So you so you would and there was a noise. Do you remember? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You heard it. Yeah. So what happened is called you did not so when you finally got a DSL line, you didn't need AOL anymore. You got it that you buy a DSL line at your house, you don't need an AOL account anymore. You can just, you know, go directly with somewhere else. And that was it. They're their business. Then they thought that they could maintain those 35 million people that were paying like 10 or $12 a month. That was think they would bill you every month on a credit card, $10, $12, like $20 a month, they think it was. So, you know, every month, $20, $20. But then one day, you didn't need them. So everybody canceled. See, as fast as they went up, they came down because nobody needed them anymore. You know, what were people using instead of AOL at that time then? Well, they would just go to a DSL line at home. And then they would use Yahoo email address. They didn't need to because Yahoo, it's free. And then, of course, Gmail came out and it's free. I mean, think about it. You were paying AOL for an email. Okay, so yes, for 30 years of doing technology event producing. Yes. Teach us about what you've been producing and why those conferences have been so crucial for people to gather. So, you know, all the conferences that have been the event director of, they're dealing with emerging technologies. So the emerging technologies, when I started, they were talking about digital printing, you know, with IBM, we were talking about moving from mainframes to minis to then PCs and network PCs. And then eventually, the obviously access to the internet, and then Netscape, and then Windows 95. And you pretty much, it was very easy to communicate with people with the speed on the internet and then messaging. And then, you know, you get to 2007. And, you know, all these baby boomers find out that they don't have to pay a fee to somebody to do a class reunion. There's some kid from Harvard who wanted to meet girls and his friends. Now we can go on Facebook and find all our old girlfriends from high school, and we don't have to pay somebody to find them. So next thing you know, every baby boomer you know, within about a six month period is now on Facebook. And they're communicating with friends from since they had heard from a kindergarten. I mean, Facebook, you know, for all the criticism and the privacy issues, let's be realistic. I mean, a guy like me, I mean, I got on and my first day I got 2000 people. I thought about every person that I knew K through 12, I graduated from Villanova. I thought about every person I knew from Villanova. I thought about every person from my MBA program. And I thought about every person I worked. So I obsessively went on for 20 straight hours, and I had 2000 people and the next day I had 4000 people. The next thing I know, I'm talking to somebody I want to kindergarten with, it really is cool. I mean, look, and a lot of baby boomers love to complain about it. Come on. I mean, it brings you back to when you were younger, and you're communicating with somebody that you wouldn't have never communicated with. I mean, I was the president of my high school class. And we had a 40th year reunion. And when we had a 10 year reunion and a 20 year reunion and a 30 year reunion, it goes through all these hoops to try to find people. One of my one of my girlfriends, she was already retired. So I said to her, she was how are we going to find everybody? So, you know, think about this, I took out the high school yearbook, I put everybody in an Excel spreadsheet, that's a use of technology, I then emailed her the spreadsheet. And then she takes out the spreadsheet. And she says, well, how am I going to find everybody? Just type their name and search in Facebook. Did you know that every person I went to high school with all 200 people were on Facebook? And the ones that weren't on Facebook, she was here the following people are on Facebook. Where do you think they are? He said, LinkedIn, Twitter, no, no, I said, tragically, that's what you're going to do. Take their name and type in O bit. And every other person was dead. So they came up as an O bit. And so 20% of my class of 200 people, 40 of them had passed on. But how did we finally passed on? We typed their names in on Google. And we write we type in O bit and they're obituary come up. So think about that. We tracked everyone down from Facebook or Google. Yeah, with the power of the internet. Right. Right. And then and then what you do, then think about this, then I call my call my web designer, I put up a high school reunion page called Go Daddy that costs nothing. I have so many Go Daddy accounts and websites. The kid puts up the Go Daddy. Nowadays, it's nothing. The kid doesn't in the frigging an hour. Now I have my high school reunion page up. And, you know, you just you go to Facebook, and you you put the link on it. And next thing you know, you know, 20 people are signing up, you know, I mean, and for me as an event producer, then I had a link back to PayPal to collect the money. You know how hard it was for me to do my 30th reunion, you're collecting the money, you're mailing me a check. I got everybody to pay me before. Yeah, they're this this brings up a really interesting trajectory. So it goes these technology events that you're producing and directing there. They take us all the way back to you know, 30 years ago, when technology when your reunions were so much more difficult to coordinate and execute all the way until now where they're just so much easier to get done, we're much more easier to bring communities of people together. So there's really definitely this, this in many ways, a trend of in this in this light that you shed at it, it is it is a beautiful way of bringing people together. Now, identifying this these last 30 years and identifying this, this this exponential technology curve and being here and seeing these peoples, you know, these young people like me, the college students that you go and speak in front of when when we're just so shocked about technology history. Right. When there's when the when students today don't don't don't even necessarily know about Wozniak and jobs and how they put things together for us, that why is that so important? Why is technology history such a crucial awareness expansion for young I think it's so important because of how productive it's so important to be able to live a life that's not debatable, that it's a bad thing. See, unfortunately, there's a lot of negative people that believe philosophically, it's hurt us. And that's not true. You have to look at the enormity, you have to look at it in a 360 view. You can't take bits and pieces of the pie and say, well, this privacy issue and blah, blah, blah. No, if you look back of the last 30 years, it's enormous. How much may it's made our lives so much easier. And I also contend, which a lot of people say is not true. I believe it's made us be able to communicate better. Now, I grew up communicating with people without the devices and without Facebook and without LinkedIn. However, when I stopped communicating with people when I got out of college, it is really cool that I can communicate with 16,000 people on LinkedIn and 5000 people on Facebook. And there's people that I haven't talked to since 1968. And they go on LinkedIn, and they see my profile, and they push a button, and I get a message. And it says, you know, I went to I went to fifth grade in 1968 with a guy with the same name as you, you know, and he was a real, he was a real big talker and he was a blah, blah, blah. It's really crazy. He has the same name as you. And then I type back. But that's me. And he's like, get the blank out of here. But and they get to see your entire history of what's happened. Right. And that's why they say it. They say it's hurt communication skills for younger people. And for people I fundamentally disagree. Because I wouldn't have been communicating with these people anymore. You know, and some of these people that are introverted, weren't able to communicate without this, you know, for them to write back to me on LinkedIn, you know, the shy girl or the shy guy, you know, I was extroverted and I still am. But for them to communicate with me, I've got into some really great communications with people that, you know, I really never talked too much in 1971 was a freshman in high school. And next thing I know, you know, the woman is talking to me about this and that. And, you know, I'm a diet, I'm myself a diabetic. So now I'm sharing the point that I'm a diabetic. Well, look at all the it really builds up a community of people. And my father's generation, they didn't have it. And he got out of high school and say it's 1975. He's not talking to these people. You know, so and I was talking about this the other day, say my father in 19, so 1955, 1965, 1975, 1980, America was not that much different in the workforce. And with people in 1955, 65, 75, 1980, everything changed with Wozniak and, and, and jobs. The next thing you know, they forced IBM with that PC as we earlier said, then the 80s changed with the whole PC revolution. So like I said, that this country was the same for, you know, you had the war ended in 45, you know, from 45 to 55, there was a lot going on, you know, the Russians, you know, we found that the Russians had nuclear weapons in 49. So let's get the 55 Eisenhower. America because of the lack because of where we were in technology was basically the same place and the way we communicated. But once again, people started with those PCs and they had PCs at home. And the next thing you know, Andreessen and Netscape and there it just opened everything up onto, you know, the web. And then what you just mentioned there I wanted to get, I wanted to get us to get to is that you not only have a technology history background, you have an overall history background and especially a focus on the last 100 years of United States history. And within this last period of history, we've seen crazy things. We talk about this on the socioeconomic status level that we see things like GDP continuing to increase over the last 40, 50 years. Meanwhile, median male income stagnates. What's going on, right as the 1% with this technology boom just getting extremely wealthier. Meanwhile, the average American families are continuing to struggle. So why don't we talk about your also your synthesis on the history? Yeah, and so if you look back, say in 1965, so the Great Society program started in 1964, under President Johnson, he recognized after President Kennedy had this vision and Johnson carried it out after his assassination of President Kennedy, and he got elected in 64. So the Great Society program comes in and they recognize finally that 20% of our of our people were impoverished. Then they said that we had another 60% were middle class. And there's the top 20% and of the 1% of the top 1% is the upper class. But there was a really an upper middle class and a middle class. So now fast forward the clock, you know, 50 years later, we still have the same 20% impoverished. And we have a lot of entitlement programs to help the impoverished where there were people when I was a boy in 1965, you know, I'd go into New York City, I'd look through the train, you saw really poverty. So we've helped a lot of the 20%. But now what's happened, the next 60% of people, they don't have $1,000 to fix their car, they are living paycheck to paycheck. So income inequality is true. It is true. There's no doubt about it. And actually, who's benefited is people that are involved in information, let's be candid here. So it's it when you talk about educated, you become educated, but you became educated in technology. I mean, a person that became educated, and how to work in a steel mill or coal mine, that's not that didn't work out. Okay, it's hard to retrain, right? You know, so the so the the students that had an opportunity to get involved in a technology society benefited. And unfortunately, we have too many people that didn't embrace the new economy. And that's really and now and now we have this income inequality. And, you know, there's so many American cities that are like Flint and Worcester, and Dayton, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, where, you know, if they needed to hire 5,000 people, you know, to, like, you know, you see Facebook has, you know, all these big data centers. Well, if you put a data center in those places, and they had to hire 5,000 people, there's not going to find 5,000 people to go into the data center. Facebook could put a data center in Bridgeport. How are you going to hire 5,000 people? Where are they going to come from? And this is why, you know, whether it's Cambridge Mass, or the Silicon Valley, a research triangle park, or Austin, or certain other technology, you know, Seattle, you so all the technology clusters, the economic have done well. And if you're not in a technology cluster, but the people who live in technology clusters have been educated into this technology. Yeah. Yeah. And this, there's also another. So there's a social fabric issue as well, in terms of the way that we've, we've highlighted and propped up conspicuous consumption and not extended our inclusive fitness out to the global village. And and that is that's something that I think we're we're changing as well. You and I could talk for such long periods of time about history and technology history. And I'm really excited to have you back on the show. Sure. Sure. Let's wrap on COFAS. So the Conference on the Future of Engineering Software. This is our second annual partnership. Thank you. And we want to be with you forever. I really do. You've done such a great job interviewing our keynote speakers. And you know, we've had you from Microsoft and Facebook and Dell and it's just been wonderful. And this is this was the big thing is Vince did an incredible job at bringing COFAS to Silicon Valley and making sure that we're positioned right here next to Facebook, having Microsoft Facebook, Dell sponsors, having their cutting edge speakers here. This is one of the ways to really birth an organ. There's so many young people here now. This is a really powerful way to to re birth an organization powerfully moving forward. What is your synthesis on both the state of engineering software and the future of engineering software? This is a really cool brain trust that the COFAS has. I'm so optimistic about the future because, you know, I the first time I heard about say VR, you know, it was like it seemed like a science fiction movie. And then 30 years ago, when I heard about AI, and I remember hearing about machine learning, I was like, no, how can that be? How are they going to have software to pick up what you're saying? And it just seems so remote. But it is it's been developed. It's being used. And it's only going to get better. It's it's like the cars, the car from 1965 was the first year they had seat belts. It just got better and better and better. It's only going to get better and better and better. Because the men and women that are coming out of schools and or start using these products, they're starting at a completely different starting point than say anyone my age. So they're so much more advanced, you know, with the technology, it's it's like taking a shower in the morning for them. It's not some big deal for them to do. So I'm my last couple. This is my third COFAS. I just can't believe what you see, and what some of these younger people have been able to do. Yeah, yeah, the current state of extremely young people being able to pick what they want to learn and learn it like it is their passion and having access to that information is so crucial. And what we've been able to highlight in the interviews from the conference, the state of engineering software is just blowing up. And it's so beautiful to see that because it's applicable to and you know, my message that I like to leave with everyone as a person that's been involved with emerging technologies for 30 years, I have to say it, I said it before and I know I'm repeating myself. Technology has really done wonderful things in America and the world. And I really take it to heart that when people think that we're not at we're less productive, and we've had some trade off, you know, there's people that are negative that say it's the devil. I heard the same thing about Gates, like 25 years ago, Microsoft this Microsoft that Microsoft. It's like, and now you know, Facebook, this Zuckerberg, the same thing about photography. Yeah, it's really, you know, look, this country has brought all the technology advances this world. I mean, you take a look, what changed our country? The Interstate Road Act of 1956, we put these interstates everywhere. Technology gave us those interstates. And all the transportation systems are helping are from technology. And now lastly, the last mile, they're doing digitalization of the water industry, which is important. And technology is going to help clean the environment. Technology is not destroying the environment. And that's like I said, it's only positive. You know, it's all positive. Yeah, there's there's a lot of nuance. And I'm really happy that that you're providing us with this a little big history perspective on on on the role of the evolution of humanity. Thanks. Thank you so much, Alan. Thank you, bro. We love you. You're the man. You're the man. You're the man. Thank you everyone. Thank you. We greatly appreciate it. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Let us know what you're thinking about technology history about cofes, cofes links below. Also simulations links are below. 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