Technical Town

Conversations both on this blog and backchannel have been telling me a lot more about Midland today -- unsurprisingly a rather different place than it was 42 years ago, but some things I might not have guessed.

One is the influx of (East) Indians. During my time Midland was completely "caucasian," and though I never knew much of Dow after it went into hard times sometime in the early 70s (one of my correspondents then reported that about 1/3 of the houses were up for sale) it seems it's recovered, doing well, and bringing in folks from other lands.

And Redmond (WA) seems to be a bit like Midland in this regard. When I moved here in 1983 from Silicon Valley I was moving into a technical backwater, again mostly "caucasian"; a very few small high-tech companies -- including Microsoft which was housed in a single building then. And Redmond was small; I'm sure it had more than the single stoplight I remember but there wasn't much here.

Of course Microsoft took off and helped spawn many other high-tech companies. And Redmond has grown; the old Workshop Tavern is gone (torn down without ever catching fire, amazing because the grease on the walls was so thick even in '83), more stoplights than I can count, an amazing proliferation lately of high-rises -- and a huge influx of people from elsewhere. A large housing development back of our facility is about half owned by Indians. And on the streets in town you'll readily hear Chinese, various Indian languages (I assume -- I cannot distinguish Hindi from the other 26 or so languages spoken in India) and Arabic.

This is going to be an interesting visit.