"If you care a lot about the future, it shows that you believe in what you're doing now and you think it's worthwhile enough to have some lasting impact." – Syd Mead
2011 was a slow year for posts on my blog, 15 in all. That’s the smallest number I’ve written in a year since I started this blog 5-1/2 years ago.
In prior years I went through a phase of discovery. I was finding all this material, and just interpreting it helped me learn a new perspective. There was so much to say about it. I think last year I started trying to figure things out, to push the boundaries of my own technical knowledge, and to go more in-depth on prior issues I had covered here. That takes more time and effort. What I was saying before was, “Look at that shiny ball over there! Look how beautiful it is!” I kept getting closer and closer to it. Finally, I approached it. It was in my grasp, but all I saw was the surface. Not what’s inside, and what made it tick. I’ve started to reach inside to see more of this thing. I also had plenty of other non-computer/science issues cross my path last year that demanded my attention for a while.
Here are the top 5 most read posts for 2011. Only one, “Exploring the meaning of Tron Legacy,” was written last year:
Luigi Zingales wrote an excellent article for City Journal, called “Who Killed Horatio Alger?” He lays out very clearly how a meritocratic society works, and the diversions that can take us off that track. He says this is what’s happened with the bubbles and bailouts, and that they risk ending our belief in a meritocracy. He identifies a crucial agenda to reasserting it, which he calls, I think aptly, “pro-market.” It is neither anti-business nor pro-business. Rather it asserts that the rules of a market should rule in the economy: When you succeed, the reward you receive from the market should not be pillaged. You get to keep the lion’s share of it. When you fail, it’s all on you. Do not expect the government to back you up. He points out that a “pro-market” agenda does not have a lot of political allies right now. Pro-business, particularly big business interests, and anti-business interests are on the same page: Neither of them like the market approach.
Zingales does a great job of describing what’s different about the political realm vs. the market, and how culturally similar business monopolies are to political institutions.
I think he puts forward a legitimate warning that if we don’t stop doing the bailouts when future market crashes happen (and they will happen), the free market principles this country has used since its founding will go away, and may never come back, because people will see that using free market assumptions in their own lives don’t pay off when society doesn’t believe in them.
The alternative in such a scenario is to see success as purely a matter of luck, not merit, and that there is nothing fair about it. This provides a rationale to redistribute income to the less lucky, and for government to pick winners and losers in the economy, favoring some businesses or industries over others. The position of industries in the market would be seen as purely arbitrary, a matter of luck. He points out that redistribution leads to economic stagnation, because there is no incentive to create new wealth in that scenario.
Here are some salient quotes from the article:
[T]his rosy picture obscures a hard fact: meritocracy is a difficult principle to sustain in a democracy. Any system that allocates rewards on the basis of merit inevitably gives higher compensation to the few, leaving the majority potentially envious. In a democracy, the majority generally rules. Why should that majority agree to grant a minority disproportionate power and rewards?
…
America … encouraged meritocracy from its inception. In the eighteenth century, the social order throughout the world was based on birthrights: nobles ruled Europe and Japan, the caste system prevailed in India, and even in England, where merchants were gaining economic and political strength, the aristocracy wielded most of the political power. The American Revolution was a revolt against aristocracy and the immobility of European society, but unlike the French Revolution, which emphasized the principle of equality, it championed the freedom to pursue happiness. In other words, America was founded on equality of opportunities, not of outcomes.
…
When the difference between a comfortable retirement and an indigent one is determined not by hard work or by a frugal lifestyle but by lucky timing in buying or selling your house, people start questioning the fairness of the market system. The fact that the real-estate bubble was the second large bubble to pop in less than a decade further undermined trust in markets as a good indicator of where to invest resources.
Though he doesn’t get into this, in my mind the third quote relates to monetary policy. The Fed kept interest rates low in the 1990s for an extended period of time. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said that there was no fear of inflation, due to increases in productivity from the computer/internet revolutions. The Fed’s easy money policy likely was a major contributor to the dot-com and telecom bubbles that burst in 2000. The Fed returned to an easy money policy in 2001, which fueled the housing bubble, and led to its subsequent collapse. It continues to implement an easy money policy to this day. That needs to change if Zingales’s pro-market agenda is going to work. All this policy has done is led us to ruin.
Looking at the retrospectives on Steve Jobs, after news of his death, they mostly recalled the last 10 years of his life, the iPod, the iPhone, and finally the iPad. Most of the images show him as an old man, an elder of the digital age “who changed the world.” This is not the Steve Jobs of my memories, but it is one of our modern era, one that has created digital devices that run software in tightly controlled environments for the consumer market.
My fond memories of Apple began with some of the company’s first technology products, back in the early 1980s. I didn’t know who Steve Jobs was at first, but I found out rather quickly. My memories of him are as a vibrant young man who believed that small, personal computers were the wave of the future, though “small” meant something that would fit on your desk…
I can say that I “experienced” Steve through using the technology he helped develop.
Apple’s first big success: The Apple II
My first experience with their technology was the Apple II Plus computer.
The Apple II Plus, from Wikipedia.org
The electronics were designed by Steve Wozniak, who has been called a “Mozart” of electronics design. Through the creative use of select chips and circuitry, he was able to pack a lot of functionality into a small space. Jobs designed the case for the computer. At the time that the first Apple II came out, in 1977, it was one of the first microcomputers that looked like what we might expect of a computer today. Most computers of the time were constructed by hardware hackers. The Apple was different, because you didn’t have to worry about building any part of it yourself, if you didn’t want to. The thing I heard that was really appealing about the Apple when it was launched was that the company was very open about how it worked. They wouldn’t talk about 100% of everything in it, because some of it was proprietary, but they’d tell hackers about everything else. They said, “Go to town on the darn thing!” That was the reason it got an early lead on everyone else, because Jobs recognized that its market was mainly software hobbyists. It was appealing to people who wanted to do things with the electronics, to expand upon what was there, but it was targeted at people who wanted to manipulate the machine through software.
My first encounter with a II Plus was at my Jr. high school in 1982. The school had just 3 of them. One was in the library, and students had to sign up for time on it. The other two were owned by a couple teachers, and were kept in their offices. The following school year my school got a computer lab, which was filled with Apple IIe’s. That same year the local public library made an Apple II Plus available. Most of the programming I did in my teen years was done on the II.
It was a very simple, but a very technical machine, by today’s standards. When you’d start it up, it would come up in Applesoft Basic (written by Microsoft), a programming language environment that doubled as the computer’s command-line interface/operating system. All you’d see was a right-square-bracket on the lower-left side of a black screen, and a blinking square for a cursor.
Applesoft Basic, from Wikipedia.org
It offered an environment that allowed you to run an app., and manage your files on disk, by typing commands. What I liked about it was that it offered commands that allowed me to do commonsensical things. With other 8-bit microcomputers I had used, I had to go through gyrations, or go to a special program to maintain disk files. If I wanted to do some graphics, the commands were also right there in the language. With some other popular computer models, you had to do some complicated maneuvers to get that capability. It offered nothing for sound, though. If you wanted real sound, you had to get something like a Mockingboard add-on that had it’s own synthesizer hardware. The computer had several internal expansion slots. It was not designed for sound out of the box. If you had nothing else, you had to go into machine language to “tweak” the computer’s internal speaker to get that, since it was only designed to beep. This was not “fixed” until the Apple IIGS, which came out in 1986. Regardless, Apple games tried their best to get sound out of the computer’s internal speaker.
Basic was considered a beginner’s programming language, for newbies. It was less intimidating to learn, because the commands in the language looked kind of like English. Even though it was looked down upon by hackers, Basic was what I used on it most of the time. It was technology from an era when learning something about how the computer operated was expected of those who bought them.
To really harness the computer’s power you had to program in assembly language, or type bytes into the machine directly, using what was called the computer’s built-in machine monitor. The square bracket prompt would change into an asterisk (“*”), and you were in no man’s land. The Basic environment was turned off, and you were on your own, navigating the wilds of the machine’s memory, and built-in routines, giving commands and data to the machine in hexadecimal (a base-16 numbering system). This is what the pros used. You had total command of the machine. You also had all of the responsibility. There was no protected memory, and the machine gave you as much rope as you needed to hang yourself. If your program wandered off into disk operating system code by accident, you might corrupt the data you had on disk. Most of the commercial software written for the Apple II series was written in this mode, or using a piece of software called an assembler, that allowed the programmer to use mneumonic codes, which were easier to deal with. Programs written in machine code ran faster than Basic code. Basic programs ran in what’s called an interpreter, where the commands in the program were translated into executable code as the program ran, and this was a slower process. As a consolation, some people used Basic compilers to translate their programs into a machine code version in one go, so they’d run faster.
If you wanted to run a commercial app., you would insert a disk that contained the app. into the floppy disk drive, and reboot the machine. The app. would automatically load off of disk. If you wanted to run a different app., you’d typically remove the disk from the disk drive, and insert a new one, and repeat the process. There was no desktop environment to operate from. You booted into each program, and you could only run one program at a time.
This was pretty much the world of the Apple II. Once graphical interfaces became popular, Berkeley Softworks came out with a piece of software called GEOS that gave the II a workable graphical interface, though I think most Apple users thought it was a novelty, because most of the applications people cared about didn’t run on it.
Another big market for the II was in the public schools. For many years it was the de facto standard in computing in America’s schools. A lot of educational software was written for it.
Stickybear on the Apple II, from atarimagazines.org
A third big market opened up for it when VisiCalc (Visible Calculator) came out in 1979, written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. It was the world’s first commercial spreadsheet, and it came out first on the Apple II. It was the II’s “killer app,” a piece of software so sought after that people would buy the computer just to be able to use it.
VisiCalc, from Wikipedia.org
I first learned what a spreadsheet was by using VisiCalc. Modern spreadsheets use many of the same basic commands, and offer the same basic features that it pioneered. The two main features it lacked were it did not support macros, and it had no graphing function. Each cell could contain a formula that could draw values from other cells into a calculation. Other than that it was not programmable.
An interesting bit of history from this era is that some of the software from it lives on. Castle Wolfenstein, by Muse Software, one of the popular games for the Apple II has had quite a lot of staying power, into our modern era. Remember Wolfenstein 3D by Id Software, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the PC? Wolfenstein started on the Apple II in 1981. The following video is from its sequel, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, which came out in 1984. It gives you the same flavor of the game. Unlike its modern translations, it was a role-playing game. The object was to pick up items that would help you get to your objective. Shooting was a part of the game, but it wasn’t the only thing you had to do to get through it. As I remember, the ultimate goal was to blow up the castle.
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein
Another Apple original that has had a lot of staying power is Flight Simulator. It was originally written by a company called subLogic. They came out with Flight Simulator II, which was ported to a bunch of different computers, including the IBM PC. This was the second version of the product, which was a huge improvement on the original. It featured realistic maps of cities (as realistic as you could get with such a low-resolution display), colorized landscapes (rather than the wireframe graphics in the original), realistic weather conditions you could select, and a variety of aircraft you could fly. Later, expansion disks came out for it that featured maps of real cities you could fly to. Microsoft purchased the rights to Flight Simulator II, and developed all of its subsequent versions.
The original Flight Simulator on the Apple II
Their flops
Apple had some early flops. The first was a now-little-known computer called the Apple III, which came out in 1980. It was a slightly faster version of the II, using similar technology. It was designed and marketed as a business machine. Unlike the II it had an 80-column text display. The II had a 40-column text display, though in the early 1980s there were 80-column expansion cards you could get for the IIe. It had a higher memory capacity, and it was backward-compatible with the II, through a compatibility mode.
The Apple III, from Wikipedia
Their next flop came soon after, the Apple Lisa, which came out in 1983.
The Apple Lisa, from Wikipedia
A screen from the Lisa, from Wikipedia
It was also marketed as a business computer. Most people give props to the Macintosh as being Apple’s first computer with a graphical user interface, and a mouse, but it was the Lisa that had that distinction. This was Apple’s first crack at the idea. It had some pretty advanced features for microcomputers at the time. The main one was multi-tasking. It could run more than one application at a time. Its biggest problem was its price, about $10,000. Unlike the Apple III, the Lisa had some staying power. Apple marketed it for the next few years, trying variations on it to try to improve its appeal.
I had the opportunity to spend a little time with a Lisa at a computer show in the mid-1980s. It had a calendaring desk accessory that was a revelation to me. It was the first of its kind I had seen. In some ways it looked a lot like iCal on OS X. My memory is it functioned just like it. It would give you a monthly, weekly, and daily calendar view. If you wanted to schedule an event for it to alert you about, you entered information on a form (which looked like a conventional dialog box), and then when that date and time came up, it would alert you with a reminder.
When I was in Jr. high and high school, I used to carry around with me a pocket spiral-bound notebook so I could write down assignments, and when I had tests coming up. It looked pretty messy most weeks. I really wanted a way to just keep my schedule sane. The Lisa demonstrated that a computer could do that. I didn’t have regular access to a Lisa computer, though, and there was absolutely no way my mother could afford to get me one, especially just to give me something with a neat calendar! So in high school I set out to create my own weekly planner app. on an Apple II, using Basic. I didn’t own one, but the school had lots of them. I figured I could use them, or the one at the local public library, which I used regularly as well. I wrote about the development of it here. I called my app. “Week-In-Advance,” and I wanted it to have something of the feel of the Lisa calendar app. I saw. So I set out to create a small “graphical interface” in text mode. I succeeded in my efforts, and it showed me how hard it is to create something that’s easy to use! It was the biggest app. I had written up to that point.
The Macintosh
If you’re a modern Mac user, this was kind of its great-granddaddy… Anyway, it’s related. I’ll explain later. It came out in 1984, and was Steve Jobs’s baby.
The first Macintosh, from Wikipedia
I had the thought recently that Jobs invented the idea of the “beige case” for a computer with the Macintosh, which PC makers followed for years during the 1990s, and everyone got tired of it.
This almost was Apple’s third flop. It created a sensation, because of its simple design, and ease of use. Steve Jobs called it “The computer for the rest of us.” It was targeted at non-techie users who just wanted to get something done. They didn’t want to have to mess with the machine, or understand it. The philosophy was it should understand us, and what we wanted.
My local public library got a Mac for people to use a year after it came out. So I got plenty of time using one.
It was a cheaper version of the Lisa, so it was more accessible, but there wasn’t a whole lot you could do with it at first. The only applications available for it at its launch were from Apple: MacPaint, a drawing/painting program (rather like Microsoft Paint today, except with only two colors, and a bunch of patterns with which you could paint on the screen), and MacWrite, a word processor. Just from looking at it, you can tell that no Apple II programs would run on it, and I don’t think you’d want that anyway.
As you can see, it had a monochrome display. It could only display two colors, white and black. This drew some criticism, but it was still a useful machine. The Mac wouldn’t have a color display until the Macintosh II came out in 1987. Incidentally, other platforms had color graphical interfaces a year after the Mac first came out. There was GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) by Digital Research (which was mainly for the IBM PC), the Atari ST (which used GEM), and the Commodore Amiga, not to mention Version 1.0 of Microsoft Windows.
The Mac was probably the first computer Apple produced that represented a closed design. The first Macs were hardly expandable at all. You could expand their memory capacity, but that was it. It had a built-in floppy drive, but no internal hard drive, and no ability to put one inside. The Mac popularized the 3-1/2″ floppy disk format. Before it came along the standard was 5-1/4″ disks. It had an external connector for a hard drive, so any hard drive had to exist outside the case. It had some external ports so it could be hooked up to a printer, and I believe a phone modem.
In that era we were all used to floppy drives making noises. The first Mac’s floppy drive was also a bit noisy, but it had a “hum” sound to it, as it spun the disk. It sounded like it was “humming” some tune that only it knew. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, when they talked about the development of the Mac at their D5 Conference appearance (below), called it a “twiggy” drive. The reason for this sound it made, I later discovered, is it used a data compression technique that Steve Wozniak had developed for the Apple II’s disk drives, called Group Code Recording (GCR). It was developed in an effort to store data uniformly on the disk, so as to fit more on it to make it a more reliable storage medium. The reason for the sound it made is they varied the speed of the drive, depending on where the read/write head was on the disk. You have to understand a little something about physics to get why they did this.
(Update: 10-21-2001: I realized after doing some research that I held a mistaken notion that this was a data compression technique. The reason they varied the speed of the drive is the format they used, called GCR, used a fixed sector size. Since they varied the speed, there were fewer sectors closer in to the center than towards the outer edge. In effect, they inverted the “normal” way of storing data. This article explains it in more detail, under Technical Details:Formatting:Group Code Recording.)
All other disk drives on other computers stored more data on the inner tracks of a disk than on the outer tracks. The reason was the disk was always spun at the same speed, no matter where the read/write head was on the disk, and the read/write head always read and stored data at a constant rate. In physics we know, though, that when you’re rotating anything at a constant rate, the part near the center moves at a slower speed than parts that are farther from the center. As a result, the disk drive will end up packing more data into a smaller space near the center of the disk than it will near the outside of it. The “density” of the data will vary depending on how far from the center it’s stored. Imagine dropping bits of material on a piece of paper that’s sliding beneath your hand. If you speed up the paper, the bits of material will be more spread out on it. I’m not sure how this was done on the Apple II drives, but on On the Mac, the way they tried to deal with this issue was to spin the disk faster towards the center, and slower as the head moved to the outer edge, thereby generating different “motor” sounds as it sped up and slowed down the disk.
Their GCR format compressed data, which made it possible to store a little more data per disk than on most other drives. Looking back on it, this technique might seem trivial, given the amount of data we store today, but back then it was rather significant. A conventional double-sided, double-density 3-1/2″ disk drive could store 720K on a disk. But a Mac could store 800K on the same disk, providing 11% more space per disk.
Back then most computer users didn’t have a lot of data to store. Applications and games were small in size. Documents might be 30K at most. Most people didn’t think of storing large images, and certainly not videos, on these early machines. The amount of data being passed around on networks tended to be pretty small as well. So even what seems like a piddly amount of extra disk space now was significant then.
Edit 10-17-2011: A minor point to add. You’ll notice in the picture of the Mac that there’s no disk eject button. This was because the computer apparently did some housekeeping tasks using your disk, and it would be damaging to data on your disk, and/or cause the system to crash, if you could eject the disk anytime you wanted. I have no idea what these housekeeping tasks were, but whenever the user wanted to eject the disk (which you could do by selecting a menu option, or pressing a command key combination, or dragging the disk icon to the trashcan icon on the desktop), the computer would spend time writing to the disk before ejecting it via. a servo mechanism. Sometimes it would spend a significant amount of time doing this. It may have been an operating system bug, but I saw instances where it would take 5 minutes to eject the disk! All the while the disk drive would be running…doing something you knew not what. In some rare instances the computer wouldn’t eject the disk at all, no matter what you tried. In those situations it had a pinhole just to the right of the disk slot, which you can see in the picture if you look closely, that you could stick the end of a paperclip into, to manually force the disk drive mechanism to eject the disk. I remember seeing a vendor once that sold nice colored “disk ejectors,” which had a handle that looked like a USB thumb drive, and a pin at one end that you’d stick into this hole. A paperclip did the trick just fine, though.
A major difference between the Mac and other computers of the day was it did not come with a programming language. There were programming languages available for it, but you had to get them separately. It was a bold departure from the hacker culture that had influenced all the other computers in the marketplace.
In contrast to the computers I had used prior to using the Mac, including the Apple II, the experience of using it was elegant and beautiful. It had the highest resolution of any computer I had used before. I loved the fact that I could look at images in greater, finer detail. On the desktop interface, windows appeared to “warp” in and out of view, except it was really the window’s frame that moved. It didn’t have enough computing power to move a whole window’s contents. The point is they didn’t just appear. You get that effect on the modern Mac UI as well, and it looks a lot neater.
The main drawback was that it could only run one app. at a time. Even so, it was possible to cut, copy, and paste across applications. How was this done? Well, Mac OS had a desk accessory called “Scrapbook,” that allowed you to add multiple images and document clippings to it. You would add clippings by using the cut and copy feature in an application. Scrapbook would automatically cache these clippings, possibly saving them to disk (this is reminding me that I used to do a lot of disk swapping with the old Macs, which was a reason that more financially well-endowed users bought a second floppy drive, or a hard drive). The scrapbook was finite in size, and would eventually cycle out old clippings, as I recall. Anyway, when you’d load a new application, the last clipping that was added to the scrapbook would be available for pasting by default. Desk accessories could be run at all times, and so you could open Scrapbook while you were using an app., go through its clippings, and grab anything else you wanted to paste. Needless to say, cutting and pasting across applications was an involved process.
This was soon fixed by a system utility written by Andy Hertzfeld called Switcher, once the Mac was given more memory (the very first model came with a total of 128 kilobytes of memory, and so wasn’t such a great candidate for this). The idea was to enable users to load multiple apps. into memory, and allow them to switch between them without having to quit out of one to get to the others. It enabled you to go back to the desktop to launch an app. without having to quit out of the apps you had already loaded. It was rather like how apps. on mobile devices work now.
I read up on the history of Switcher a few years ago. Microsoft was very enthusiastic about it at the time, because they recognized that users would buy more apps. if it was easier to launch more than one at a time. It was really nice to use. It was like using OS X’s multiple desktop feature, except that you could only see one app. on the screen at a time. It had the same effect, though. When you’d switch, the app. you were using would “slide” out of view, and the new one would slide on right behind it. It was like you were shifting your gaze from one app. to the other. It worked really well for early Mac apps., because there was no reason to be doing background processing with what was available. It created the illusion that all apps. were “running” at the same time, when they really weren’t. All the other apps. were in suspended animation when they weren’t in view. Copying clippings and pasting between apps. became a breeze.
It was said of Steve Jobs that he had high standards that drove engineers at Apple nuts, but it seems to me he was willing to compromise on some things. The original Mac had a monochrome display, which I’m sure he knew wasn’t as exciting as color. It was a single-tasking machine, so in the beginning people were running and quitting out of applications a lot. It had a small amount of memory for what it did, and so you couldn’t load multiple apps., which made multi-tasking impractical. You couldn’t cut and paste things between applications easily without the Switcher add-on, which came out about a year after the Mac was released. I’m sure all of these compromises were made to keep the price point low.
The Mac had its critics early on, calling it a “child’s toy.” “Productive people don’t need cute icons and menus to get work done. They get in the way.” There were a lot of advocates for the command-line interface over the GUI in those days. In a way, they were right. Alan Kay said years later that the reason they came up with an iconic, point-and-click graphical interface at Xerox PARC, which the Lisa and Mac drew inspiration from, was to create an easy-to-use environment for children. Not to say that a graphical interface has to be for children, but this is the model Apple drew from.
Below is some footage from the 1996 documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” that talks about the drama of developing the Mac, along with some famous Steve Jobs quotes. It starts by describing what was going on at Xerox PARC before Jobs made his famous visit there. One note I’d like to make. The way Cringely characterizes the sequence of events that led to the development of the Lisa in this documentary is kind of misleading. He suggests that after Jobs and Apple’s engineers visited PARC, they became inspired to create the Lisa. This is not true, according to my research. Apple had been working on the Lisa since 1978. They actually had a rudimentary graphical interface for it in early 1979. They visited PARC twice in December 1979, and as Bill Atkinson said, they got inspiration from those visits in how to continue to develop it. Nevertheless, Apple was inspired to create the Lisa by the work that had previously been done at PARC (before their visits), because some of their basic ideas about a graphical interface had become public, and Apple picked up on it that way. What they got by visiting PARC were specific details in how Xerox’s interface worked. They also experienced what it was like to use it, which was a big revelation for Jobs. A little factoid not revealed in these videos is that Jobs originally wanted to kill the Lisa project before he visited PARC. It was only at the insistence of Jef Raskin that he decided to visit. After the experience, he was a convert, and embraced the project.
(Update 11-10-2011: I received a note from someone in 2006 about Jobs wanting to kill off a project at Apple before going to PARC, but looking back at it after writing this post, I realized the person was talking about the Macintosh project, not the Lisa. I’m not clear on the details. In the documentary “Welcome to Macintosh,” a former Apple employee says that the Mac project began in 1979, though another source said that the project wasn’t funded until 1981. In “Triumph of the Nerds” Cringely says that Jef Raskin was the one who thought up the Mac. The note I received 5 years ago said that he also prompted Jobs to visit Xerox PARC. Maybe Jobs didn’t try to “kill” the Mac, but just didn’t like the idea at first, and then came to embrace it after the PARC demos. I used to feel more sure about this part of the story, but now I’m not so sure.)
Jobs leaves Apple
The unthinkable happened at Apple in 1985. Jobs was ousted from the Mac project. He was replaced by his hand-picked CEO, John Sculley, and Jobs left. I remember reading about it in InfoWorld, and being kind of shocked. How could the man who started the company be ousted? How could they think that they could just get rid of this creative person, and keep it the same company? Would Apple survive without him? It felt like something was wrong with this. I wasn’t a big Apple fan at the time, but I knew enough to know that this was a big deal.
After this, I lost track of Jobs for a while. Apple seemed to just move along without him. As I mentioned earlier, they came out with newer, better computers. The Apple Mac had grown to 10% market share by the end of the 1980s, an impressive feat when PCs were growing in dominance by leaps and bounds. In hindsight, the only thing I can point to as a possible problem is they made only incremental improvements to the Mac. They coasted, and for a few years they got away with it.
The only thing about this period that I thought sucked at the time was Apple was suing every computer maker in sight that had a graphical interface, claiming they had violated its copyrights. It had the appearance that they were trying to kill off any competition. The only company they won against was Digital Research, with their GEM operating system, and then only on the PC version, which died out shortly thereafter. It was getting so bad that the technology press was calling on Apple to quit it, saying they were stifling innovation in the industry. It didn’t matter anyway, because Microsoft Windows was coming along, and it would eventually eat Apple’s lunch. Microsoft might’ve actually had Apple to thank for Windows’s success. Apple probably weakened Microsoft’s other competitors.
Nevertheless, Apple seemed to be succeeding without Jobs for a time. It was only when Sculley left in the early 1990s that things went downhill for them, from what I could see.
NeXT
I rediscovered Jobs a bit in college, when I heard about his new venture that created the NeXT computer in 1988.
The NeXT computer, from simson.net
The keyboard, monitor, and laser printer for the NeXT, from simson.net
The NeXTStep interface, from Wikipedia
Come to think of it, maybe Jobs was trying to communicate something in the name… In the clips above from “Triumph of the Nerds,” Chris Espinosa at Apple talked about how Jobs had all these ideas for the Mac that were wildly out of step with what the product was doing in the marketplace. Maybe the NeXT was what Jobs had in mind.
At the time that the NeXT came out, it seemed futuristic. The computer was shaped like a cube. The case was made out of magnesium, and it featured a removable magneto-optical drive (removable in the sense that you could take the magneto-optical disk, which was housed in a cartridge, out of the drive). Each disk held 256 MB, which was a lot in those days. Most people who had hard drives had 1/4 of that storage capacity at most. The disk was made out of a metal. The way the drive worked was a laser would heat a spot on the disk that it wanted to write to, to what’s called the Curie Point (a specific temperature), so that the magnetic write head could change its polarity. Pretty complicated! I guess this was the only way they could find at the time to achieve that kind of rewritable storage capacity on a removable disk, probably because it afforded a relatively large or imprecise read/write head. Only the part of the disk that was heated by a narrow laser beam would change. So the only part you had to worry about being terribly precise was the laser.
Out of the gate, the NeXT computer’s operating system was based on Unix, using the Mach kernel, as I recall. It used Objective C as the standard development language for the system, and was accompanied by some visual user interface design tools. The display system used a technology called Display PostScript to create a good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment.
In 1990, NeXT made a splash by announcing a slimmer, sleeker model, coined the “pizza box,” because aside from its nice look, that’s what it looked like. The magneto-optical drive was gone. It was replaced by a hard drive, and a high-density floppy drive. The big feature that got developers’ attention was a Motorola digital signal processor (DSP) chip that was built into it. One of the ways it was used was to calculate complex mathematical equations at high speed, taking the load for that off of the main processor.
the second generation NeXT computer, from Wikipedia
I got only a few chances to use a NeXT, for a brief time. Again, the computer was way out of my price range. It seemed nice enough. It had that feel about it that was like the Mac, where it would do things–just fine touches–so you didn’t have to think about them. I remember having an “information” dialog open on a file, and doing something to the file. Rather than having to refresh the information window, it updated itself automatically in the background. We take stuff like this for granted now, but back then I noticed stuff like that, because no other computer acted that way.
Doing some research in retrospect about a year ago, I found a demo video that Jobs had created about the second generation NeXT computer. I discovered that they had designed software for it so it could be used as an office platform. You could embed things like spreadsheets, sales presentations, and audio clips in e-mails you’d send to people. This was before most people had even heard of the internet, and long before the MIME protocol was developed. They had advanced video hardware in it so that you could watch high-quality digital color video, which was really hard for most computers to do then. They had also shown an example of a subscription app., demonstrating how you could read your daily issue of the New York Times online. This was done around the same time that the very first web browser was invented. If this rings a bell, though, that’s because Apple has done demos like this within the last few years, as had Microsoft, when they first introduced Windows Vista.
Once I got out into the work world, in the mid-90s, I read that things weren’t going so well for NeXT. They eventually sold off their hardware division to Canon. However, things weren’t looking totally down for Jobs. I learned that he had also been heading up a company called Pixar. “Toy Story” came out, and it was amazing. The computer graphics were not as good of an effect as “Jurassic Park,” which had come out a couple years earlier, but I was still pretty impressed with it, because it was the first feature-length movie to use only computer graphics for the whole thing. Mostly what appealed to me were the memories of the toys I had as a kid. The story was good, too.
It seemed like NeXT was on its last leg when Apple bought the company in late 1996. Apple wasn’t doing so hot, either, but it obviously had more cash on hand. The joke was on the people who did the deal, though, because in less than a year, Jobs was back on top and in charge at Apple.
In short order we had the iMacs, and amazingly they were selling like hotcakes. Apparently their shape and their color were what appealed most to customers, not what the computer actually did! No more beige boxes! Yay! Uh…and where did they come from? Eh, not important…
The first iMac, from Wikipedia
Jobs did some things that surprised me after he took over. He cancelled Hypercard, one of the most innovative pieces of software Apple ever produced. Hypercard was a multimedia authoring environment that enabled neophytes to programming to write their own programs on the Mac. You didn’t even need to know a programming language. It was a visual programming environment. You just needed to arrange media elements into a series of steps (“cards” in a “deck”), and set up buttons or links to trigger some actions. The closest equivalent to it on modern Macs is a program called “Automator.” I’ve tried using it, though, and it feels clunky. Hypercard had long been treated as a neglected stepchild at Apple, so in a way Jobs was putting it out of its misery.
He cancelled the Newton, Apple’s PDA. It had become the most popular handheld computer used by hospitals. As a result, they all had to find some other mobile platform to use, and all their mobile software had to be rewritten, because the Newton’s operating system architecture, and development language was proprietary.
Edit 10-13-2011: Thirdly, he cancelled Apple’s clone licensing program, which killed off Mac clone makers. This, to me, was more understandable from Apple’s perspective.
There had been efforts to make Mac clones in the 1980s. My memory is they were all the product of reverse-engineering. Apple finally allowed “genuine” Mac clones, under a license agreement, in the 1990s. Apple of course retained ownership over Mac OS. My memory is this happened after Sculley left. I could understand the appeal of this idea, since PCs (of the IBM variety) solidified their dominance in the market once clones came out. It didn’t work out the same way for Apple, however. A few things this strategy probably didn’t take into account. One is that Microsoft had to deal with a lot more variety in hardware in their operating system, in order to make the clone market work. I vaguely remember hearing about compatibility/stability problems with Mac clones. Secondly, the PC clone manufacturers had to accept much lower profit margins than IBM did when it owned the hardware market. Thirdly, Microsoft didn’t depend on hardware for its revenue. Apple’s business model did, and they were allowing competitors to undercut them on price. For Apple it was rather like Sun’s strategy with Java: have a loss-leader in a major, desirable technology, which the company owned the rights to, in hopes of gaining revenue on the back end in a market that was increasingly perceived as commoditized, which…didn’t really work out for them.
In a few years, NextStep would take over the Mac, with OS X. One of the things Jobs commented on recently was that after he left Apple in 1985, they just didn’t innovate like they had under his direction. It needed to catch up. So transplant NeXT’s work of 1992 into the Mac of ten years later!
Even though the OS X interface looks a lot different from the NeXT, under the covers it’s NeXTStep. The display technology is derivative from what was used on the NeXT. The NeXT operating system was Unix-based, as is OS X. Objective C was brought into the Mac platform as a supported language. In essence, OS X has been the “next” iteration of the NeXT computer. Like a phoenix, it rose again. This was apparently a part of the deal Apple made in buying the company. They recognized that some next-generation OS was needed for the Mac, since it was aging, and from the beginning they had planned to use NeXT technology to do that.
Old apps. written for Mac OS would no longer run on the new system, unless they were “carbonized.” This involved recompiling existing applications to use an emulation library. The problem was if you depended on a Mac OS app. written by a software company that was no longer in business, your best bet was not to upgrade.
Things were not so great in paradise. Apparently the transition from Mac OS to OS X was rough. I remember hearing vague complaints from Mac users about the switchover. They really didn’t get the memo that it was a whole new operating system that operated differently from what they had been used to for years. It may have not entirely been their fault, either. I remember complaints about system instability as well.
To their credit, Apple quickly fixed a lot of the stability problems, from what I understand.
This was only for starters. Rather than focus solely on developing the desktop computer market, since Jobs said that Microsoft had “won that battle,” he took Apple in a whole new direction by saying that they should develop mobile devices “for the rest of us.” Apple has also been capturing the market for electronic publishing, with iTunes and the App Store. This combination has been the source of its meteoric success since then.
Unlike “the rest of the world,” I was never that enthused about Apple’s new direction. I haven’t owned an iPod, or any of their other mobile devices. I have an old Pocket PC, and a digital camera that I use. I bought my first Apple product, a MacBook Pro, in 2008, and aside from some kinks that needed to be worked out, it’s been a nice experience. For the longest time I was not that big of an Apple fan. When I met other Apple users they often came across as elitist, like they had the bucks to buy the best technology, and they knew it. That turned me off. I used stuff from Apple from time to time, but I liked other technology better. That was because my priorities were different from most people. Nevertheless, there was something about Steve Jobs I liked. He had a creative, innovative spirit. I liked that he cared about quality. Ironically, Apple’s products always seemed more conservative than my tastes. It was an adjustment to use my current laptop. It’s allowed enough flexibility that I don’t feel totally hemmed in by its “ease of use,” but there are a few small things I miss.
Jobs was an inspiration. Like some other people I’ve seen around in my life, he was someone I followed and kept track of with interest for many years. He gave us technology that was worth our time to use. What I appreciated most about him was he pushed beyond what was widely thought of as “the way things are” in computing. Unlike most Apple fans and followers, I haven’t seen that much in the way of original ideas out of him. What I credit him with is taking the best ideas that others have come up with, trying to pare them down so that the average person can understand them, having the courage to make products out of them when no one else would, and then marketing the hell out of them. Part of what mattered to him was what computers made possible, and the experience of using them. In the beginning of all this, it seemed like his dreams were far out ahead of where most people were with respect to technology. In his return to Apple, he stayed out ahead, but he seemed to have a keen sense of not getting too far ahead of customers’ expectations. I think he discovered that there’s no virtue, at least in business, of getting too far out ahead of the crowd you’re trying to impress.
There were a couple really memorable moments with Jobs in the last 10 years that I’d like to cover. The first was his 2005 commencement address to the students at Stanford. Here he reveals some things about his life story that he had kept close to the vest for years. He had some good things to say about death as well. It’s one of the most inspirational speeches I’ve heard.
Below is a really great joint interview with Jobs and Bill Gates at the D5 Conference in 2007. It was interesting, engaging, and funny. It covers some of the history that I’ve talked about here, and what we’ve seen from Apple and Microsoft in the present.
This was a rare thing. I think this was one of only three times where Jobs and Gates had appeared together in public, and contrary to the mythology that they were rivals who hated each other,…well, they were rivals, but they got along swimmingly.
Just a little background, the intro. music you hear is from “Love Will Find A Way,” by Yes. Mitch Kapor, who’s introduced in the audience was the founder of Lotus Software. He developed the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet for the PC (Lotus was bought by IBM in the 1990s). Last I heard some years ago, he had become a major advocate for open source software.
Jobs quoted Alan Kay, saying, “People that love software want to do their own hardware.” Maybe he did say that, but the quote I remember is, “People who are really serious about software *should* make their own hardware.” When I first heard that, I remember thinking Kay was putting a challenge to programmers, like, “Real programmers make their own hardware,” but I later realized what he probably meant was that software developers should take control away from the hardware engineers, because the hardware they had created, which was being used in computers, was a crappy design. So what he was probably saying was that really good software people would be better at making hardware to run their software. The way Jobs expressed this is a shallow interpretation of what Kay said, because Kay was very critical of what both Motorola and Intel did in their hardware designs. Apple has only used hardware from both of these companies for the main chipsets for their 16-, 32-, and 64-bit computers.
Gates said something towards the end that struck me, because it really showed the friendship between the two of them. He said, totally unprompted, that he wished he had Jobs’s taste. Jobs was famously quoted as saying in “Triumph of the Nerds”:
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say, “Why is that important?” Well, proportionally-spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. And so I guess I am saddened–not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.
It felt like things had come full circle.
Saying goodbye
I was a bit shocked to hear of Jobs’s death last Wednesday. I knew that his health had been declining, but I thought he might live another year or so. He had only stepped down as Apple’s CEO in late August. In hindsight, though, it makes sense. He loved what he did. Rather than retire, and decline in obscurity, he held on until he couldn’t hold on any longer.
I’ve felt a little sad about his death at times. I know that Jobs’s favorite music was the Beatles and Bob Dylan, but on the day he died, this song, “It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday,” by Boyz II Men was running through my head. It expresses my sentiments pretty well.
This exercise in Section 3.3.3 demonstrates a concept called “memoization,” where values that are created during the run of a function are stored, so that when requests for certain computations repeat, the previously computed values can just be retrieved, rather than redone. It’s a caching technique.
I got really frustrated trying to do this exercise, because of the way the make-table function was portrayed. The exercise text doesn’t say anything about it. The code that was given for the exercise just uses it. In the past, exercises would use code that had already been introduced and discussed in the section/chapter. There is a set of functions that implement a single-dimension table (all that would be needed for this exercise) that is discussed earlier in the section. When I brought what I thought were the appropriate functions together, what I saw was this:
(define (make-table)
(list '*table*))
(define memo-fib
(memoize (lambda (n)
(cond ((= n 0) 0)
((= n 1) 1)
(else (+ (memo-fib (- n 1))
(memo-fib (- n 2))))))))
(define (memoize f)
(let ((table (make-table)))
(lambda (x) ...
Even the two-dimensional versions of make-table that were presented initialized their local table the same way. I’m used to paying attention to details in code, and so I tried to make sense of this. Every time memo-fib got called, the table got reinitialized, wiping out everything that had been added to it! This made no sense for this exercise, since the whole idea was to store values in the table, and then retrieve them later.
By looking at what other people had done with this exercise, I realized that I needed to use “wishful thinking,” and ignore any prior implementations of make-table. Just assume that make-table initializes its table structure on the first call, and returns a reference to its table (or a reference to a dispatch function) on subsequent calls to it. Assume that it does not reinitialize its internal structure, leaving anything that was previously added intact. Once I made these assumptions, the exercise made more sense.
What I saw other people do as well was assume that the insert! and lookup functions operated in constant time, taking them out as a factor in the number of steps. I do not know what assumptions are “supposed” to be made about the insert! and lookup functions. If you are doing this exercise for a grade, take these assumptions at your own risk. To me, it made sense, but perhaps your professor has a different idea in mind for how these functions are supposed to be considered in your analysis.
The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is coming up in 2 days. I received the following e-mail today from Meetup.com, telling the tale of how Meetup was created in response to the 9/11/01 attacks in New York City. Great story!
Fellow Meetuppers,
I don’t write to our whole community often, but this week is
special because it’s the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and many
people don’t know that Meetup is a 9/11 baby.
Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles
from the Twin Towers, and I was the kind of person who thought
local community doesn’t matter much if we’ve got the internet
and tv. The only time I thought about my neighbors was when I
hoped they wouldn’t bother me.
When the towers fell, I found myself talking to more neighbors
in the days after 9/11 than ever before. People said hello to
neighbors (next-door and across the city) who they’d normally
ignore. People were looking after each other, helping each
other, and meeting up with each other. You know, being
neighborly.
A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9/11 could bring
people together in a lasting way. So the idea for Meetup was
born: Could we use the internet to get off the internet — and
grow local communities?
We didn’t know if it would work. Most people thought it was a
crazy idea — especially because terrorism is designed to make
people distrust one another.
A small team came together, and we launched Meetup 9 months
after 9/11.
Today, almost 10 years and 10 million Meetuppers later, it’s
working. Every day, thousands of Meetups happen. Moms Meetups,
Small Business Meetups, Fitness Meetups… a wild variety of
100,000 Meetup Groups with not much in common — except one
thing.
Every Meetup starts with people simply saying hello to
neighbors. And what often happens next is still amazing to me.
They grow businesses and bands together, they teach and
motivate each other, they babysit each other’s kids and find
other ways to work together. They have fun and find solace
together. They make friends and form powerful community. It’s
powerful stuff.
It’s a wonderful revolution in local community, and it’s thanks
to everyone who shows up.
Meetups aren’t about 9/11, but they may not be happening if it
weren’t for 9/11.
9/11 didn’t make us too scared to go outside or talk to
strangers. 9/11 didn’t rip us apart. No, we’re building new
community together!!!!
The towers fell, but we rise up. And we’re just getting started
with these Meetups.
Scott Heiferman (on behalf of 80 people at Meetup HQ)
Co-Founder & CEO, Meetup
New York City
September 2011
I had no idea! I didn’t hear of Meetup until Howard Dean ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, since his campaign was using it to organize. I thought it was a social media thing, of sorts, and I wasn’t that interested in it. Somehow (can’t remember now) I started using it in 2009, and I found a local Lisp users group through it. I’ve met some great people as a result. Thanks so much, Meetup!
I was going through exercises in Section 3.3 of SICP recently (Modeling with Mutable Data), and discovered that my version of PLTScheme (4.1.4) does not include set-car! and set-cdr! operators. It turns out the team that maintains this development environment (now called “Racket”) changed this in Version 4. Originally Scheme had mutable pairs by default. So when you used cons, it created a mutable pair, though it treated it as immutable if you used car and cdr on it. You had to use set-car! and set-cdr! to change a pair’s contents. The dev. team changed PLTScheme such that cons creates immutable pairs (and car and cdr operate on it in an immutable fashion as usual). To use mutable pairs you need to use mcons, mcar, and mcdr to do the same operations that you used cons, car, and cdr to carry out on immutable pairs. Where the SICP text says to use set-car!, and set-cdr!, to manipulate mutable pairs, you need to use set-mcar!, and set-mcdr!.
This change only applies to the issue of immutable vs. mutable pairs. The dev. team made this decision, because in their view it made Scheme more of a pure functional language. However, I noticed that the set! operator (which changes a binding) still exists and works as expected in my copy of PLTScheme.
Edit: I goofed a bit when I posted this earlier today. I said that PLTScheme users should use mcar and mcdr to carry out the same operations as set-car! and set-cdr! in the SICP text. That is not the case. People should use set-mcar! and set-mcdr! for those operations.
Bret Victor, a former designer at Apple, is working on a way to use a computer to make math more meaningful. I can see that he really gets the representational aspect, that the symbols are not the math, just a way to represent it, and it’s not a particularly good way to represent it. This is not the whole of math encapsulated into something that’s easy to understand (math is about assertions and inferences of relationships, which are then proved or disproved), but it’s an alternative to using symbols for representing complex relationships.
Here’s an article talking about Bret’s work on an early version of something he’s working on for the iPad.
Great stuff, and I congratulate him on finding a good use for a computer!
When President Obama gave his State of the Union address on January 25, 2011, I noticed he was criticized specifically for his so-called “Sputnik moment,” his call for “investment” in certain areas involving science and engineering. Here is some of what he said on that:
Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.
This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology, an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.
People within the computer science, science, and engineering communities have been pining for a “Sputnik moment” for several years now, hoping that something, anything, will inspire our society to make math, science, engineering, and computer science a higher priority, and promote more funding for those fields in academia. It’s not just academics who are worried about this. The industries that count on having a supply of good scientists, engineers, and mathematicians to draw from in the U.S. are worried about the decline in interest among American students as well.
The hope for this “moment” is misguided, in my opinion, because what they’re really hoping for is something contrived. It also speaks to a lack of faith in America, that we cannot be inspired to pursue these fields without some foreign enemy that we feel we have to compete against. Obama kind of tried to create this “Sputnik moment” in his speech, talking about how the Chinese and South Koreans have better technology than we do. This is true. In the case of South Korea and Singapore, it’s been true for almost ten years. Back in 2002 I was hearing about how in Singapore people were reserving movie tickets for specific movies at specific theaters, and carrying out cash and credit card transactions at retail outlets, with their cell phones. All they needed to enter on their phone was their PIN. You can watch a Computer Chronicles episode where they talk about this. A couple years later I heard about how South Koreans had higher speed internet service than we did, back when the fastest broadband service to which most American consumers had access was probably 1.5 megabits per second. Koreans were already doing HD video conferencing as a matter of course. It’s come to this country just recently. I’m not convinced, though, that Americans are going to commit themselves to spending years studying technical subjects just to beat the Chinese and Koreans over issues like this.
Sputnik was a cultural realization in 1957 about the implications of the Soviets, our Cold War adversary, getting ahead of the U.S. in space technology, primarily out of an anti-communist sentiment, and concern for national security. The government didn’t have to tell people to be worried about this. In fact it was the citizenry that was banging on the doors of the government, demanding, “Why didn’t you see this coming,” and, “Why weren’t we first?” The Soviets had developed their own nuclear weapon in 1949, and now they had the ability to launch things into space. People made the connection that “they could drop nuclear bombs on us from space,” a strategic high ground that we were not even close to occupying at the time. Our own test rockets were blowing up on the launch pad on a regular basis. The feeling was the Soviets had beaten us in a game of one-upsmanship, when we least expected it, and there was an alarming sense that we needed to “catch up.”
According to what we know from history, the so-called “missile gap” was a political myth. Nevertheless, something good was able to come out of this. Math and science, which our culture had largely ignored and neglected, became a higher priority. We produced more scientists and engineers. Some of them went into university research. Others went into private industry. A couple by-products of this was a heightened interest in getting more women into computer science in the 1970s–an effort that actually succeeded at the time, but only temporarily. It also spurred the explosion in commercial personal computers in the late 1970s, which continued into the 1990s. There was a cultural understanding which said that learning about computers at a technical level, and how to use them, was important for our future.
That culture has changed. We value computer technology, because now it’s everywhere, and it’s hard not to learn about it, but now it’s all about learning the technology’s interface, not how to build it, or manipulate its internals. There is much less interest in what makes our technology possible, and in learning what’s necessary to drive it forward.
The criticism of Obama’s speech where he talks about our “Sputnik moment,” has bothered me somewhat, because the critics missed the history of government research funding. We really shouldn’t dismiss it, and let ourselves be ignorant of it, because I think this is one of the relatively few areas where government has done a good job, even with the occasional misguided notions that have been promoted through it under the label of “science”.
Here is some of what was said against Obama’s speech.
Are you impressed with the Internet? With your iPad? With that gadget on your car’s dashboard that gets you back on the Interstate after you get lost in a strange city?
Thank Washington, because according to the president Washington “planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs — from manufacturing to retail — that have come from these breakthroughs.”
If you don’t remember Presidents Carter or Reagan or Clinton bragging about the initiatives of their administrations that would one day bear the fruit of global social networks like Facebook, handheld communication devices like BlackBerrys, and the mobility revolution of Wi-Fi, it’s because they didn’t.
Government didn’t bring us any of those things; the private sector did. Does anyone really believe the federal government — which can’t find, let alone police, the 13 million-plus illegal aliens within our borders — can find and finance entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs while they are in the embryonic stages of their careers and make them successes?
The part of Obama’s speech that was quoted makes it sound like he was making a bit of a non-sequitor. Here is the full quote:
Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs — from manufacturing to retail — that have come from these breakthroughs.
On these points, Obama was right, but it takes an understanding of the history of this technology to get that. Defense spending was an important part of establishing the internet (through ARPA). It should be noted that the internet I refer to here is not the web, but rather the basic hardware and software infrastructure that the web uses in order to work. NASA provided R&D funding for the development of computer chips around the time they were invented, and without defense spending there would not be a GPS satellite system, which is essential for GPS technology to work here on the ground. It should be noted that the technology for GPS was initially used exclusively by the military, the technology for which was kept secret, and I think was only made available for consumer use within the last 10+ years. These have been essential technology platforms for the consumer products and services we use.
Just a side note: The example of the level of illegal immigration exhibiting government incompetence is a bad one. It’s not that our government can’t police and regulate this better. It’s that it doesn’t want to, and there are interests in this country who like it that way. Anyway…
There was also this from Glenn Beck shortly after the speech:
The President also announced he would be “investing” in biomedical research. Can anyone find that one in the Constitution? Oh, and information technology, especially clean energy technology. Alright. Let’s take these apart one at a time, shall we?
Biomedical: Maybe it’s just me as an American citizen, but I don’t want the government now dabbling with creating our drugs. Period.
Information technology? I dunno. I thought we were doing pretty good with Steve Jobs. Bill Gates [is] doing good, you know. Newcomers [are] coming into that field all the time. I think we’re good! Have you seen the iPhone…next to the Post Office? I’m going to go with Apple on that one.
After seeing these comebacks from conservatives, I shook my head a bit in disgust. To me, these people clearly didn’t understand what they were talking about with regard to how the products we see today came to be. Well, I hope to remedy that a bit in this series.
Obama wasn’t talking about starting a government-owned biomedical or IT company, or the government becoming a venture capitalist that would fund startups (though, as you’ll see later in this series, the government did that in a round-about way during the “middle stage” of the internet’s development), but rather that the government would provide funding for basic scientific research of the same type that developed the technology platforms which Facebook, Twitter, GPS devices, smartphones, and PCs were able to build upon, or were able to use. It’s not a stretch at all to say that most of these platforms would not exist today, or would’ve come later, had government-financed research not delved into creating them.
I will use several sources for this series. The primary one is “The Dream Machine,” by M. Mitchell Waldrop. He tells the story of where the basis–the ideas and infrastructure–for a lot of the technology we use today came from. Other sources I will use are Wikipedia, historical videos I’ve found on the internet, and a documentary called “The Machine That Changed The World.” Occasionally I will cite anecdotes I have heard from people who were either involved in this work, or who have been close to the people who were.
“The Dream Machine” follows the career of one man, J.C.R. Licklider, and several other computing luminaries, who made great contributions to the field of computer science, and particularly to the goal of creating interactive, networked computing, the kind of computing we do every day when we use technology.
What follows is a series of posts on this subject. I’ve broken it up into parts, because it’s extensive. The goal of what I’m writing here is not to be an authoritative source, but to provide a primer which you, the reader, can use to further your own research of this topic, if you feel so inclined. I will not cover the full history of computer technology (though there is still a lot here). What I will cover is the history of government-funded research into certain computer technologies, and what flowed from that research. I’ve made a point to try as much as I can to include the contributions of private companies that were created from government projects, or worked with government agencies, or were beneficiaries of ideas generated by government-sponsored research, and which were critical in bringing us the technology we use today.
Getting computing off the ground
The first technological breakthrough described in the “The Dream Machine” was ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the first general-purpose computer. There were other computers invented by other creators before this, but they were designed for a specific purpose. It was either impossible, or very difficult, to program them for other purposes. This computer could be programmed to use a variety of calculation methods.
ENIAC was designed by J. Presper Eckert, and John Mauchly (pronounced “mock-lee”). It was a digital computer, and its electronics were made up of vacuum tubes, also known as “valves.” It was a government project, financed by the U.S. Army, at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, during WW II. It was completed in 1946, and took up a whole room. It was also the first high profile project where women were important to the operation of a computer. They were called “Rosies,” and they were the programmers of ENIAC. This was no mean feat for anyone to do, since no programming language existed. It was programmed via. panels of “switches” (though the controls were actually dials), and the only code the programmers had to read were wiring diagrams. Before this, the “Rosies” had worked as human computers, figuring firing tables for artillery shells for the war effort by hand, with the help of mechanical calculators. Human computation was a problem, though. Errors were inevitable, and they might go undetected. It took a long time for people to compute tables. The sense of the time was they needed the firing tables yesterday. They couldn’t produce them fast enough. So building an electronic computer to do this work was seen as essential. As was the case in all sorts of male-dominated fields of the day, since most of the young men in the country were off fighting the war, women were brought in to do both kinds of work (computation and programming), and they showed themselves to be up to the task, though their contribution went unrecognized by society for many years.
There’s a new documentary out on DVD now called “Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II” (h/t to Mark Guzdial) for anyone who’s interested in learning more about this. There’s also a segment on this history in the documentary, “The Machine That Changed The World,” in its first episode, called “Great Brains.”
The following video of ENIAC, and the people who operated it, is National Archives footage digitized to the web. Note: There is no sound in this video. Eckert and Mauchly appear in the video at 4:55.
The blinking light display on the ENIAC was set up solely for the computer’s public unveiling. The display is a panel of lights covered with ping pong balls, with numbers painted on them. This panel was not used for normal operation. Nevertheless, it established the precedent of computers having panels of blinking lights.
There were two limitations with ENIAC. One was, while it could be programmed, it could not store its program. Programming was a matter of “wiring” the program into the machine, which was accomplished by adjusting the aforementioned panels of dials. Second, it was not interactive. The computer loaded data into itself, processed it, and produced printed tables of calculations. That was it. This would more or less become the template for most of the computers that would be produced and used for the next 25 years.
Taking what they had learned from building ENIAC, Eckert and Mauchly formed the world’s first computer company, the Electronic Control Company, later called the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, in 1946. They developed the Univac (the Universal Automatic Computer). The following ad for Univac was produced after the Eckert and Mauchly company was bought by Remington Rand in 1950.
Univac was made famous when it was featured on a CBS News broadcast, giving the first statistical computer prediction for an election, in the 1952 presidential race. The prediction was based on a sample of actual vote tallies on election night, and was very close to the actual result, though CBS did not air the prediction, because it differed significantly from polls taken before the election.
IBM decided to get into the computer business after hearing requests for computers from the U.S. military during the Korean War. There was resistance within IBM to getting into this new market. Nevertheless, it produced its first computer model, the 701, in 1953. Its design was based on Dr. John von Neumann’s paper, “Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument,” which documented his work in creating a computer that could store its program, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, at Princeton.
IBM came to dominate the field with its superior marketing, and backward compatibility with the punch card system of its older mechanical tabulation machines.
The first glimmers of interactive computing
What I covered above is one path that computers took, which came to dominate computer use for a long time. Another path that was very significant, though was not enjoyed by the public at the time, was interactive computing. For many years, interactive computing would only be known in the military. Eventually it would come to be known by the whole world.
Going back in time to before ENIAC was created, the Navy wanted to build a flight simulator for pilot training. They funded a project at MIT called Whirlwind, starting in 1944. It was designed by Jay Forrester. The system he ultimately built was the first real-time digital computer. Like ENIAC, it used vacuum tubes. What was different was it gave constant feedback to an operator (the pilot trainee) as it received input (movements of a joystick by the trainee), and it gave the operator something to look at, a simple graphical display, generated using an oscilloscope.
Whirlwind was never really “finished,” though it was put into military service in 1951. The scientists and engineers who worked on it were constantly tinkering with it, and changing its purpose. Under “Project Claude,” Whirlwind was tasked with displaying the positions of a real drone and a real aircraft flying in the sky, taking radar data as input in real time, allowing the operator to use the joystick that was part of the computer’s setup to remotely control the drone. The goal was to see if the person sitting at the computer could use the equipment to pilot the drone to intercept the aircraft. In tests it worked. This is not unlike the way military drones are piloted today.
A government-deputized committee that was formed shortly after the Soviets tested their first nuclear bomb in 1949, headed by MIT physicist George Valley, saw Whirlwind in action in 1950. It was a decisive proof-of-concept for them about what computers were capable of, and how they could be used for air defense. The Valley committee was tasked with assessing our existing defenses in the face of a Soviet nuclear threat, and making recommendations about any changes that were needed. They found that our defenses were woefully inadequate for defending against a bomber raid, the only major threat that was imagined at the time.
The committee’s report was delivered to the Pentagon in 1950. It recommended that the government install more radar stations to fill in the gaps in the radar net, and that an automated radar tracking and response system–a computer system–was needed. Seeing Whirlwind in action gave them confidence that this was possible. The U.S. government was very nervous about the situation with the Soviets. The thinking was the cold war could turn into a hot war quickly, and so they accepted the Valley committee’s recommendations without question, even though this was a radical, new idea at the time, only supported by experimental technology.
A man by the name of J.C.R. Licklider comes into the story here. He was a psychologist who was very interested in computers. In addition to being a scientist, he was also a mathematician. He is a major figure in the history that follows.
Licklider came to MIT in 1950 to continue his work in psychology. While there, he developed custom-built analog computers to simulate isolated neurological activity in the human brain, as part of his research. He also contributed to the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project in 1951, working on human factors research for the displays that operators would be working with. He helped determine when and how much information should be displayed to the operators, and what the intensity of the displays should be, so that the operators would be comfortable, and would not be overwhelmed with information, so they could make clear decisions.
SAGE was, in essence, the system that was recommended in the Valley Committee report. It was designed to be a real-time system, like Whirlwind, which would monitor our defensive airspace for Soviet bombers, and our own air force flights. It was developed at MIT, with several corporations contributing to its construction and planning, including IBM, System Development Corporation (which was spun off from RAND Corp. They managed all of the programmers for the SAGE project), Burroughs, and Western Electric.
The programming task for SAGE was very complex. It was estimated they needed 2,000 programmers. There weren’t enough in the whole country to work on it. So the SAGE project undertook an education program to recruit and train new programmers. All comers were invited, men and women, from all walks of life. It was not easy to tell who the best programmers would be. Scientists, engineers, mathematicians, the typical candidates one would think were ideal, were not sure bets. Music teachers tended to be the best candidates. It was found that women were better than men at paying attention to minute details while simultaneously not losing track of the big picture. One of the best programming groups in the project was 80% female.
The Navy lost interest in Whirlwind in 1954, and stopped work on it. The Air Force began construction of SAGE installations that same year. The SAGE system was brought online in 1958. Each installation was huge, due to the fact that, like ENIAC, its electronics were made up of large arrays of vacuum tubes. It took up a few floors of a building at each installation. Each one had two computers, so that one could always be taken down for maintenance if need be. It was networked so that information gathered about detected objects in the sky could be relayed to other stations. The first phone modems were created during this project, for this information transfer.
SAGE was fully built by 1963. The thing was, it was obsolete by this point. ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) had been developed, and the nuclear threat situation had become more a matter of nuclear deterrence than strategic defense. SAGE could not deal with ICBMs at all. Still, Whirlwind and SAGE would have a huge impact on the future of computing in the minds of the scientists and engineers who worked on them. SAGE was the first big proof-of-concept that interactive, networked computing was a viable concept. Still, it would take a lot of convincing to get more players in the computer industry to believe in it. Computers were still big and expensive, and computer time was expensive and precious. The idea of interactive computing was seen as pie in the sky by many–a waste of time, and SAGE was the exception that proved the rule that computers were only for data processing, not for interaction.
What came of it
One of MIT’s working groups on the SAGE project was spun off as the MITRE Corporation in 1958. Its purpose was to integrate new weapons systems into SAGE. In addition, in the coming years MITRE would develop the National Airspace System for air traffic control, which is still in use today, and AWACS (the Airborne Warning and Control System) (sources: Wikipedia, The MITRE Digest).
The SAGE project enhanced IBM’s ability to deliver computer systems that could handle big, real-time data processing projects, because their staff had learned how to do it through the experience of working on this project, and by bringing experienced people in from places like MIT. IBM developed SABRE (Semi-Automated Business-Related Environment) for American Airlines. It was a simplified commercial version of SAGE, but was designed for making airline reservations. The first experimental SABRE system went online in 1960. It was the largest real-time commercial data processing network in the world at the time. It was ultimately linked by phone lines to 1,200 teletype terminals across the country.
American made SABRE available to independent travel agents in 1976, and in the year 2000 spun it off as SABRE Holdings, which exists today. It’s divided into four business units: Travelocity (the e-commerce site for people to make their own travel reservations), Sabre Travel Network (a global distribution system providing travel information to agencies, corporations, and travelers), Sabre Airline Solutions (providing airline reservations systems and financial management), and Sabre Hospitality Solutions (providing technology solutions to hotels).
The SAGE system continued to be used by the military until 1984. Fortunately it was never tested in combat.
J. Presper Eckert, a co-inventor of the ENIAC, became an executive with Remington Rand when the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was purchased by Rand in 1950. He stayed on through the company’s many transitions. Remington Rand was purchased by Sperry in 1955, and went by the name of Sperry Rand, and then Sperry, until the company merged with Burroughs to form Unisys in 1986. It is still in existence today. Eckert retired from Unisys in 1989. He died on June 3, 1995.
Dr. John Mauchly, co-inventor of the ENIAC, became a founding member, and president, of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and helped found the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He stayed on with Remington Rand for 10 years, after their company was bought by Rand. He left the company in 1959 to form the consulting firm Mauchly Associates. He later formed another consulting firm called Dynatrend in 1967. He died on January 8, 1980. (sources: Wikipedia, the Association for Computing Machinery, Ohio History Central)
Jay Forrester, creator of Whirlwind, moved to the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and left the development of digital computing for good, in 1956. He created a new field of research called “system dynamics,” which looks at the interactions of objects in dynamic systems, with an emphasis on simulation of those systems. He developed ideas which have led to modern notions of supply chain management. As of this writing he is a professor emeritus and senior lecturer at MIT.
In Part 2, I will describe the efforts that began in the 1960s to bring interactive computing to the masses.
I was excited to see this article yesterday on a long-planned experiment conducted in space, called “Gravity Probe B”. According to the article, the results confirm predictions made by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. The experiment made extremely precise measurements of the Earth’s gravity well. The results comport with the idea that space-time is warped by the mass of the Earth. They also match a prediction made by Einstein’s theory that the Earth’s spin produces a swirling gravity well, with a shape analogous to that of a whirlpool drawing water into itself, in this case drawing space into itself. The space-time distortion caused by the Earth appears to move as a result of Earth’s rotation, though the rates of spin are not anywhere close to each other. The rate of spin of the gravity well is much slower. What has interested the scientists on this project in this effect is it helps explain the jets of charged particles that are generated by massive black holes in space, as the whirling distortions around them are probably more extreme, spinning much faster than here on Earth.
If you’re interested in getting into the history and the details of the theory that inspired this experiment, click on the first graphic embedded in the linked article. This will take you to another page, which also includes some video clips that provide easy to understand illustrations of what was observed. I particularly liked Kip Thorne’s “missing inch” model demonstration. He provided an easy to understand 2D model, which he transforms into a 3D model, of how they were able to show with Gravity Probe B’s instruments that the space around Earth is indeed warped.
I saw this from Star Parker today, and I think she makes an excellent point about the role of government:
There is no way around the fact that freedom and prosperity only exist when government protects property, and this includes our money.
I would add to this, “protects the lives of individuals, and respects contracts,” as well as property, but she is on to something. Since the financial crash of 2008 our government has taken on the role of the protector of our economy, even if the majority of Americans has not wanted it to do this. It has propped up companies, at best providing a cushion to tide them through their restructuring, and at worst given them a false sense of value. It has been focused for too long on the conceit that it can produce favorable outcomes, and when I say this in particular, I mean it far beyond this discussion. It goes above and beyond protecting property. Protecting property means protecting it from harm inflicted by fraud, thieves, saboteurs, and vandals–external threats, not harm that is self-inflicted. What the government has been presuming is that it can save us from ourselves.
Even though the Federal Reserve has wanted to deny that it is devaluing the Dollar, it has been doing so by creating money and then exchanging it for Treasuries, to finance our dramatically expanding public debt, and/or toxic mortgage securities. We haven’t been feeling the effects of this so much, because banks have not been lending that much into the private economy, but someday this will change. This policy has had effects abroad, which we have been feeling indirectly. Nevertheless, this is not protecting our property–specifically, our money!
What I’ve been increasingly realizing is that if we are to get back to prosperity, our government should stop trying to save us from ourselves, stop trying to manage the economy, and get back to its raison d’etre, and the Fed should adopt a new policy of protecting the value of the Dollar. If both were to do this, it would likely cause some scary and unpleasant results in the short term, but if people can see where the real problems are in the economy, then they are more likely to be resolved.
