"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
The death of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, on August 25 got me reflecting on what was accomplished by NASA during his time. I found a YouTube channel called “The Conquest of Space,” and it’s been wonderful getting acquainted with the history I didn’t know.
I knew about the Apollo program from the time I was a kid in the 1970s. I was born two months after Apollo 11, so I only remember it in hindsight. By the time I was old enough to be conscious of the Apollo program’s existence, it had been mothballed for four or five years. I could not be ignorant of its existence. It was talked about often on TV, and in the society around me. I lived in Virginia, near Washington, D.C., in my early childhood. I remember I used to be taken regularly to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Of all of their museums, it was my favorite. There, I saw video of one of the moon walks, the space suits used for the missions (as mannequins), the Command Module, and Lunar Module at full scale, artifacts of a time that had come and gone. There was hope that someday we would go back to the Moon, and go beyond it to the planets. The Air and Space Museum had an IMAX movie that was played continuously, called “To Fly.” From what I’ve read, they still show it. It was produced for the museum in 1976. I remember watching it a bunch of times. It was beautifully done, though looking back on it, it had the feel of a “demo” movie, showing off what could be done with the IMAX format. It dramatizes the history of flight, from hot air balloons in the 19th century, to the jet age, to rockets to the Moon. A cool thing about it is it talked about the change in perspective that flight offered, a “new eye.” At the end it predicted that we would have manned space missions to the planets.
Why wouldn’t we have manned missions that venture to the planets, and ultimately, perhaps a hundred years off, to other star systems? It would just be an extension of the advancements in flight we had made on earth. The idea that we would keep pushing the boundaries of our reach seemed like a given, that this technological pace we had experienced would just keep going. That’s what everything that was science-oriented was telling me. Our future was in space.
In the late 1970s Carl Sagan produced a landmark series on science called “Cosmos.” He talked about the history of space exploration, mostly from the ground, and how our destiny was to travel into space. He said, introducing the series,
The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can.
Winding down?
As I got into my twenties, in the 1990s, I started to worry about NASA’s robustness as a space program. It started to look like a one-trick pony that only knew how to launch astronauts into low-earth orbit. “When are we going to return to the Moon,” I’d ask myself. NASA sent probes out to Jupiter, Mars, and then Saturn, following in the footsteps of Voyager 1 and 2. Surely similar questions were being asked of NASA, because I’d often hear them say that the probes were forerunners to future manned space flight, that they were gathering information that we needed to know in advance for manned missions, holding out that hope that someday we’d venture out again.
The Space Shuttle was our longest running space program, from 1981 to 2011, 30 years. Back around the year 2000 I remember Vice President Al Gore announcing the winner of the contract to build the next generation space shuttle, which would take the place of the older models, but it never came to be. Under the administration of George W. Bush the Constellation program started in 2005, with the idea of further developing the International Space Station, returning astronauts to the Moon, establishing a base there for the first time, and then launching manned missions to Mars. This program was cancelled in 2010 in the Obama Administration, and there has been nothing to replace it. I heard some criticism of Constellation, saying that it was ill-defined, and an expensive boondoggle, though it was defended by Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, two Apollo astronauts. Perhaps it was ill-defined, and a waste of money, but it felt sad to see the Space Shuttle program end, and to see that NASA didn’t have a way to get into low-earth orbit, or to the International Space Station. The original idea was to have the first stage of the Constellation program follow, after the space shuttles were retired. Now NASA has nothing but rockets to send out space probes and robotic rovers to bodies in space. Even the Curiosity rover mission, now on Mars, was largely developed during the Bush Administration, so I hear.
I have to remember at times that even in the 1970s, during my childhood, there was a lull in the manned space program. The Apollo program was ended in the Nixon Administration, before it was finished. There was a planned flight, with a rocket ready to go, to continue the program after Apollo 17, but it never left the ground. There’s a Saturn V rocket that was meant for one of the later missions that lays today as a display model on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center. I have to remember as well that then, as now, the program was ended during a long drawn out war. Then, it was in Vietnam. Now, it’s in the Middle East.
Manned space flight ended for a time after the SL-4 mission to the Skylab space station in 1974. It didn’t begin again for another 7 years, with the first launch of the Space Shuttle. The difference is the Shuttle was first conceptualized towards the end of the Apollo program. It was there as a goal. Perhaps we are experiencing the same gap in manned flight now, though I don’t have a sense that NASA has a “next mission” in mind. As best I can tell the Obama Administration has tasked NASA with supporting private space flight. There is good reason to believe that private space flight companies will be able to send astronauts into low-earth orbit soon. That’s a consolation. The thing is that’s likely all they’re going to do in the future–launch to low-earth orbit. They’re at the stage that the Mercury program was more than 50 years ago.
What I ask is do we have anything beyond this in mind? Do we have a sense of building on the gains in knowledge that have been made, to venture out beyond what we now know? I grew up being told that “humans want to explore, to push the boundaries of what we know.” I guess we still are that, but maybe we’re directing that impulse in new ways here on earth, rather than into space. I wonder sometimes whether the scientific community fooled itself into believing this to justify its existence. Astrophysicist, and vocal advocate for NASA, Neil deGrasse Tyson has worried about this, too.
I realized a few years ago, to my dismay, that what really drove the creation of the space program, and our flights to the Moon, was not an ambition to push our frontiers of knowledge just for the sake of gaining knowledge. There was a major political aspect to it: beating the Soviets in “the space race” of the 1960s, establishing higher ground for ourselves, in a military sense. Yes, some very valuable scientific and engineering work was done in the process, but as Tyson would say, “science hitched a ride on another agenda.” That’s what it’s often done in human history. Many non-military benefits to our society flowed from what NASA once did, none of which are widely recognized today. Most people think that our technological development came from innovators in the private sector alone. The private sector did a lot, but they also drew from a tremendous resource in our space and defense research and development programs, as I’ve documented in earlier posts.
I’ll close with this great quote. It echoes what Tyson has said, though it’s fleshed out in an ethical sense, too, which I think is impressive.
The great enemy of the human race is ignorance. It’s what we don’t know that limits our progress. And everything that we learn, everything that we come to know, no matter how esoteric it seems, no matter how ivory tower-ish, will fit into the general picture a block in its proper place that in the end will make it possible for mankind to increase and grow; become more cosmic, if you wish; become more than a species on Earth, but become a species in the Universe, with capacities and abilities we can’t imagine now. Nor do I mean greater and greater consumption of energy, or more and more massive cities.
It’s so difficult to predict, because the most important advances are exactly in the directions that we now can’t conceive, but everything we now do, every advance in knowledge we now make, contributes to that. And just because I can’t see it, and I’m an expert at this, … doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And if we refuse to take those steps, because we don’t see what the future holds, all we’re making certain of is that the future won’t exist, and that we will stagnate forever. And this is a dreadful thought. And I am very tired when people ask me, “What’s the good of it,” because the proper answer is, “You may never know, but your grandchildren will.”
– Isaac Asimov, 1973, from the NASA film “Small Steps, Giant Strides”
Then as now, this is the lament of the scientist, I think. Scientists must ask society’s permission to explore, because they usually need funds from others to do their work, and there is no immediate payback to be had from it. It is for this reason that justifying the funding of that work is tough, because scientific work goes outside the normal set of expectations people have about what is of value. If the benefits can’t be seen here and now, many wonder, “What’s the point?” What Asimov pointed out is the pursuit of knowledge is its own reward, but to really gain its benefits you must be future-oriented. You have to think about and value the world in which your children and grandchildren will live, not your own. If your focus is on the here and now, you will not value the future, and so potential future benefits of scientific research will not seem valuable, and therefor will not seem worthy of pursuit. It is a cultural mindset that is at issue.
Edit 12-10-2012: Going through some old articles I’d saved, I came upon this essay about humanity’s capacity for intellectual thought, called “Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?”, by Steven Dutch at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. It provides some reasonable counter-notions to my own that seem to confirm what I’ve seen, but will still take some contemplation on my part.
There’s no science in the article. In terms of quality, at best, I’d call this an “executive summary.” Maybe there’s more detailed research behind it, but I haven’t found it yet. Dutch uses heuristics to provide his points of comparison, and uses a notion of evidence to provide some meat to the bones. He asks some reasonable questions that are worth contemplating, challenging the notion that “humans are naturally curious, and strive to explore.” He then makes observations that seem to come from his own experience. Overall, he provides a reasonable basis for answering a statement I made in this article: “I wonder sometimes whether the scientific community fooled itself into believing this to justify its existence.” He comes down on the side of saying, in his opinion (paraphrasing), “Yes, some in the scientific community have fooled themselves on this issue.” He discusses the notion that “humans are naturally curious,” due to the behavior exhibited by children. He concludes by saying that children naturally display a shallow curiosity, which he calls “tinkering.” The harder task of creative, deep thought does not come naturally. It’s something that needs to be cultivated to take root. Hence the need for schools. The question I think we as citizens should be asking is whether our schools are actually doing this, or something else.
I don’t know much about Jack’s history, and the history of Commodore. What I remember is that Jack was a Polish immigrant. He founded Commodore Business Machines in the 1950s, as a typewriter parts company. It eventually got into selling electronic calculators. It got into the computer market in the late 1970s. I think its first computer was the Commodore PET. Jack later said that he didn’t get into the computer business because he particularly loved the concept. He just did it to make money.
The Commodore 64, from Wikipedia
While Apple Computer pioneered high end personal computing, Commodore pioneered the low end of that market. Jack was I think the first to have the concept of profiting by selling computers in volume, at prices that consumers could afford. The company’s first popular, low-priced computer was the VIC-20. Its Commodore 64 computer was wildly popular. It was sold in toy and department stores, for what was then a bargain basement price of about $550. It was the most widely sold computer of its era.
Tramiel was said to be ruthless, wanting to crush all his competitors. He largely succeeded at it. When I say this, you have to understand that back in the late 70s, up to the mid-80s, the computer market was really separated into the two strata of high-end and low-end. While there were people who bought high-end computers to use at home, most of them were bought by schools and businesses. At that time, computers like Commodore’s were mainly bought for use at home, and it mainly competed against other computer manufacturers in the home market. Commodore began to make a foray into the high-end market with its Amiga computer, which came out in 1985, but its influence was not as widespread in that market as was technology from IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.
The consumer division of Atari (which was owned by Warner Communications) and Commodore were fierce rivals in the low-end market. In a surprising move, Jack left Commodore in 1984, and bought Atari from Warner. He made a go of it with Atari for another 12 years, first coming out with the Atari ST computer, its first 16-bit model, and then other models like the TT030, and the Falcon 030, the last computer they made. Atari also made a foray into the high-end market with its 16- and 32-bit line, but it had a similar profile as Commodore’s Amiga. It was accepted as a niche machine.
Here’s a British interview I found on YouTube with Jack Tramiel from around 1984/85, introducing Atari’s new line of 8- and 16-bit machines.
When Jack bought Atari, there was some credence given to the idea that he would do for Atari what he had done for Commodore, making it a dominant player, crushing all its rivals. It didn’t even get close to that, at least in the U.S. Atari did very well for several years in Europe, becoming one of the dominant computer manufacturers there, but the U.S. market was already changing. By the time Tramiel bought the company, consumers were beginning to “standardize” on the IBM PC, and later PC clones, facilitated by Microsoft’s operating system, MS-DOS. Atari admitted defeat in the computer market in 1993, but continued to make a go of it in the consumer video game business, with the Atari Lynx color portable game system, and the Jaguar 64-bit console.
Commodore went into bankruptcy in 1994. Its intellectual property has since been acquired and used by a couple companies.
Atari was on its last legs in 1996. It had been whittled down to nothing, just a few employees. Atari’s intellectual property was sold to a disk drive manufacturer, JTS, that year. It was bought and sold a couple times after that. It eventually “landed” with a company called Infogrames around the year 2000. They changed their name to “Atari” in 2003, and continue to sell video games under the Atari label.
Tramiel went into retirement after selling Atari. He later joked, in a self-effacing way, “I wanted to destroy Atari, and I did!”
Well, anyway, I enjoyed Atari’s computers. I still have a 130XE and a Mega STe (both models from the Tramiel era) that I’ve kept in storage. Maybe one of these days I’ll donate my Mega STe to some computer museum that wants it. I’ve promised myself that one of these days I’m going to drag out the 130XE and transfer all my old Atari disks so I can run the old stuff on an emulator when I want to reminisce. I did that with my STe stuff about 10 years ago. Ah memories…
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 which 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.
J. Presper Eckert, from the Computer History Museum
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.
John Mauchly, from the Computer History Museum
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.
Jay Forrester, from Wikipedia
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, with a background in mathematics and physics, 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.
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 describe the efforts that began in the 1960s to bring interactive computing to the masses.
I heard earlier this month that Google Wave was going to be shut down at the end of the year, because it was not a hit with academia (h/t to Mark Guzdial). I was surprised. What was interesting and rather shocking is one of the reasons it failed was that academics couldn’t figure out how to use it. They said it was too complex. In other words, the product required some training. I’ve used Wave and it’s about as easy to use as an e-mail application, though there are some extra concepts that need to be acquired to use it. I saw it as kind of a cross between e-mail and teleconferencing. Maybe if people had been told this they would’ve been able to pick up the concepts more easily. It’s hard for me to say.
I thought for sure Wave would be a hit somewhere. I assumed business and bloggers would adopt it. The local Lisp user group I’ve been attending has been using Wave for several months now, and we’ve made it an integral part of our meetings. I think we’ll get along without it, but we were sorry to hear that it’s going away.
As I’ve reflected on it I’ve realized that Wave has some significant shortcomings, though it was a promising technology. I first heard about it in a comment that was left on my blog a year ago in response to my post “Does computer science have a future?” Come to think of it, Google Wave’s fate is an interesting commentary on that topic. Anyway, I watched Google’s feature video where it was debuted. It reminded me a bit of Engelbart’s NLS from 1968, though it really didn’t hold a candle to NLS. It had a few similarities I could recognize, but its vision was much more limited. As the source article for this story reveals, the Google Wave team used the idea of extending the concept of e-mail as their inspiration, adding idioms of instant messaging to the metaphor. That explains some things. What I think is a shame is they could’ve done so much more with it. One thing I could think of right off the bat was having the ability to link between waves, and entries in different waves, so that people could refer back and forth to previous/subsequent conversations on related topics. I mean, how hard would that have been to add? In business terms wouldn’t this have “added value” to the product concept? What about bringing over an innovation from NLS and adding video conferencing? Maybe businesses would’ve found Wave appealing if it had some of these things. It’s hard to say, but apparently the Wave team didn’t think of them.
At our Lisp user group meeting last week we got to talking about the problems with Wave after we learned that it was going away. A topic that came up was that Google realized Wave was going to raise costs in computing resources, given the way it was designed, as a client/server model. All Waves originated on Google’s servers. An example I heard thrown out was that if one person had 10,000 friends all signed up on one wave, and they were all on there at the same time, every single keystroke made by one person would cause Google’s server to have to send the update to every one of the people signed up for the wave–10,000 people. There was something about how they couldn’t monetize the service effectively as well, especially for that kind of load.
As they talked about this it reminded me of what Alan Kay said about Engelbart’s NLS system at ETech 2003. NLS had a similar client/server system design to Google Wave. I remember he said that the scaling factor with NLS was 2N, because of its system architecture. This clearly was not going to scale well. It was perhaps because of this that several members of Engelbart’s team left to go work on the concept of personal computing at Xerox PARC. What they were after at PARC was a network scaling factor of N2, and the idea was they would accomplish this using a peer-to-peer architecture. I speculated that this tied in with the invention of Ethernet at PARC, which is a peer-to-peer networking scheme over TCP/IP. I remember Kay and a fellow engineer showed off the concept with Croquet at ETech. It was quite relevant to what I talk about here, actually, because the demo showed how updates of multiple graphical objects on one Squeak instance (Croquet was written in Squeak) were propagated very quickly to another instance over the network, without a mediating central server. And the scheme scaled to multiple computers on the same network.
Google Wave’s story is a sorry tale, a clear case where the industry’s collective ignorance of computer history has hurt technological progress. In this case it’s possible that one reason Wave did not go well is because the design team did not learn the lessons that had already been learned about 38 years ago.
In my guest post on Paul Murphy’s blog called “The PC vision was lost from the get go” I spoke to the concept, which Alan Kay had going back to the 1970s, that the personal computer is a new medium, like the book at the time the technology for the printing press was brought to Europe, around 1439 (I also spoke some about this in “Reminiscing, Part 6″). Kay made this realization upon witnessing Seymour Papert’s Logo system being used with children. More recently Kay has with 20/20 hindsight spoken about how like the book, historically, people have been missing what’s powerful about computing because like the early users of the printing press we’ve been automating and reproducing old media onto the new medium. We’re even automating old processes with it that are meant for an era that’s gone.
Kay spoke about the evolution of thought about the power of the printing press in one or two of his speeches entitled The Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet. In them he said that after Gutenberg brought the technology of the printing press to Europe, the first use found for it was to automate the process of copying books. Before the printing press books were copied by hand. It was a laborious process, and it made books expensive. Only the wealthy could afford them. In a documentary mini-series that came out around 1992 called The Machine That Changed The World, I remember an episode called “The Paperback Computer”. It said that there were such things as libraries, going back hundreds of years, but that all of the books were chained to their shelves. Books were made available to the public, but people had to read the books at the library. They could not check them out as we do now, because they were too valuable. Likewise today, with some exceptions to promote mobility, we “chain” computers to desks or some other anchored surface to secure them, because they’re too valuable.
Kay has said in his recent speeches that there were a few rare people during the early years of the printing press who saw its potential as a new emerging medium. Most of the people who knew about it at the time did not see this. They only saw it as, “Oh good! Remember how we used to have to copy the Bible by hand? Now we can print hundreds of them for a fraction of the cost.” They didn’t see it as an avenue for thinking new ideas. They saw it as a labor saving device for doing what they had been doing for hundreds of years. This view of the printing press predominated for more than 100 years still. Eventually a generation grew up not knowing the old toils of copying books by hand. They saw that with the printing press’s ability to disseminate information and narratives widely, it could be a powerful new tool for sharing ideas and arguments. Once literacy began to spread, what flowed from that was the revolution of democracy. People literally changed how they thought. Kay said that before this time people appealed to authority figures to find out what was true and what they should do, whether they be the king, the pope, etc. When the power of the printing press was realized, people began appealing instead to rational argument as the authority. It was this crucial step that made democracy possible. This alone did not do the trick. There were other factors at play as well, but this I think was a fundamental first step.
Kay has believed for years that the computer is a powerful new medium, but in order for its power to be realized we have to perceive it in such a way that enables it to be powerful to us. If we see it only as a way to automate old media: text, graphics, animation, audio, video; and old processes (data processing, filing, etc.) then we aren’t getting it. Yes, automating old media and processes enables powerful things to happen in our society via. efficiency. It further democratizes old media and modes of thought, but it’s like just addressing the tip of the iceberg. This brings the title of Alan Kay’s speeches into clear focus: The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet.
Below is a talk Alan Kay gave at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in 2007, which I think gives some good background on what he would like to see this new medium address:
“A man must learn on this principle, that he is far removed from the truth” – Democritus
Squeak in and of itself will not automatically get you smarter students. Technology does not really change minds. The power of EToys comes from an educational approach that promotes exploration, called constructivism. Squeak/EToys creates a “medium to think with.” What the documentary “Squeakers” makes clear is that EToys is a tool, like a lever, that makes this approach more powerful, because it enables math and science to be taught better using this technique. (Update 10/12/08: I should add that whenever the nature of Squeak is brought up in discussion, Alan Kay says that it’s more like an instrument, one with which you can “mess around” and “play,” or produce serious art. I wrote about this discussion that took place a couple years ago, and said that we often don’t associate “power” with instruments, because we think of them as elegant but fragile. Perhaps I just don’t understand at this point. I see Squeak as powerful, but I still don’t think of an instrument as “powerful”. Hence the reason I used the term “tool” in this context.)
From what I’ve read in the past, constructivism has gotten a bad reputation, I think primarily because it’s fallen prey to ideologies. The goal of constructivism as Kay has used it is not total discovery-based learning, where you just tell the kids, with no guidance, “Okay, go do something and see what you find out.” What this video shows is that teachers who use this method lead students to certain subjects, give them some things to work with within the subject domain, things they can explore, and then sets them loose to discover something about them. The idea is that by the act of discovery by experimentation (ie. play) the child learns concepts better than if they are spoon-fed the information. There is guidance from the teacher, but the teacher does not lead them down the garden path to the answer. The children do some of the work to discover the answers themselves, once a focus has been established. And the answer is not just “the right answer” as is often called for in traditional education, but what the student learned and how the student thought in order to get it.
Learning to learn; learning to think; learning the critical concepts that have gotten us to this point in our civilization is what education should be about. Understanding is just as important as the result that flows from it. I know this is all easier said than done with the current state of affairs, but it helps to have ideals that are held up as goals. Otherwise what will motivate us to improve?
What Kay thinks, and is convinced by the results he’s seen, is that the computer can enable children of young ages to grasp concepts that would be impossible for them to get otherwise. This keys right into a philosophy of computing that J.C.R. Licklider pioneered in the 1960s: human-computer symbiosis (“man-computer symbiosis”, as he called it). Through a “coupling” of humans and computers, the human mind can think about ideas it had heretofore not been able to think. The philosophers of symbiosis see our world becoming ever more complex, so much so that we are at risk of it becoming incomprehensible and getting away from us. I personally have seen evidence of that in the last several years, particularly because of the spread of computers in our society and around the world. The linchpin of this philosophy is, as Kay has said recently, “The human mind does not scale.” Computers have the power to make this complexity comprehensible. Kay has said that the reason the computer has this power is it’s the first technology humans have developed that is like the human mind.
Expanding the idea
Kay has been focused on using this idea to “amp up” education, to help children understand math and science concepts sooner than they would in the traditional education system. But this concept is not limited to children and education. This is a concept that I think needs to spread to computing for teenagers and adults. I believe it should expand beyond the borders of education, to business computing, and the wider society. Kay is doing the work of trying to “incubate” this kind of culture in young students, which is the right place to start.
In the business computing realm, if this is going to happen we are going to have to view business in the presence of computers differently. I believe for this to happen we are going to have to literally think of our computers as simulators of ”business models.” I don’t think the current definition of “business model” (a business plan) really fits what I’m talking about. I don’t want to confuse people. I’m thinking along the lines of schema and entities, forming relationships which are dynamic and therefor late-bound, but with an allowance for policy to govern what can change and how, with the end goal of helping business be more fluid and adaptive. Tying it all together I would like to see a computing system that enables the business to form its own computing language and terminology for specifying these structures so that as the business grows it can develop “literature” about itself, which can be used both by people who are steeped in the company’s history and current practices, and those who are new to the company and trying to learn about it.
What this requires is computing (some would say “informatics”) literacy on the part of the participants. We are a far cry from that today. There are millions of people who know how to program at some level, but the vast majority of people still do not. We are in the “Middle Ages” of IT. Alan Kay said that Smalltalk, when it was invented in the 1970s, was akin to Gothic architecture. As old as that sounds, it’s more advanced than what a lot of us are using today. We programmers, in some cases, are like the ancient pyramid builders. In others, we’re like the scribes of old.
This powerful idea of computing, that it is a medium, should come to be the norm for the majority of our society. I don’t know how yet, but if Kay is right that the computer is truly a new medium, then it should one day become as universal and influential as books, magazines, and newspapers have historically.
In my “Reminiscing” post I referred to above, I talked about the fact that even though we appeal more now to rational argument than we did hundreds of years ago, we still get information we trust from authorities (called experts). I said that what I think Kay would like to see happen is that people will use this powerful medium to take information about some phenomenon that’s happening, form a model of it, and by watching it play out, inform themselves about it. Rather than appealing to experts, they can understand what the experts see, but see it for themselves. By this I mean that they can manipulate the model to play out other scenarios that they see as relevant. This could be done in a collaborative environment so that models could be checked against each other, and most importantly, the models can be checked against the real world. What I said, though, is that this would require a different concept of what it means to be literate; a different model of education, and research.
This is all years down the road, probably decades. The evolution of computing moves slowly in our society. Our methods of education haven’t changed much in 100 years. The truth is the future up to a certain point has already been invented, and continues to be invented, but most are not perceptive enough to understand that, and “old ways die hard,” as the saying goes. Alan Kay once told me that “the greatest ideas can be written in the sky” and people still won’t understand, nor adopt them. It’s only the poor ideas that get copied readily.
I recently read that the Squeakland site has been updated (it looks beautiful!), and that a new version of the Squeakland version of Squeak has been released on it. They are now just calling it “EToys,” and they’ve dropped the Squeak name. Squeak.org is still up and running, and they are still making their own releases of Squeak. As I’ve said earlier, the Squeakland version is configured for educational purposes. The squeak.org version is primarily used by professional Smalltalk developers. Last I checked it still has a version of EToys on it, too.
Edit: As I was writing this post I went searching for material for my “programmers” and “scribes” reference. I came upon one of Chris Crawford‘s essays. I skimmed it when I wrote this post, but I reread it later, and it’s amazing! (Update 11/15/2012: I had a link to it, but it’s broken, and I can’t find the essay anymore.) It caused me to reconsider my statement that we are in the “Middle Ages” of IT. Perhaps we’re at a more primitive point than that. It adds another dimension to what I say here about the computer as medium, but it also expounds on what programming brings to the table culturally.
Here is an excerpt from Crawford’s essay. It’s powerful because it surveys the whole scene:
So here we have in programming a new language, a new form of writing, that supports a new way of thinking. We should therefore expect it to enable a dramatic new view of the universe. But before we get carried away with wild notions of a new Western civilization, a latter-day Athens with modern Platos and Aristotles, we need to recognize that we lack one of the crucial factors in the original Greek efflorescence: an alphabet. Remember, writing was invented long before the Greeks, but it was so difficult to learn that its use was restricted to an elite class of scribes who had nothing interesting to say. And we have exactly the same situation today. Programming is confined to an elite class of programmers. Just like the scribes, they are highly paid. Just like the scribes, they exercise great control over all the ancillary uses of their craft. Just like the scribes, they are the object of some disdain — after all, if programming were really that noble, would you admit to being unable to program? And just like the scribes, they don’t have a damn thing to say to the world — they want only to piddle around with their medium and make it do cute things.
My analogy runs deep. I have always been disturbed by the realization that the Egyptian scribes practiced their art for several thousand years without ever writing down anything really interesting. Amid all the mountains of hieroglypics we have retrieved from that era, with literally gigabytes of information about gods, goddesses, pharoahs, conquests, taxes, and so forth, there is almost nothing of personal interest from the scribes themselves. No gripes about the lousy pay, no office jokes, no mentions of family or loved ones — and certainly no discussions of philosophy, mathematics, art, drama, or any of the other things that the Greeks blathered away about endlessly. Compare the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians with the writings of the Greeks and the difference that leaps out at you is humanity.
You can see the same thing in the output of the current generation of programmers, especially in the field of computer games. It’s lifeless. Sure, their stuff is technically very good, but it’s like the Egyptian statuary: technically very impressive, but the faces stare blankly, whereas Greek statuary ripples with the power of life.
What we need is a means of democratizing programming, of taking it out of the soulless hands of the programmers and putting it into the hands of a wider range of talents.
Paul Murphy saw fit to give me another guest spot on his blog, called “The tattered history of OOP”, talking about the history of OOP practice, where the idea came from, and how industry has implemented it. If you’ve been reading my blog this will probably be review. I’m just spreading the message a little wider.
Paul has an interesting take on the subject. He thinks OOP is a failure in practice because with the way it’s been implemented it’s just another way to make procedure calls. I agree with him for the most part. He’s informed me that he’s going to put up another post soon that gets further into why he thinks OOP is a failure. I’ll update this post when that’s available.
In short, where I’m coming from is that OOP, in the original vision that was created at Xerox PARC, still has promise. The current implementation that most developers use has architectural problems that the PARC version did not, and it still promotes a mode of thinking that’s compatible with procedural programming.
Update 6/3/08: Paul Murphy’s response to my article is now up, called “Oddball thinking about OOP”. He argues that OOP is a failure because it’s an idea that was incompatible with digital computing to begin with, and is better suited to analog computing. I disagree that this is the reason for its failure, but to each their own.
Update 8/1/09: I realized later I may have misattributed a quote to Albert Einstein. Paul Murphy talked about this in a post sometime after “The tattered history of OOP” was published. I said that insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Murphy said he realized that this was misattributed to Einstein. I did a little research myself and it seems like there’s confusion about it. I’ve found sites of quotations that attribute this saying to Einstein. On Wikipedia though it’s attributed to Rita Mae Brown, a novelist, who wrote this in her 1983 book, Sudden Death. I don’t know. I had always heard it attributed to Einstein, though I agree with the naysayers that no one has produced a citation that would prove he said it.
A while back I wrote my “Reminiscing” series of posts talking about the history of the machines I used growing up, as I remembered it. I came upon a few materials on reddit over a period of about a month that gave more authoritative histories of the Atari ST and Amiga. They’re really neat to look at. Atari and Commodore were fierce competitors since they both got into the computer market in the late 1970s, up until they both stopped computer production in 1993/94. There were the same flamewars during those years about which computer was better between devoted camps as there are now about which operating system, or system of software development (open source vs. closed source) is better. That competitive, beat your opponent to a pulp spirit still lives on.
The Atari ST
The Atari ST, from Wikipedia.org
Landon Dyer has a blog called DadHacker. He’s written a two-part series on the building of the Atari ST, as an on-the-ground engineer. He gives a kind of blow-by-blow of what he could recall of the events of the time, and the issues they dealt with in developing it in a very short time period. Here are part 1 and part 2.
When I was getting my undergraduate CS degree at Colorado State University one of my dormmates, Darryl May, had worked at Atari under the Tramiel “regime” before coming to school. As I recall he had done customer support, among other things. He was not high up on the totem pole, and so was not privy to a lot of the stuff that was going on, but he told me a few stories.
The higher-ups in the company hierarchy were not entirely sealed off from everyone else. He said there were a few times where he just happened to bump into Jack Tramiel in the men’s bathroom.
Another story was that there were framed pictures put in odd places on some of the walls. He said they were where Jack Tramiel had caused a ”dent” by punching them with his fist–just releasing stress…
I used to really like Atari computers, 8-bit and ST, and one of the aspirations I had was to maybe work at Atari one day. After hearing this, and maybe a few other tales I can’t remember, I lost interest. I didn’t conflate this with the machines themselves. I still liked them, and I have fond memories of them to this day. It’s just that the company culture didn’t sound so hot, and I began to see why there was such a love/hate relationship with Atari back then among the devoted.
In 1993 I had the opportunity to attend a Falcon 030 presentation given by David Small, the inventor of the Magic Sac and Spectre GCR/128 Macintosh emulators for the ST. The Falcon had started to ship a short while before. As I recall, and my memory’s fuzzy on this, he told a tale of how the Falcon development team was treated. One of the things I remember him saying is after promising to pay the engineers for their efforts, rather than paying them in cash, they were given company stock…which at the time was probably trading as a penny stock. I remember it hovered around $1 a share, often going under that amount, with really no hope of it getting any better. Small winced as he delivered the punch line, and drew audible sounds of disgust from the audience. We all knew what the situation was with Atari.
The impression I’ve gotten from listening to first hand accounts is that Jack Tramiel was a “penny wise, pound foolish” hard ass. I don’t get a sense that he had a creative spirit. His strategy, as it was when he was at the helm at Commodore, was to sell machines to a mass market. For whatever reason, it worked out for several years in Europe, where Atari was one of the dominant sellers of computers. In the U.S. it didn’t work out. I remember asking Darryl about this, and in his view Atari was just a tax write-off for the Tramiels. Jack Tramiel was set to retire, and just didn’t have the motivation to really make Atari do well. That was his theory anyway.
Giving credit where it’s due, in an interview I saw on a British computer TV show from the 1980s, Jack Tramiel revealed that one of his goals when he ran Commodore was to keep the Japanese out of the U.S. PC market. He did this by undercutting them on price. Maybe he succeeded, since I remember there was talk in the 80s about the Japanese working on low-end MSX machines to sell to the U.S. market. Somehow that never got off the ground. Incidentally, MSX was Microsoft’s attempt to do for low-end 8-bit computers what it did for IBM PCs and clones: create a standard OS. Apparently Tramiel was someone who fought to keep computer production in the U.S. We can thank him for that, though in hindsight he just delayed the inevitable. From what I remember, Atari shifted computer production to Asia, even under Tramiel’s management. Today a lot of the PC production lines are in Asia, though I’m sure there are still some here.
As I’ve mentioned before, Atari stopped producing computers in late 1993. The company continued on, trying to compete in the video game market, but dying a slow death, until it was finally “retired” in its sale to JTS (a disk drive manufacturer) in 1996.
The Amiga
The Commodore Amiga, from Wikipedia.org
I found a couple videos that cover the history of the Amiga. What’s intriguing to me is there are some juicy tidbits about what went down between Amiga Corp. and Atari. This was something I had read about, but never completely understood.
Amiga started out as its own company developing video game peripherals. As I recall, and parts of this may be wrong, at some point Atari started giving funding to Amiga, back when Atari was owned by Warner Communications (now called Time Warner), and expected to get first dibs on some technology that was being developed (maybe the chips). There came a point where Amiga was running low on cash, and put itself up for sale. Amiga wasn’t satisfied with the way they were being treated by Atari. Commodore appeared to be interested. Amiga pursued a deal with Commodore, and eventually reached an amicable price per share with them. I’m not clear if the Tramiels were in on the negotiations with Amiga. From what I read it sounded like the deal with Commodore was either near completion when Jack Tramiel bought Atari, or it was already overwith. They tell the story in the video (below) so I’ll leave the details to them, though they don’t talk about who was in charge at Atari.
Commodore bought Amiga, and Atari’s working relationship with them went out the window. Atari sued, citing their agreement, but ultimately lost. The Amiga computer went to Commodore. As I recall the Tramiels already had some ideas about a 16-bit machine they wanted to develop by the time they bought Atari, but they had to work fast to get it out in time to compete with the Amiga.
(Update 4-5-2010: The above was an account from memory of the relationship I had read about between Atari and Amiga. Apparently it was in the ballpark, but not precise. You can read more about the Atari-Amiga contract here under the subheading “Amiga Contract”. Martin Goldberg, who apparently worked for Atari at the time, left a comment to this post (see below) about what went down between Atari and Amiga. Martin strongly disputes RJ’s account (given in the video below) of the Atari-Amiga-Commodore negotiations.)
From what I read one of the main players at Amiga was Jay Miner, though according to the video below he was the head guy. He used to work at Atari, and developed the graphics chips for their 8-bit computers in the late ’70s. Maybe he did more than that, but I don’t recall. He brought the same know-how to the Amiga computer project, creating the famous graphics (and sound?) co-processors that gave the Amiga real pizzaz.
The video below is the story of the founding of Amiga Corp., and the purchase of Amiga by Commodore, as told by the original guys and gals who made it all happen.
Another neat thing about this video is they show the CES mock up of the Amiga Lorraine (its code name) that I remember reading about in Compute! Magazine back in 1984. I remember they told the story of the Amiga’s appearance at CES with a great sense of foreboding that the machine looked revolutionary, and if it became anything more than vaporware it would represent a next generation leap in computing. This is interesting in retrospect, because Compute! did not greet the Apple Macintosh, which was a final product ready for sale at the time, with the same sense of excitement. They covered the unveiling of the first Mac, but then they were like “on to the next subject…”.
You have to remember that back then what was considered “standard” was a computer that when you booted it up would greet you with a command line interface, and the only machines most people knew about that had high resolution graphics combined with a “large” color palette were the IBM PC and the Apple II.
I would say that all three, the Apple Mac, Atari ST, and the Commodore Amiga represented the next generation of popular computing at the time. Each came at it from a different angle, and none of them turned out the way their visionary creators anticipated. All three pursued the business computing market, thinking it would help establish the machines with a healthy customer base, but none of them made large inroads in it. Instead each found a following in creative businesses. The Mac was adopted for professional (paper) publishing. The Atari ST was adopted by musicians for its MIDI hardware and software. The Amiga was adopted by video production studios since its hardware capabilities fit in well with what they needed. Video production software followed suit.
A show I heard about during my last year in college (’92-’93) that used Amigas with Video Toaster cards for the special effects shots was Babylon 5. It’s the reason why I got interested in the show in the first place. But wow, the storywriting in the series held my attention. It told a tale of epic proportions. They only used Amigas for the first season though. I heard that Amiga/Video Toasters were used for the effects shots in the SeaQuest DSV series as well.
I can’t help it…Diversion into trivia: Two actors in the Babylon 5 TV series also starred in the movie Tron. What were the actors’ names, and what characters did they play in the movie? They’re both in this fan video. See if you can find them. One of them is pretty easy to pick out.
Here’s a video of an Amiga production plant being shut down in 1994, when Commodore shut its doors for good. Not much to see here. Pretty boring, but it gives you that sense that things are coming to an end.
Update 5/30/08: I found this video of a 25th anniversary commemoration of the Commodore 64, presented by the Computer History Museum. Finally the C-64 gets its due. It was really kind of a get together of some people who defined personal computing in the 1980s. At first it was just a one-on-one chat with Jack Tramiel. Later they brought up Steve Wozniak (representing Apple), a guy who used to work for IBM during the IBM PC days, and another guy who worked for Commodore. They reflect a bit on what happened at Apple and IBM at the time as well. Interesting discussion.
On a lighter note, a reminder (video link) of how far we’ve come since then.
