Comment Computer history rambles and what might have been (Score 1) 628
Jim, thanks for the reply. It is a pleasure to be corresponding with someone with such a knowledge of computing history (having lived it). My first computer (other than playing with IBM punched cards and building my own circuits) was KIM-1 with 1K of memory in the late 1970s, and I've been working with them ever since. I started networked computing in high school in the 1970s on a TOPS-10/Lyrics DEC PDP-10 system on Long Island, even eventually getting a Commodore PET to dial in (but I could not afford as a teenager the US$10 an hour phone non-local charges -- probably US$40 an hour in today's money -- although at some point we got a local dial-in as I was leaving high school). I was later for a time on AppleLink and BIX and the Well and IGC, but still generally restricted by US$10 an hour long distance charges until the late 1990s. We perhaps both draw from many of the same pool of ideas and interests and likely even sci-fi stories informing our outlooks (even if they are not identical) -- although with my experiences lag yours by a decade or two, and I was never in the kind of communities doing the kind of really new work you were fortunate enough to be in. My father was a merchant mariner, then a machinist, then a manufacturing engineer, so I also has a somewhat more mechanical focus in some of my aspirations (like interest in self-replicating hardware leading to self-replicating space habitats, which overlaps seasteading and some other exponential ideas you talk about for environmental cleanup); but my mother's work as a social worker / welfare caseworker for twenty years and more also is an influence as to bigger picture issues. Due to that lag, compared to you, I also saw and lived in much more of the Personal Computer aspect of the industry compared to PLATO and (to me then unaffordable, even for two decades) computer networking, even if I did use networked computer early on in high school. I put some rambles below on ideas in your essay and other historical links, plus a big quote at the end from Bill Norris hat applies to the main topic of automation and jobs. Anyway, got to get back to "work" or I would make this better and shorter.
=== Ramble mode on
I corresponded with Bill Norris briefly in the late 1980s (when my graduate advisor at Princeton suggested I talk to him), then again in the early 1990s. I had hoped to work with him somehow at his foundation developing software to support flexible manufacturing and information exchange, even hoping to move as a summer volunteer/intern to MN (he said he had no money to hire new staff). However, I met my wife around then and so those hopes ultimately fell apart. My own ideas on that became "OSCOMAK", but it has not really gone far, and it has been eclipsed by other ideas of lesser scope but better social networking. It's a shame he and I never worked together back then, as I feel it would have been a great match with my interests and abilities, and I would have learned so much from him. I can envy you a chance to bask in that environment.
Bill Norris sent me a copy of his biography as well as copies of many of the pamphlets he wrote for Control Data (like "back to the Countryside via Technology"). I scanned and OCR'd some of the pamphlets and had hoped to put them on the internet and we had some correspondence about that too, but the licensing issues remained unclear so I did not put them up. Glad someone else did though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
Of Bill Norris' talks there, the most relevant there is this HBR story on robots taking all the jobs may be: "Technology and Full Employment [Nov. 1978]". I quote at length from one of them at the end. However, as much as I respect Bill Norris, and as much as what he said about full employment and technology may have been true in the 1970s, I feel it is a lot less true now that robotics, AI, and other forms of automation, along with better design, better materials, expanded infrastructure, the internet, eventually cheaper energy via PV and fusion, and so on are making *most* human labor less economically valuable in comparison. As predicted in the 1960s and before, the income-through-jobs link is being stretched to the breaking point for *most* people, and wage income is increasingly problematical as being the primary way families gain the right to consume the products of industry. Ultimately, some form of basic income or social credit is needed to distribute purchasing power under 21st century capitalism (or we need to a new form of economics entirely emphasizing subsistence, gift, or planned transactions). *Full* employment is not the solution, if it ever was. Full employment also sidesteps the issue of "good" employment as far as meaningful jobs, worker autonomy, or worker skill increases. *Good* employment is still a great idea though, like E.F. Schumacher talks about in "Buddhist Economics" or "Good Work". Of course, Bill Norris was all about "good employment" and treating workers well by pioneering the Employee Assistance Plan (EAR) and so on -- stuff that other corporations, even Google, have copied decades later but without the "creating jobs for poor uneducated people in the inner-city" focus.
As to perspective on patents and copyrights, in practice I don't feel they work to the advantage of our overall global culture at this point, given the costs of chilling effects and re-invention. The fan produced "Star Trek Continues" shows what is possible when hundreds of volunteers get together to make and fund something:
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
Lawyers get paid big bucks for mastering essentially a public domain of knowledge and contributing to that public domain by court cases and tailoring application of that public domain to specific individual needs. If the public domain works for lawyers, why should it not work for engineers and programmers and writers?
Independent individual innovators in the USA are particularly disadvantaged compare to innovators in, say, India or China that are less respectful of such things. I can understand the argument for patents and copyrights in an economy based primarily on exchange transactions as a way to get development funds from investors who plan to recoup their investment via imposing "artificial scarcity" via an information monopoly granted and ultimately enforced at gunpoint by the government for the patent of copyright. But at the same time, patents and copyrights hold back the emergence of a gift economy and the systematic organization and distillation of global knowledge and culture. For all the economic arguments, creating "artificial scarcity" remains something of an immoral act. About the only justification I can think of for "artificial scarcity" (other than fiscal survival in our primitive civilization) is perhaps, done for security or "prime directive" reasons like, say, keeping the plans for a zero-point energy device out of the hands of a scarcity-oriented culture that would ironically likely just blow itself up with such a device fighting over oil fields. BTW, my ironic site: http://artificialscarcity.com/
Here is a self-assessed copyright tax idea I put together around the early 2000s, inspired by someone slashdot sig of something like "if it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"
http://journalism.berkeley.edu...
"It may prove difficult in the short term to reduce the term of copyrights which have already been extended. Also, the forces pushing perpetual copyright are strong. However, there is another route, which may be easier, employing the concepts of Aikido -- moving with the strong force and redirecting it in a better way. Rather than fight to reduce the maximum term of copyrights, consider that existing and future copyrights could be taxed annually just like real estate as long as they are kept from the public domain. This uses a market-based approach to limit the external costs of copyright monopolies."
I'm a big Smalltalk/Kay/Ingalls/etc. fan since the 1981 Byte article on it, and I started using it in the 1980s, buying a copy of ObjectWorks the day before the great earthquake in CA, which took weeks to arrive because of the quake (even if they charged my credit card the same day).
https://archive.org/details/by...
I was involved for a time with the Squeak community, trying to get the license straightened out and get the system to be more modular and support more standard widgets -- all to little avail, but years later others did that. I agree JavaScript across the web is the best we have as far as being like it that has received mass option. Following on Dan Ingall's move to JavaScript (with the Lively Kernel), I've been moving my own work there like with the most recent versions of Pointrel/Twirlip/etc. and other stuff.
As for DOS, QNX existed before DOS and was better. It had microkernel message passing and could operate as a (near) real-time OS. It supported multi-processing and multi-machines. DOS is a cheap plastic toy compared to an industrial strength QNX. IBM has its own Forth written by David Frank at IBM Research f(who I worked side-by-side with there). Forth would have made a better DOS than DOS, but IBM's PC division was separate from David's group. Can you imagine what the IBM PC's and large industry's evolution would have been like if the command prompt was Forth? Around that time, IBM also had the industrial/scientific CS9000 personal workstation for scientists that ran a UNIX-like system on top of a 68000. Imagine if that has become the standard -- people would not have spent so many years dealign with a funky Intel instruction set with an odd memory model.
And along the time you wrote your 1982 essay, there was the beginning of the French Minitel system which started in 1978.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
In that essay, you mention one-way vs. two-way communications (as you knew as a possibility from PLATO). My wife's work connects to helping a community reclaim its own stories compared to mass-produced ones. My own (long term, still ongoing for 30 years) ideas connect to knowledge representation via the Pointrel system and a social semantic desktop (but I'd be the first to say the ideas are incomplete, have been passed by in many ways, and have not taken off, although the Pointrel ideas may have helped in some small way to inspire WordNet started by my undergrad advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller as I was graduating).
You wrote: "With the precipitous drop in the price of information technology, computer-based communication has come within the technical and economic reach of the mass-market.
I wonder if you ever read Theodore Sturgeon's" 1950s sci-fi short story, "The Skills of Xanadu" about nanotech-like crystal belts that crete a distributed computer network for sharing information and more? That story has apparently inspired many technical people from a master inventor at IBM Research (but he focused on the nanotech) to Ted Nelson. I asked Ted about the story when he gave a talk at IBM Research, and he said he had been looking for it but forgot the name -- ironic as the name Xanadu comes from the story. If you have not listened to or read that story, I think you would *really* like it based on your writings and the potential of the internet for digital democracy:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
https://books.google.com/books...
The first all electronic digital computer invented at Ames Iowa (Berry/Atanasoff). Sad about what happened with Berry. For a time, I lived next door in Iowa to someone involved in a group building a replica of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Between the first such computer and PLATO, the Midwest really pioneered modern networked computing. So, it is strange that Silicon Valley pretty much gets all the credit for essentially just re-inventing or re-packaging decades old stuff. It seems too easy to give huge credit for innovation to companies for, say, introducing new CPU instruction sets that are little different in concept than the previous ones. But, as much as I respect Doug Engelbart in CA and the 1968 "the mother of all demos" and his later work with Augment (and I took his 2000 colloquium and participated with great enjoyment in related discussions), PLATO started in 1960.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Of course IBM in New York did much too, including developing the VM idea in the late 1960s. Although Chuck Moore "discovered" Forth (essentially a VM-like-approach) around the same time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
It can be frustrating to be in Slashdot discussions where so much of this history is forgotten. And no doubt there is tons more I don't know about the history. Wish I had paid more attention in Michael Mahoney's class on the history of technology at Princeton, although that was just as he was playing around with PCs and before he got deeper into the history of computing.
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/...
The question of who gets "credit" for ideas and innovations in the public eye might be explained in part based on what you wrote around 1982, with perhaps considering people in Silicon Valley and Redmond are often more feudalists than pioneers, even if they claim to be pioneers?
You wrote: "Actually, this is an ancient problem that keeps rearing its ugly head in many places in many forms. In my industry its called the "Whiz Kids vs. MBAs" syndrome. Others have termed it "Western Cowboys vs. Eastern Bankers". The list is without end. I prefer to view it as a more stable historical pattern: "Pioneers vs. Feudalists". Pioneers are skilled at manipulating unpeopled environments to suit their needs whereas feudalists are skilled at manipulating peopled environments to suit their needs. Although, these are not necessarily exclusive traits, people do seem to specialize toward one end or the other simply because both skills require tremendous discipline to master and people have limited time to invest in learning. Pioneers want to be left alone to do their work and enjoy its fruits. Feudalists say "no man is an island" and feel the pioneer is a "hick" or worse, an escapist. Feudalists view themselves as lords and pioneers as serfs. Pioneers view feudalists as either irrelevant or as some sort of inevitable creeping crud devouring everything in its path. At their best, feudalists represent the stable balance and harmony exhibited by Eastern philosophy. At their worst, feudalists represent the tyrannical predation of pioneers unable to escape domination. At their best, pioneers represent the freedom, diversity and respect for the individual represented by Western philosophy. At their worst, pioneers represent the inefficient, destructive exploitation of virgin environs."
Still, we need both the individual (or organization) and the broader network to do good work (and networks can include a lot of "stigmergy" as a means of coordinating individuals via artifact construction). I love Manuel De Landa's ideas on the interaction of meshwork and hierarchy, and I have quoted this over and over because it is one of the most insightful ideas (for our time) I've ever read:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible."
One has to admit that having *any* standard like DOS/Windows, or HTML5/CSS/JavaScript, no matter how bad, generally provides a lot of value in terms of people being able to build on top of it. I use Macs mostly these days for a desktop after years with Debian, but I have to admit the backwards-compatibility of Windows is better than either (and far better than Mac). It remains a shame that better standards like QNX or Scheme/Self/Smalltalk often existed before those things were created. Which standard "wins" is often so arbitrary and often reflects a "worse is better" approach which pushes needless work out to the periphery that could be avoided by just a slightly better standard (like if JavaScript did not have default globals and if it had a standard module loader from the start). I like your idea of taxing the winner.
I liked the "continuous approval voting" (CAV) in your 1982 essay. You wrote: "In CAV, a group of people who associate with each other select a representative from among themselves. Each member has an "approval list" which only they can see and alter. On this list, they give the name of every individual they feel is competent to be their representative. The person whose name appears on the most approval lists is the representative. At any time, a member may change their approval list. That change could put another at the top of the approval heap and therefore force a recall of the previous representative. A hierarchy of such groups could grow to unlimited size, still with no campaigns and everyone evaluating only those who they are in a position to associate with. Of course, thresholds for recall, terms of office and other embellishments may be included to optimize the system for particular purposes. The point is that this represents just one of many new forms of democracy that could change the way privilege and accountability are allocated in our institutions."
While we may not see that in US elections any time soon, in a away, we do see something a bit like it in FOSS projects, where people fork them and walk away from them (like the Debian systemd conflict). I can wonder if the CAV idea could be more directly applied to such FOSS project management, including adapting it to the issue of trademark control and forking? Another related idea to consider is Dee Hock's "Chaordic" model. That has more to do with the boundaries of groups as they exists within larger groups or overlap with each other though rather than choosing "leadership". Perhaps one challenge of applying CAV to FOSS is it assumes well-defined organizations from the start rather than a sort of continuos fluidity in sets of associations based on constantly shifting levels of trust? As Clay Shirky mentions in his essay "A group is its own worst enemy", it is hard to make software that asses reputation, but humans tend to do that internally on their own fairly well (or at least maybe could with the right additional tools like feedback on number of posts and so on, like Stack Overflow or Amazon does, and Slashdot does in its own ways which.
I agree with Hurga's comment from 2012:
Still, ideas are often "in the air" in some sense -- not to discount hard work or reflection. You had seen what was possible with PLATO, and so that helped inform ideas about next steps. Still, I can see that people in certain places and time who are part of a social community can learn so much so quickly about priorities and options that individuals, even informed by libraries of books, may struggle to re-invent and re-learn.
On your implementation ideas mentioned there, I to have been enamored of a Forth/Smalltalk hybrid, and have posted on that on the Squeak developer list many years ago. It would be so cool to have a multi-processor Smalltalk easily understandable from the ground up. Alas, I have many half-baked ideas (including OSCOMAK and the Pointrel system) but so little time.
BTW, if you have any advice on diet/exercise/lifestyle as to how you've managed to remain so sharp and engaged for so long, despite an uphill battle against bad standards and other social woes, I'm all ears!
=== Bill Norris quotation
Of Bill Norris' talks mentioned above, this one is perhaps the most relevant there is to the topic robots taking all the jobs, quoted at length
"Technology and Full Employment [Nov. 1978]"
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
"Technological innovation is the wellspring of new jobs. To help solve the problem of unemployment, technological innovation must be increased by making existing technology more available; by accelerating the creation of new technology, and devising more effective means of applying technology.
The major focus must be on unemployment â" identifying and stimulating the private sector to undertake projects for creating new jobs. The central vehicle for coordinating the resources of all segments of society should be regional development offices. These offices will facilitate programs that create jobs by addressing the needs of society. Suggested programs include fostering entrepreneurial enterprise, developing alternate energy sources, revitalizing urban centers, reducing minority youth unemployment, and developing alternatives to capital- and fossil fuel-intensive methods of farming.
Legislative actions are required to achieve these goals. The types of projects that need to be undertaken can be the same as those proposed in the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Plan of the Humphrey/Hawkins Bill. All sectors of society must work together to solve the problem of unemployment. Only from this united effort will come the needed jobs and the enduring solutions to the other major problems of our global society.
The opportunity to participate in this forum is greatly appreciated. It would be most gratifying if I were able to contribute to a long-term solu tion to unemployment, because I believe it is the nation's number one problem.
Not only are more jobs needed, but almost as important, more skilled jobs. The unemployment problem will become even more critical as in the next ten years another twenty million new jobs will be required. This would be the largest increase of any decade in our history; in the last ten years only thirteen million were created.
The basic question is whether the U.S. can increase jobs and still improve productivity or whether this is another situation where we only can make trade-offs: are we faced with a choice between more automation, better productivity, and fewer jobs on the one hand or more jobs, less efficiency, more inflation, increased government pay outs and deficits on the other?
This apparent dilemma is solvable through increased technological innovation. Technological innovation is the wellspring of new jobs. Capital investment is also a source of jobs and capital is required to support technological innovation. A dollar invested in technology will create more jobs and return more income than the same amount invested in capital equipment.
Technological innovation is one of the key factors in productivity improvement, along with capital investment and employee training.
For example, one of the most serious societal problems that's closely related to employment is the achievement of more abundant and less costly sources of energy. Our economy is utterly dependent on cheap and readily available gas and oil for energy. Within twenty to thirty years, world production will begin to fall off. Considering that fifteen to twenty years are required to get meaningful results from the average new development, there is precious little time available to avoid disaster.
There are many other major societal problems crying for more attention. These include the improvement in energy conservation, greater environmental protection, new materials, less costly food production, more efficient water conservation, revitalization of inner cities, better education, better health care and improved productivity.
Solutions to this vast array of major problems, along with a nationwide increase in technological innovation, will in the long run, provide millions of private industry jobs that must be part of a systematic route to full employment. What is required are jobs that are created from products or services to meet the country's long-range needs. This should be our main thrust for job creation. As a businessman, I have been involved for over 30 years in establishing small businesses that have grown and have provided needed products and services and, along the way, more than 40,000 jobs.
So I believe that leadership for planning and implementing full employment programs must be provided by business, working in coop eration with universities, government, labor unions and other major segments of society. These programs should be planned so that they are in accord with the national goals and priorities embodied in the full employment bill. Our major societal problems are massive ones and massive resources are required for their solution. The best ap proach is that they are viewed as business opportunities with an appropriate sharing of cost between business and government. Economic growth will be stimulated along with job creation. The key resource needed is technology, i.e., the knowhow to solve the problems. In order to create jobs, improve productivity and increase technological innovation at affordable costs, we need to make existing technology more available and to devise more effective means of putting technologies to work. Only by doing this will we achieve the most timely solu tions to our major societal problems.
Policy changes and productive legislation are needed, summarized as follows:
A. A clearly stated redirection of policy to achieve the broader use of government-sponsored R&D results in the creation of jobs.
B. Stimulation of government laboratories and universities to make their technologies more available and to aid in their efficient trans fer. This can be achieved by allocating a percentage (five to ten percent) of project funds to information and technology transfer, and by assigning added responsibility and incentive to scientists and engineers doing the work.
C. Encouragement of government agencies having informational data bases to make them available to the private sector at minimal cost.
D. Provision of tax incentives or direct payments to encourage private companies to sell and/or lease their technology for the public good. This type of government support would only be a front-end requirement to stimulate the initial creation of jobs.
But the increase in technological innovation that could reasonably be expected in today's environment would fall far short of what is required. The reason is primarily the indifference of business toward major societal problems. For too long business has been preoccupied doing the things that are the most profitable and leaving the solutions to most of the major problems of society as the responsibility of government. Meanwhile, these problems are growing to disastrous proportions.
To conclude, what I am saying is that the old ways are not working, partly because solving the unemployment problem is always "Someone Else's" problem. Everyone really only wants to keep doing what he is doing and doesn't want to change. What I am proposing is to enlist all sectors of society to solve the problem of unemployment. In working together to help solve it, there will be not only a better understanding of the origin of jobs, but also of the enormous difficulty to create them. Out of this effort will also come a much better and badly needed understanding and respect for each sector of society by the others. Most important, out of this effort will come more jobs."