The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to cover yet another of the groundbreaking technologies to come out of MIT: Sketchpad. 

Ivan Sutherland is a true computer scientist. After getting his masters from Caltech, he migrated to the land of the Hackers and got a PhD from MIT in 1963. The great Claud Shannon supervised his thesis and Marvin Minsky was on the thesis review committee. But he wasn’t just surrounded by awesome figures in computer science, he would develop a critical piece between the Memex in Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” and the modern era of computing: graphics. 

What was it that propelled him from PhD candidate to becoming the father of computer graphics? The 1962-1963 development of a program called Sketchpad. Sketchpad was the ancestor of the GUI, object oriented programming, and computer graphics. In fact, it was the first graphical user interface. And it was all made possible by the TX-2, a computer developed at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory by Wesley Clark and others. The TX-2 was transistorized and so fast. Fast enough to be truly interactive. A lot of innovative work had come with the TX-0 and the program would effectively spin off as Digital Equipment Corporation and the PDP series of computers. 

So it was bound to inspire a lot of budding computer scientists to build some pretty cool stuff. Sutherland’s Sketchpad used a light pen. These were photosensitive devices that worked like a stylus but would send light to the display, activating dots on a cathode ray tube (CRT). Users could draw shapes on a screen for the first time. Whirlwind at MIT had allowed highlighting objects, but this graphical interface to create objects was a new thing altogether, inputing data into a computer as an object instead of loading it as code, as could then be done using punch cards. 

Suddenly the computer could be used for art. There were toggle-able switches that made lines bigger. The extra memory that was pretty much only available in the hallowed halls of government-funded research in the 60s opened up so many possibilities. Suddenly, computer-aided design, or CAD, was here. 

Artists could create a master drawing and then additional instances on top, with changes to the master reverberating through each instance. They could draw lines, concentric circles, change ratios. And it would be 3 decades before MacPaint would bring the technology into homes across the world. And of course AutoCAD, making Autodesk one of the greatest software companies in the world. 

The impact of Sketchpad would be profound. Sketchpad would be another of Doug Englebart’s inspirations when building the oN-Line System and there are clear correlations in the human interfaces. For more on NLS, check out the episode of this podcast called the Mother of All Demos, or watch it on YouTube. 

And Sutherland’s work would inspire the next generation: people who read his thesis, as well as his students and coworkers. 

Sutherland would run the Information Processing Techniques Office for the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency after Lick returned to MIT. He also taught at Harvard, where he and students developed the first virtual reality system in 1968, decades before it was patented by VPL research in 1984. Sutherland then went to the University of Utah, where he taught Alan Kay who gave us object oriented programming in smalltalk and the concept of the tablet in the Dynabook, and Ed Catmull who co-founded Pixar and many other computer graphics pioneers. 

He founded Evans and Sutherland, with the man that built the computer science department at the University of Utah and their company launched the careers of John Warnock, the founder of Adobe and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics. His next company would be acquired by Sun Microsystems and become Sun Labs. He would remain a Vice President and fellow at Sun and a visiting scholar at Berkeley. 

For Sketchpad and his other contributions to computing, he would be awarded a Computer Pioneer Award, become a fellow at the ACM, receive a John von Neumann Medal, receive the Kyoto Prize, become a fellow at the Computer History Museum, and receive a Turing Award. 

I know we’re not supposed to make a piece of software an actor in a sentence, but thank you Sketchpad. And thank you Sutherland. And his students and colleagues who continued to build upon his work.

The first episode of this podcast went up on July 7th 2019. One year later, we’ve managed to cover a lot of ground, but we’re just getting started. Over 70 episodes and so far, my favorite was on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

They may seem disconnected at times, but they’re not. There’s a large outline and it’s all research being included in my next book.

The podcast began with an episode on the prehistory of the computer. And we’ve had episodes on the history of batteries, electricity, superconductors, and more - to build up to what was necessary in order for these advances in computing to come to fruition.

We’ve celebrated Grace Hopper and her contributions. But we’d like to also cover a lot of other diverse voices in computing. 

There was a series on Windows, covering Windows 1, 3, , and 95. But we plan to complete that series with a look at 98, Millineum, NT, 2000, and on. We covered Android, CP/M, OS/2 and VMS but want to get into the Apple operating systems, SUN, and Linux, etc.

Speaking of Apple… We haven’t gotten started with Apple. We covered the lack of an OS story in the 90s - but there’s a lot to unpack around the founding of Apple, Steve Jobs and Woz, and the re-emergence of Apple and their impact there. 

And since that didn’t happen in a vacuum, there were a lot of machines in that transition from the PC being a hobbyist market to being a full-blown industry. We talked through Radioshack, Commodore, the Altair, the Xerox Alto, 

We have covered some early mainframes like the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, ENIAC, the story of Z-1 and Zuse, and even supercomputers like Cray, but still need to tell the later story, bridging the gap between the mainframe, the minicomputer, and traditional servers we might find in a data center today. 

We haven’t told the history of the Internet. We’ve touched on bits and pieces, but want to get into those first nodes that got put onto ARPAnet, the transition to NSFnet, and the merging of the nets into the Internet. And we covered sites like Friendster, Wikipedia, and even the Netscape browser, but the explosion of the Internet has so many other stories left to tell. Literally a lifetime’s worth. 

For example, we covered Twitter and Snapchat but Google and Facebook

We covered the history of object-oriented languages. We also covered BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, Java, But still want to look at AWS and the modern web service architecture that’s allowed for an explosion of apps and web apps. 

Mobility. We covered the Palm Pilot and a little on device management, but still need to get into the iPhone and Samsung and the underlying technology that enabled mobility. 

And enterprise software and compliance.

Knowing the past informs each Investment thesis. We covered Y Combinator but there are a lot of other VC/Private equity firms to look at.

But what I thought I knew of the past isn’t always correct. As an example, coming from the Apple space, we have a hero worship of Steve Jobs that, for example, reading the Walter Isaacson book often conflicts with. He was a brilliant man, but complicated. And the more I read and research, the more I need to unpack many of own assumptions across the industry. 

I was here for a lot of this, yet my understanding is still not what it could be.

Interviews from people who wrote code to put on lunar landers, who invented technology like spreadsheets, 

I wish more people could talk about their experiences openly, but even 40 years later, some are still bound by NDAs

I’ve learned so much and I look forward to learning so much more!

Haarlem, 1956. No, this isn’t an episode about New York, we’re talking Haarlem, Netherlands. Guido Van Rossum is born then, and goes on to college in Amsterdam where he gets a degree in math and computer science. He went on to work at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, or CWI. Here, he worked on BSD Unix and the ABC Programming language, which had been written by Lambert Meertens, Leo Geurts, and Steven Pemberton from CWI. 

He’d worked on ABC for a few years through the 1980s and started to realize some issues. It had initially been a monolithic implementation, which made it hard to implement certain new features, like being able to access file systems and functions within operating systems. But Meertens was an editor of the ALGOL 68 Report and so ABC did have a lot of the ALGOL 68 influences that are prevalent in a number of more modern languages and could compile for a number of operating systems. It was a great way to spend your 20s if you’re Guido.

But after some time building interpreters and operating systems, many programmers think they have some ideas for what they might do if they just… started over. Especially when they hit their 30s. And so as we turned the corner towards the increasingly big hair of the 1990s, Guido started a new hobby project over the holiday break for Christmas 1989. 

He had been thinking of a new scripting language, loosely based on ABC. One that Unix and C programmers would be interested in, but maybe not as cumbersome as C had become. So he got to work on an interpreter. One that those open source type hackers might be interested in. ALGOL had been great for math, but we needed so much more flexibility in the 90s, unlike bangs. Bangs just needed Aquanet.

He named his new creation Python because he loved Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They had a great TV show from 1969 to 1974, and a string of movies in the 70s and early 80s. They’ve been popular amongst people in IT since I got into IT.

Python is a funny language. It’s incredibly dynamic. Like bash or a shell, we can fire it up, define a variable and echo that out on the fly. But it can also be procedural, object-oriented, or functional. And it has a standard library but is extensible so you can add libraries to do tons of new things that wouldn’t make sense to be built in (and so bloat and slow down) other apps. For example, need to get started with big array processing for machine learning projects? Install TensorFlow or Numpy. Or according to your machine learning needs you have PyTorch, SciPi, Pandas, and the list goes on. 

In 1994, 20 developers met at the US National Standards Bureau in Maryland, at the first workshop and the first Python evangelists were minted. It was obvious pretty quickly that the modular nature and ease of scripting, but with an ability to do incredibly complicated tasks, was something special. What was drawing this community in. Well, let’s start with the philosophy, the Zen of Python as Tim Peters wrote it in 1999:

• Beautiful is better than ugly.
• Explicit is better than implicit.
• Simple is better than complex.
• Complex is better than complicated.
• Flat is better than nested.
• Sparse is better than dense.
• Readability counts.
• Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
• Although practicality beats purity.
• Errors should never pass silently.
• Unless explicitly silenced.
• In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
• There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.
• Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
• Now is better than never.
• Although never is often better than right now.[a]
• If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
• If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
• Namespaces are one honking great idea—let's do more of those!

Those are important enough to be semi-official and can be found by entering “import this” into a python shell. Another reason python became important is that it’s multi-paradigm. When I said it could be kinda’ functional. Sure. Use one big old function for everything if you’re moving from COBOL and just don’t wanna’ rethink the world. Or be overly object-oriented when you move from Java and build 800 functions to echo hello world in 800 ways. Wanna map reduce your lisp code. Bring it. Or add an extension and program in paradigms I’ve never heard of. The number of libraries and other ways to extend python out there is pretty much infinite. 

And that extensibility was the opposite of ABC and why Python is special. This isn’t to take anything away from the syntax. It’s meant to be and is an easily readable language. It’s very Dutch, with not a lot of frills like that. It uses white space much as the Dutch use silence. I wish it could stare at me like I was an idiot the way the Dutch often do. But alas, it doesn’t have eyeballs. Wait, I think there’s a library for that. 

So what I meant by white space instead of punctuation is that it uses an indent instead of a curly bracket or keyword to delimit blocks of code. Increase the tabbing and you move to a new block. Many programmers do this in other languages just for readability. Python does it for code. 

Basic statements included, which match or are similar to most languages, include if, for, while, try, raise, except, class, def, with, break, continue, pass, assert, yield, import and print until python 3 when that became a function. It’s amazing what you can build with just a dozen and a half statements in programming. You can have more, but interpreters get slower and compilers get bigger and all that… 

Python also has all the expressions you’d expect in a modern language, especial lambdas. And methods. And duck typing, or suitability for a method is determined by the properties of an object rather than the type. This can be great. Or a total pain. Which is why they’ll eventually be moving to gradual typing. 

The types of objects are bool, byte array, bytes, complex, dict, ellipsis (which I overuse), float, frozen set, int, list, NoneType (which I try to never use), NotImplementedType, range, set, str, and tuple so you can pop mixed tapes into a given object. Not to be confused with a thruple, but not to not be confused I guess… 

Another draw of python was the cross-compiler concept. An early decision was to make python cable to talk to c. This won over the Unix and growing Linux crowds. And today we have cross-compilers for C and C++, Go, .Net, Java, R, machine code, and of course, Java.  

Python 2 came in 2000. We got a garbage collection system and a few other features and 7 point releases over the next 10 years. Python 3 came in 2008 and represented a big change. It was partially backward-compatible but was the first Python release that wasn’t fully backward-compatible. We have had 7 point releases in the past 10 years as well. 3 brought changes to function print, simpler syntax, moved to storing strings in unicode by default, added a range function, changed how global variables react inside for-loops, implemented a simpler set of rules for order comparisons, and much more. 

At this point developers were experimenting with deploying microservices. Microservices is an a software development architecture where we build small services, perhaps just a script or a few scripts daisy chained together, that do small tasks. These are then more highly maintainable, more easily testable, often more scalable, can be edited and deployed independently, can be structured around capabilities, and each of the services can be owned by the team that created it with a contract to ensure we don’t screw over other teams as we edit them. 

Amazon introduced AWS Lambda in 2014 and it became clear quickly that the new micro services paradigm was accelerating the move of many SaaS-based tools to a micro services architecture. Now, teams could build in node or python or java or ruby or c# or heaven forbid Go. They could quickly stand up a small service and get teams able to consume the back end service in a way that is scalable and doesn’t require standing up a server or even a virtual server, which is how we did things in EC2. The containerization concept is nothing new. We had chroot in 1979 with Unix v7 and Solaris brought us containerization in 2004. But those were more about security. Docker had shown up in 2013 and the idea of spinning up a container to run a script and give it its own library and lib container, that was special. And Amazon made it more so. 

Again, libraries and modularization. And the modular nature is key for me. Let’s say you need to do image processing. Pillow makes it easier to work with images of almost any image type you can think of. For example, it can display an image, convert it into different types, automatically generate thumbnails, run sooth, blur, contour, and even increase the detail. Libraries like that take a lot of the friction out of learning to display and manage images. 

But Python can also create its own imagery. For example, Matplotlib generates two dimensional graphs and plots points on them. These can look as good as you want them to look and actually allows us to integrate with a ton of other systems. 

Van Rossum’s career wasn’t all python though. He would go on to work at NIST then CNRI and Zope before ending up at Google in 2005, where he created Mondrian, a code review system. He would go to Dropbox in 2013 and retire from professional life in 2019. He stepped down as the “Benevolent dictator for life” of the Python project in 2018 and sat on the Python Steering Council for a term but is no longer involved. It’s been one of the most intriguing “Transfers of power” I’ve seen but Python is in great hands to thrive in the future. This is the point when Python 2 was officially discontinued, and Python 3.5.x was thriving. 

By thriving, as of mid-202, there are over 200,000 packages in the Python Package Index. Things from web frameworks and web scraping to automation, to graphical user interfaces, documentation, databases, analytics, networking, systems administrations, science, mobile, image management and processing. If you can think of it, there’s probably a package to help you do it. And it’s one of the easier languages. 

Here’s the thing. Python grew because of how flexible and easy it is to use. It didn’t have the same amount of baggage as other languages. And that flexibility and modular nature made it great for workloads in a changing and more micro-service oriented world. Or, did it help make the world more micro-service oriented. It was a Christmas hobby project that has now ballooned into one of the most popular languages to write software in the word. You know what I did over my last holiday break? Sleep. I clearly should have watched more Monty Python so the short skits could embolden me to write a language perfect for making the programmers equivalent, smaller, more modular scripts and functions. So as we turn the corner into all the holidays in front of us, consider this while stuck at home, what hobby project can we propel forward and hopefully end up with the same type of impact Guido had. A true revolutionary in his own right. 

So thank you to everyone involved in python and everyone that’s contributed to those 200k+ projects. And thank you, listeners, for continuing to tun in to the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you.

“If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will be blown in.” Deng Xiaoping perfectly summed up the Chinese perspective on the Internet during his 11 year tenure as the president of the People’s Republic of China, a position he held from 1978 to 1989. Yes, he opened up China with a number of market-economy reforms and so is hailed as the “Architect of Modern China.” However, he did so with his own spin. 

The Internet had been on the rise globally and came to China in 1994. The US had been passing laws since the 1970s to both aid and limit the uses of this new technology, but China was slow to the adoption up until this point. 

1997, the Ministry of Public Security prohibits the use of the Internet to “disclose state secrets or injure the interests of the state or society. The US had been going through similar attempts to limit the Internet with the Telecommunications Decency Act in 1996 and the US Supreme Court ended up striking that down in 1997. And this was a turning point for the Internet in the US and in China. Many a country saw what was about to happen and governments were grappling with how to handle the cultural impact of technology that allowed for unfettered globally interconnected humans. 

By 1998, the Communist Party stepped in to start a project to build what we now call the Great Firewall of China. They took their time and over eight years but a technology that they could fully control. Fang Binxing graduated with a PhD from Harbin Institute of Technology and moved to the National Computer Network Emergency Response technical Team where he became the director in 2000. It’s in this capacity that he took over creating the Great Firewall.

They watched what people were putting on the Internet and by 2002 were able to make 300 arrests. They were just getting started and brought 10s of thousands of police in to get their first taste of internet and video monitoring and of this crazy facial recognition technology. 

By 2003 China was able to launch the Golden Shield Project. Here, they straight-up censored a number of web sites, looking for pro-democracy terms, news sources that spoke out in favor of the Tiananmen Square protests, anyone that covered police brutality, and locked down the freedom of speech. They were able to block blogs and religious organizations, lock down pornography, and block anything the government could consider subversive, like information about the Dalai Lama. 

And US companies played along. Because money. Organizations like Google and Cisco set up systems in the country and made money off China. But also gave ways around it, like providing proxy servers and VPN software. We typically lump Golden Shield and the Great Firewall of China together, but Golden Shield was built by Shen Changxiang and the Great Firewall is mainly run in the three big internet pipes coming into the country, basically tapping the gateway in and out, where Golden Shield is more distributed and affiliated with public security and so used to monitor domestic connections. 

As anyone who has worked on proxies and various filters know, blocking traffic is a constantly moving target. The Chinese government blocks IP addresses and ranges. New addresses are always coming online though. They implement liar DNS and hijack DNS, sometimes providing the wrong IP to honeypot certain sites. But people can build local hosts files and do DNS over TLS. They use transparent proxies to block, or filter, specific URLs and URI schemes. That can be keyword based and bypassed by encrypting server names. 

They also use more advanced filtering options. Like Packet forging where they can do a TCP reset attack which can be thwarted by ignoring the resets. And of course man in the middle attacks, because you know, state owned TLS so they can just replace the GitHub, Google, or iCloud certs - with has each happened. They employ quality of service filtering. This is deep packet inspection that mirrors traffic and then analyze and create packet loss to slow traffic to unwanted sites. This helps thwart VPNs, SSH Tunneling and Tor but can be bypassed by spoofing good traffic, or using pluggable transports. Regrettably that can be as processor intensive as the act of blocking. Garlic routing is used when onion routing can’t be. 

All of this is aided by machine learning. Because like we said, it’s a constantly moving target. And ultimately, pornography and obscene contact is blocked. Discussion about protests is stomped out. Any descent about whether Hong Kong or Taiwan are part of China is disappeared. Democracy is squashed. 

By 2006, Chinese authorities could track access both centrally and from local security bureaus. The government could block and watch what the people were doing. Very 1984. By 2008, Internet cafe’s were logging which customers used which machines. Local officials could crack down further than the central government or tow the party line. 

2010, Google decides they’re not playing along any more and shuts down their own censoring. 2016, the WTO defines the Great Firewall as a trade barrier. Wikipedia has repeatedly been blocked and unblocked since the Chinese version was launched in 2001 but as of 2019 all Wikipedia versions are completely blocked in China.

The effect of many of these laws and engineering projects has been to exert social control over the people of China. But it also acts as a form of protectionism. Giving the people Baidu and not Google means a company like Baidu has a locked in market, making Baidu worth over $42 billion. Sure, Alphabet, the parent of Google, is worth almost a trillion dollars but in their minds, at least China is protecting some market for Baidu. And giving the people Alibaba instead of Amazon gives people the ability to buy goods and China protects a half-trillion dollar market capitalized company, in moneys that would be capitalizing Amazon, who currently stands at $1.3 trillion. 

Countries like Cuba and Zimbabwe then leverage technology from China to run their own systems. With such a large number of people only able to access parts of the Internet that their government feels is ok, many have referred to the Internet as the Splinternet. China has between 700 and 900 million internet users with over half using broadband and over 500 million using a smart phone. But the government owns the routes they use in the form of CSTNET, ChinaNet, CERNET, and CHINAGBN but expanding to 10 access points in the last few years, to handle the increased traffic. 

Sites like Tencent and Sina.com provide access to millions of users. With that much traffic they’re now starting to export some technologies, like TikTok, launched in 2016. And whenever a new app or site comes along based in China, it often comes with plenty of suspect. And sometimes that comes with a new version of TikTok that removes potentially harmful activity. 

And sometimes Baidu Maps and Tianditu are like Google Maps but Chinese like the skit in the show Silicon Valley. Like AliPay for Stripe. Or Soso Baike for Wikipedia. And there are plenty of viral events in China that many Americans miss, like the Black Dorm Boys or Sister Feng. Or “very erotic, very violent” or the Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures and the list goes on. And there’s a China slang like 520 meaning I love You or 995 meaning Help. More examples of splinternetting or just cultural differences? You decide.

And the protectionism. That goes a lot of different ways. N Jumps is Chinese slang to refer to the number of people that jump out of windows at Foxconn factories. We benefit from not-great working conditions. The introduction of services and theft of intellectual property would be a place where the price for that benefit is paid in full. And I’ve seen it estimated that roughly a third of sites are blocked by the firewall, a massive percentage and places where some of the top sites do not benefit from Chinese traffic. 

But suffice it to say that the Internet is a large and sprawling place. And I never want to be an apologist. But some of this is just cultural differences. And who am I to impose my own values on other countries when at least they have the Interwebs - online North Korea. Oh, who am I kidding… Censorship is bad. And the groups that have risen to give people the Internet and rights to access it and help people bypass controls put in place by oppressive governments. Those people deserve our thanks.

So thank you to everyone involved. Except the oppressors. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. Now go install ToR, if only to help those who need to access modern memes to do so. Your work is awesome sauce.

Have a great day.

The killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis gave the Black Lives Matter movement a new level of prominence and protesting racial injustice jumped into the global spotlight with protests spreading first to Louisville and then to practically every major city in the world. 

Protesting is nothing new but the impacts can be seen far and wide. From the civil rights protests and Vietnam War protests in the 60s they are a way for citizens to use their free speech to enact social change. After all, Amendment I states that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble."

The 90s was a weird time. In many ways desecularization was gaining momentum in the US and many of the things people feared have turned out to become reality. Many have turned their backs on religion in favor of technology. Neil Gaiman brought this concept to HBO by turning technology into a God. And whether they knew that was what they were worried about or not, the 90s saw a number of movements meant to impose the thought police into intruding into every day life. Battle lines were drawn by people like Tipper Gore, who wanted to slap a label on music and a long and steady backlash to those failures led to many of the culture battles we are fighting with today. These days we say “All Lives Matter” but we often really mean that life was simpler when we went to church.

And many go to church still. But not like we used to. Consider this. 70% of Americans went to church in 1976. Now it’s less than half. And less than a third have been to church in the past week. That shouldn’t take anything away from the impact religion has in the lives of many. But a societal shift has been occurring for sure. And the impact of a global, online, interconnected society is often under-represented.

Imagine this. We have a way of talking to other humans in practically every country in the world emerging. Before, we paid hefty long distance lines or had written communication that could take days or weeks to be delivered. And along comes this weird new medium that allowed us to talk to almost anyone, almost instantly. And for free. We could put images, sounds, and written words almost anonymously out there and access the same. And people did.

The rise of Internet porn wasn’t a thing yet. But we could come home from church and go online and find almost anything. And by anything, it could be porn. Today, we just assume we can find any old kind of porn anywhere but that wasn’t always the case. In fact, we don’t even consider sex education materials or some forms of nudity porn any more. We’ve become desensitized to it. But that wasn’t always the case. And that represented a pretty substantial change. And all societal changes, whether good or bad, deserve a good old fashioned backlash. Which is what the Telecommunications Decency Act title 5 was. 

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or EFF) had been anticipating the backlash. The legislation could fine or even incarcerate people for distributing offensive or indecent content. Battle lines were forming between those who wanted to turn librarians into the arbiters of free speech and those who thought all content should be open. 

Then as in now, the politicians did not understand the technology. They can’t. It’s not what got them elected. I’ve never judged that. But they understood that the boundaries of free speech were again being tested and they, as they have done for hundreds of years, wanted to try and limit the pushing of the boundaries. Because sometimes progress is uncomfortable. 

Enter the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign, which the EFF was organizing and the Center for Democracy and Technology. The Blue Ribbon campaign encouraged site owners to post images of ribbons on their sites in support. Now, at this point, no one argued these were paid actors. They branded themselves as Netizens and planned to protest. A new breed of protests online and in person. And protest they did. They did not want their Internet or the Internet 25 years later that we have inherited, to be censored. 

Works of art are free. Access to medical information that some might consider scandalous is free. And yes, porn is often free. We called people who ran websites webmasters back then. They were masters of zeros and ones in HTML. The webmasters thought people making laws didn’t understand what they were trying to regulate. They didn’t. But lawmakers get savvier every year. Just as the Internet becomes harder to understand. 

People like Shabir Safdar were unsung heroes. Patrick Leahy, the democratic senator from Vermont spoke out. As did Yahoo and Netscape. They wanted to regulate the Internet like they had done the television. But we weren’t having it. And then, surprisingly Bill Clinton signed the CDA into law. The pioneers of the Internet jumped into action. From San Francisco to the CDT in Brussels, they planned to set backgrounds black. I remember it happening but was too young to understand what it meant at the time. I just thought they were cool looking. 

It was February 8, 1996. And backgrounds were changed for 48 hours. 

The protests were covered by CNN, Time Magazine, the New York Times, and Wired. It got enough attention so the ACLU jumped into the fight. And ultimately the Act was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1997. Sandra Day O’Connor and Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the opinion. It was 9-0. The Internet we have today, for better or worse, was free. As free for posting videos of police killing young black men as it is to post nudes, erotic fiction, or ads to buy viagra. Could it be done again some day? Yes. Will it? Probably. Every few years ago legislators try and implement another form of the act. SOPA, COPA, and the list goes on. But again and again, we find these laws struck down. The thought police had been thwarted. 

As recent as 2012, Reddit wants to protest against SOPA and PIPA - so they try to repeat the blackout. The protests bring enough attention for the Supreme Court to hear a case and the new laws get overturned. Because free speech. And there’s hate speech sprinkled in there as well. Because the Internet helps surface the best and worst of humanity. But you know what, we’re better off for having all of it out there in the open, as hurtful and wonderful and beautiful and ugly as it all can be, according to our perspectives. And that’s the way it should be. Because the knowledge of all of it helps us to grow and be better and address that which needs to be addressed. 

And society will always grapple with adapting to technological change. That’s been human nature since Prometheus stole fire and gave it to humanity. Just as we’ve been trying to protect intellectual property and combat piracy and everything else that can but up against accelerating progress. It’s hard to know where the lines should be drawn. And globalism in the form of globally connected computers doesn’t make any of that any easier. 

So thank you to the heroes who forced this issue to prominence and got the backing to fight it back in the 90s. If it had been over-regulated we might not have the Internet as it is today. Just as it should be. Thank you for helping to protect free speech. Thank you for practicing your free speech. And least of all, thank you for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. Now go protest something!

Today we’re going to cover America Online, or AOL. 

The first exposure many people had to “going online’ was to hear a modem connect.

And the first exposure many had to electronic mail was the sound “you’ve got mail.”

But how did AOL rise so meteorically to help mainstream first going online in walled gardens and then connecting to the Internet?

It’s 1983. Steve Case joins a company called Control Video Corporation to bring online services to the now-iconic Atari 2600. CVC was bringing a service called Gameline to allow subscribers to rent games over a dialup connection. Case had grown up in Honolulu and then gone to Williams College in Massachusetts, which until the rise of the Internet culture had been a breeding ground for tech companies. Up to this point, the personal computer market had mostly been for hobbyists, but it was slowly starting to go mainstream. 

Case saw the power of pushing bits over modems. He saw the rise of ARPAnet and the merger of the nets that would create the Internet. The Internet had begun life as ARPAnet, a US Defense Department project, until 1981, when the National Science Foundation stepped in to start the process of networking non-defense-oriented computers. And by the time Case’s employer Control Video Corporation was trying to rent games for a dollar, something much larger than the video game market was starting to happen. 

From 1985 to 1993, the Internet, then mostly NSFNET, surged from 2,000 users to 2,000,000 users. In that time, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1991 at CERN, and Mosaic came out of the National Center for Supercomputing applications, or NCSA at the University of Illinois, quickly becoming the browser everyone wanted to use until Mark Andreeson left to form Netscape. In 1993 NSFNET began the process of unloading the backbone and helped the world develop the Internet. 

And the AOL story in that time frame was similar to that of many other online services, which we think of today as Internet Service Providers. The difference was that today these are companies individuals pay to get them on the Internet and then they were connecting people to private nets. When AOL began life in 1985, they were called Quantum Computer Services. Case began as VP of Marketing but would transition to CEO in 1991. 

But Case had been charged with strategy early on and they focused on networking Commodore computers with a service they called Q-Link, or Quantum Link. Up until that point, most software that connected computers together had been terminal emulators. But the dialup service they built used the processing power of the Commodore to connect to services they offered, allowing it to be much more scalable. They kept thinking of things to add to the service, starting with online chat using a service called Habitat in 1986. And by 1988 they were adding dedicated fiction with a series they called QuantumLink Serial. 

By 1988 they were able add AppleLink for Apple users and PC Link for people with IBM computers and IBM clones. By 1989 they were growing far faster than Apple and the deal with Apple soured and they changed their name to America Online. They had always included games with their product, but included a host of other services like news, chat, and mail. CompuServe changed everything when they focused on connecting people to the Internet in 1989, a model that AOL would eventually embrace. 

But they were all about community from the beginning. They connected groups, provided chat communities for specific interests, and always with the games. That focus on community was paying off. The first Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter Nights got huge. Sure there had been communities and Massively Multiplayer games. So most of the community initiatives weren’t new or innovative, just done better than others had done it before them. 

They launched AOL for DOS in 1991 and AOL for Windows in 1992. At this point, you paid by the hour to access the network. People would dial in, access content, write back offline, then dial back in to send stuff. A lot of their revenue came from overages. But they were growing at a nice and steady pace. In 1993 they gave access to Usenet to users. 

In the early 90s, half of the CDs being pressed were for installing AOL on computers. By 1994 they hit a million subscribers. That’s when they killed off PC Link and Q-Link to focus on the AOL service and just kept growing. But there were challengers, and at the time, larger competitors in the market. CompuServe had been early to market connecting people to the Internet but IBM and Sears had teamed up to bring Prodigy to market. The three providers were known as the big three when modems ran at 9,600 bits per second.

But as the mid-90s came around they bought WebCrawler in 1995 and sold it to Excite shortly thereafter, inking a deal with Excite to provide search services. They were up to 3 million users. In 1996, with downward pressure on pricing, they went to a flat $19.95 pricing model. This led to a spike in usage that they weren’t prepared for and a lot of busy signals, which caused a lot of users to cancel after just a short time using the service. And yet, they continued to grow. They inked a deal with Microsoft for AOL to be bundled with Windows and the growth accelerated. 

1997 was a big year. Case engineered a three0way deal where WorldCom bought CompuServe for $1.2 billion in stock and then sold it to AOL. This made way for a whole slew of competitors to grow, which is an often-unanticipated result of big acquisitions. This was also the year they released AIM, which gave us our first taste of a network effect messaging service. Even after leaving AOL many a subscriber hung on to AIM for a decade. That’s now been replaced by What’s App, Facebook Messenger, Text Messaging, Snapchat to some degree, and messaging features inside practically every tool, from Instagram and Twitter to more community based solutions like Slack and Microsoft Teams. AIM caused people to stay online longer. Which was great in an hourly model but problematic in a flat pricing model. Yet it was explosive until Microsoft and others stepped in to compete with the free service. It lasted until it was shut down in 2017. By then, I was surprised it was still running to be honest. 

In 1998 AOL spent $4.2 Billion to buy Netscape. And Netscape would never be the same. Everyone thought the Internet would become a huge mall at that point. But instead, that would have to wait for Amazon to emerge as the behemoth they now are. 

In 1999, AOL launched AOL Search and hit 10 Million users. AOL invested $800 million in Gateway and those CompuServe users put another 2.2 million subscribers on the board. They also bought Mapquest for $1.1 billion dollars. And here’s the thing, that playbook of owning the browser, community content, a shopping experience, content-content, maps, and everything else was really starting to become a playbook that others would follow in the dark ages after the collapse of AOL. And yes, that would be coming. All empires over-extend themselves eventually. 

In Y2k they made over $4 billion in subscriptions. 15 years of hard work was paying off. With over 23 million subscribers, their market valuation was at $224 billion in today’s money and check this out, only half of the US was online. But they could sense the tides changing. We could all feel the broadband revolution in the air. Maybe to diversify or maybe to grow into areas they hadn’t, AOL merged with media congomerate Time Warner in 2001, by paying $165 billion dollars for them in what was then the biggest merger (or reverse merger maybe) in history. 

This was a defining moment for the history of the Internet. AOL was clearly leveraging their entry point into the internet as a means of pivoting to the online advertising market and Warner Cable brought them into broadband. But this is where the company became overextended. Yes, old media and new media were meeting but it was obvious almost immediately that this was a culture clash and the company never really met the growth targets. Not only because they were overextended but also because so much money was being pumped into Internet startups that there were barbarians at every gate. And of course, the dot com bubble burst. Oh, and while only 1% of homes had broadband, that market was clearly about to pop and leave companies like AOL in the dust. But, now Time Warner and Time Warner Cable would soften that blow as it came. 

2002, over 26 million users. And that’s when the decline began. By then 12% of homes in the US were wired up to broadband, likely DSL, or Digital Subscriber Lines, at that time. 

Case left AOL in 2003 and the words AOL would get dropped from the name. The company was now just Time Warner again. 2004 brings a half billion dollar settlement with the SEC for securities fraud. Oops. More important than the cash crunch, it was a horrible PR problem at a time when subscribers were falling off and broadband had encroached with over a quarter of US homes embracing faster internet usage than anything dialup could offer. 

The advertising retooling continued as the number of subscribers fell. In 2007 AOL moved to New York to be closer to those Mad Men. By the way, the show Mad Men happened to start that year. This also came with layoffs. And by then, broadband had blanketed half of the US. And now, wireless Internet was being developed, although it would not start to encroach until about 2013. 

AOL and Time Warner get a divorce in 2009 when AOL gets spun back off into its own standalone company and Tim Armstrong is brought in from Google to run the place. They bought his old company Patch.com that year, to invest into more hyperlocal news. You know those little papers we all get for our little neighborhoods? They often don’t seem like tooooo much more than a zine from the 90s. Hyperlocal is information for a smaller community with a focus on the concerns and what matters to that cohort. 

2010 they buy TechCrunch, 2011 they buy The Huffington Post. To raise cash they sell off a billion dollars in patents to Microsoft in 2012. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion dollars. They would merge it with Yahoo! In 2017 as a company called Oath that is now called Verizon Media. And thus, AOL ceased to exist. Today some of those acquisitions are part of Verizon Media and others like Tumblr were ruined by mismanagement and corporate infighting. 

Many of the early ideas paved the way for future companies. AOL Local can be seen in companies like Yelp. AOL Video is similar to what became YouTube or TikTok. Or streaming media like Netflix and Hulu. AOL Instant Messenger in What’s App. XDrive in Google Drive. AOL News in CNN, Apple News, Fox News, etc. We now live in an App-driven world where each of these can be a new app coming around every year or two and then fading into the background as the services are acquired by an Amazon, Google, Apple, or Facebook and then fade off into the sunset only to have others see the billions of dollars paid as a reason to put their own spin on the concept. 

Steve Case runs an investment firm now. He clearly had a vision for the future of the Internet and did well off that. And his book The Third Wave lays out the concept that rather than try and build all the stuff a company like AOL did, that companies would partner with one another. While that sounds like a great strategy, we do keep seeing acquisitions over partnerships. Because otherwise it’s hard to communicate priorities through all the management layers of a larger company. He talked about perseverance, like how Uber and Airbnb would punch through the policies of regulators. I suspect what we are seeing by being sent home due to COVID will propel a lot of technology 5-10 years in adoption and force that issue. 

But I think the most interesting aspect of that book to me was when he talked about R&D spending in the US. He made a lot of money at AOL by riding the first wave of the Internet. And that began far before him, when the ARPANet was formed in 1969. R&D spending has dropped to the lowest point since 1950, due to a lot of factors, not least of which is the end of the Cold War. And we’re starting to see the drying up of the ideas and innovations that came out of that period transition heavily regulated. 

So think about this. AOL made a lot of money by making it really, really easy to get online and then on the Internet. They truly helped to change the world by taking R&D that the government instigated in the 70s and giving everyday people, not computer scientists, access to it. They built communities around it and later diversified when the tides were changing. What R&D from 5 to 20 years ago that could truly be beneficial to humanity today hasn’t made it into homes across the world - and of that what can we help to proliferate?

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you and we are so lucky to make use of the innovations you might be bringing us in the future. Whether those are net-new technologies, or just making that research available to all. Have a great day. 

Today we’re going to cover an essay Bill Gates wrote in 1996, a year and change after his infamous Internet Tidal Wave memo, called Content is King, a term that has now become ubiquitous. It’s a bit long but perfectly explains the Internet business model until such time as there was so much content that the business model had to change. 

See, once anyone could produce content and host it for free, like in the era of Blogger, the model flipped. So here goes: 

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.

The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries, including the manufacturing of TV sets, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.

When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of “content” becomes very wide. For example, computer software is a form of content-an extremely important one, and the one that for Microsoft will remain by far the most important.

But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.

One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.

The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable, and many companies are laying plans to create content for the Internet.

For example, the television network NBC and Microsoft recently agreed to enter the interactive news business together. Our companies will jointly own a cable news network, MSNBC, and an interactive news service on the Internet. NBC will maintain editorial control over the joint venture.

I expect societies will see intense competition-and ample failure as well as success-in all categories of popular content-not just software and news, but also games, entertainment, sports programming, directories, classified advertising, and on-line communities devoted to major interests.

Printed magazines have readerships that share common interests. It’s easy to imagine these communities being served by electronic online editions.

But to be successful online, a magazine can’t just take what it has in print and move it to the electronic realm. There isn’t enough depth or interactivity in print content to overcome the drawbacks of the online medium.

If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.

A question on many minds is how often the same company that serves an interest group in print will succeed in serving it online. Even the very future of certain printed magazines is called into question by the Internet.

For example, the Internet is already revolutionizing the exchange of specialized scientific information. Printed scientific journals tend to have small circulations, making them high-priced. University libraries are a big part of the market. It’s been an awkward, slow, expensive way to distribute information to a specialized audience, but there hasn’t been an alternative.

Now some researchers are beginning to use the Internet to publish scientific findings. The practice challenges the future of some venerable printed journals.

Over time, the breadth of information on the Internet will be enormous, which will make it compelling. Although the gold rush atmosphere today is primarily confined to the United States, I expect it to sweep the world as communications costs come down and a critical mass of localized content becomes available in different countries.

For the Internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work. The long-term prospects are good, but I expect a lot of disappointment in the short-term as content companies struggle to make money through advertising or subscriptions. It isn’t working yet, and it may not for some time.

So far, at least, most of the money and effort put into interactive publishing is little more than a labor of love, or an effort to help promote products sold in the non-electronic world. Often these efforts are based on the belief that over time someone will figure out how to get revenue.

In the long run, advertising is promising. An advantage of interactive advertising is that an initial message needs only to attract attention rather than convey much information. A user can click on the ad to get additional information-and an advertiser can measure whether people are doing so.

But today the amount of subscription revenue or advertising revenue realized on the Internet is near zero-maybe $20 million or $30 million in total. Advertisers are always a little reluctant about a new medium, and the Internet is certainly new and different.

Some reluctance on the part of advertisers may be justified, because many Internet users are less-than-thrilled about seeing advertising. One reason is that many advertisers use big images that take a long time to download across a telephone dial-up connection. A magazine ad takes up space too, but a reader can flip a printed page rapidly.

As connections to the Internet get faster, the annoyance of waiting for an advertisement to load will diminish and then disappear. But that’s a few years off.

Some content companies are experimenting with subscriptions, often with the lure of some free content. It’s tricky, though, because as soon as an electronic community charges a subscription, the number of people who visit the site drops dramatically, reducing the value proposition to advertisers.

A major reason paying for content doesn’t work very well yet is that it’s not practical to charge small amounts. The cost and hassle of electronic transactions makes it impractical to charge less than a fairly high subscription rate.

But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won’t be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You’ll just click on what you want, knowing you’ll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.

This technology will liberate publishers to charge small amounts of money, in the hope of attracting wide audiences.

Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products-a marketplace of content.”

Today we’re going to cover a computer programming language many might not have heard of, ALGOL. 

ALGOL was written in 1958. It wasn’t like many of the other languages in that it was built by committee. The Association for Computing Machinery and the German Society of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics were floating around ideas for a universal computer programming language. 

Members from the ACM were a who’s who of people influential in the transition from custom computers that were the size of small homes to mainframes. John Backus of IBM had written a programming language called Speedcoding and then Fortran. Joseph Wegstein had been involved in the development of COBOL. Alan Perlis had been involved in Whirlwind and was with the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Charles Katz had worked with Grace Hopper on UNIVAC and FLOW-MATIC. 

The Germans were equally as influential. Frederich Bauer had brought us the stack method while at the Technical University of Munich. Hermann Bottenbruch from The Institute for Applied Mathematics had written a paper on constructing languages. Klaus Samelson had worked on a computer called PERM that was similar to the MIT Whirlwind project. He’d come into computing while studying Eigenvalues. 

Heinz Ritishauser had written a number of papers on programming techniques and had codeveloped the language Superplan while at the The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. This is where the meeting would be hosted.

They went from May 27th to June 2nd in 1958 and initially called the language they would develop as IAL, or the International Algebraic Language. But would expand the name to ALGOL, short for Algorithmic Language. They brought us code blocks, the concept that you have a pair of words or symbols that would begin and end a stanza of code, like begin and end. They introduced nested scoped functions. They wrote the whole language right there. You would name a variable by simply saying integer or setting the variable as a := 1. You would substantiate a for and define the steps to perform until - the root of what we would now call a for loop. You could read a variable in from a punch card. It had built-in SIN and COSIN. It was line based and fairly simple functional programming by today’s standards. They defined how to handle special characters, built boolean operators, floating point notation. It even had portable types. 

And by the end had a compiler that would run on the Z22 computer from Konrad Zuse. While some of Backus’ best work it effectively competed with FORTRAN and never really gained traction at IBM. But it influenced almost everything that happened afterwards. 

Languages were popping up all over the place and in order to bring in more programmers, they wanted a formalized way to allow languages to flourish, but with a standardized notation system so algorithms could be published and shared and developers could follow along with logic. One outcome of the ALGOL project was the Backus–Naur form, which was the first such standardization. That would be expanded by Danish Peter Naur for ALGOL 60, thus the name.

In ALGOL 60 they would meet in Paris, also adding Father John McCarthy, Julien Green, Bernard Vauquois, Adriaan van Wijngaarden, and Michael Woodger. It got refined, yet a bit more complicated. FORTRAN and COBOL use continued to rage on, but academics loved ALGOL.

And the original implementation now referred to as the ZMMD implementation, gave way to X1 ALGOL, Case ALGOL, ZAM in Poland, GOGOL, VALGOL, RegneCentralen ALGOL, Whetstone ALGOL for physics, Chinese ALGOL, ALGAMS, NU ALGOL out of Norway, ALGEK out of Russia,  Dartmouth ALGOL, DG/L, USS 90 Algol, Elliot ALGOL, the ALGOL Translator, Kidsgrove Algol, JOVIAL, Burroughs ALGOL, Niklaus Firths ALGOL W, which led to Pascal, MALGOL, and the last would be S-algol in 1979. 

But it got overly complicated and overly formal. Individual developers wanted more flexibility here and there. Some wanted simpler languages. Some needed more complicated languages. ALGOL didn’t disappear as much as it evolved into other languages. Those were coming out fast and with a committee to approve changes to ALGOL, they were much slower to iterate. 

You see, ALGOL profoundly shaped how we think of programming languages. That formalization was critical to paving the way for generations of developers who brought us future languages. ALGOL would end up being the parent of CPL and through CPL, BCPL, C, C++, and through that Objective-C. From ALGOL also sprang Simula and through Simula, Smalltalk. And Pascal and from there, Modula and Delphi. It was only used for a few years but it spawned so much of what developers use to build software today. 

In fact, other languages evolved as anti-ALGOL-derivitives, looking at how you did something and deciding to do it totally differently. 

And so we owe this crew our thanks. They helped to legitimize a new doctrine, a new career, computer programmer. They inspired. They coded. And in so doing, they helped bring us into the world of functional programming and set structures that allowed the the next generation of great thinkers to go even further, directly influencing people like Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay. 

And it’s okay that the name of this massive contribution is mostly lost to the annals of history. Because ultimately, the impact is not. So think about this - what can we do to help shape the world we live in? Whether it be through raw creation, iteration, standardization, or formalization - we all have a role to play in this world. I look forward to hearing more about yours as it evolves!

Today we’re going to cover the Homebrew Computer Club.

Gordon French and Fred More started the Homebrew Computer Club. French hosted the Home-brew Computer Club’s first meeting in his garage in Menlo Park, California on March 5th, 1975. I can’t help but wonder if they knew they were about to become the fuse the lit a powder keg? If they knew they would play a critical role in inspiring generations to go out and buy personal computers and  automate everything. If they knew they would inspire the next generation of Silicon Valley hackers? Heck, it’s hard to imagine they didn’t with everything going on at the time. Hunter S Thompson rolling around deranged, Patty Hearst robbing banks in the area, the new 6800 and 8008 chips shipping…

Within a couple of weeks they were printing a newsletter. I hear no leisure suits were damaged in the making of it. The club would meet in French’s garage three times until he moved to Baltimore to take a job with the Social Security Administration. The group would go on without him until late in 1986. By then, the club had played a substantial part in spawning companies like Cromemco, Osborne, and most famously, Apple.

The members of the club traded parts, ideas, rumors, and hacks. The first meeting was really all about checking out the Altair 8800, by an Albuquerque calculator company called MITS, which would fan the flames of the personal computer revolution by inspiring hackers all over the world to build their own devices. It was the end of an era of free love and free information. Thompson described it as a high water mark. Apple would help to end the concept of free, making its founders rich beyond their working-class dreams. 

A newsletter called the People’s Computer Company had gotten an early Altair. Bob Albrecht would later change the name of the publication to Dr Dobbs. That first, fateful meeting, inspired Deve Wozniak to start working on one of the most important computers of the PC revolution, the Apple I. They’d bounce around until they pretty much moved into Stanford for good. 

I love a classic swap meet, and after meetings, some members of the group would reconvene at a parking lot or a bar to trade parts. They traded ideas, concepts, stories, hacks, schematics, and even software. Which inspired Bill Gates to write his “Open Letter to Hobbyists” - which he sent to the club’s newsletter.  

Many of the best computer minds in the late 70s were members of this collective. 

• George Morrow would make computers mostly through his company Morrow designs, for 30 years.
• Jerry Lawson invented cartridge-based gaming. 
• Lee Felsenstein built the SOL, a computer based on the Intel 8080, the Pennywhistle Modem, and designed the Osborne 1, the first real portable computer. He did that with Adam Osborne who he met at the club. 
• Li-Chen Wang developed Palo Alto Tiny Basic.
• Todd Fischer would help design the IMSAI.
• Paul Terrell would create the Byte Shop, a popular store for hobbyists that bought the first 50 Apple 1 computers to help launch the company. It was also the only place to buy the Altair in the area. 
• Dan Werthimer founded the SETI@home project. 
• Roger Melen would found Cromemco with Harry Garland. They named the company after Crothers Memorial, the graduate student engineering dorm at Stanford. They built computers and peripherals for the Z80 and S-100 bus. They gave us the Cyclops digital camera, the JS-1 joystick, and the Dazzler color graphics interface - all for the Altair. They would then build the Z-1 computer, using the same chassis as the IMSAI, iterating new computers until 1987 when they sold to Dynatech. 
• John Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, had become a famous phreaker in 1971, having figured out that a whistle from a box of Captain Crunch would mimic the 2600 hertz frequency used to route calls. His Blue Box design was then shared to Steve Wozniak who set up a business selling them with his buddy from high school, Steve Jobs. 
• And of course, Steve Wozniak would design the Apple 1 using what he learned at the meetings and team up with his buddy Steve Jobs to create Apple Computer and launch the Apple I, which Woz wanted to give his schematics away for free and Jobs wanted to sell the boards. That led to the Apple II, which made both wealthy beyond their wildest imaginations and paved the way for the Mac and every innovation to come out of Apple since. 

Slowly the members left to pursue their various companies. When the club ended in 1986, the personal computing revolution had come and IBM was taking the industry over. A number of members continued to meet for decades, using the new name, the 6800 club, named after the Motorola 6800 chip, which had been used in the Altair on that fateful day in 1975. 

This small band of pirates and innovators changed the world. Their meetings produced the concepts and designs that would be used in computers from Atari, Texas Instruments, Apple, and every other major player in the original personal computing hobbyist market. The members would found companies that went public and inspired IBM to enter what had been a hobbyist market and turn it into a full fledged industry. They would democratize the computer and their counter-culture personalities would humanize computing and even steer computing to benefit humans in an era when computers were considered part of the military industrial complex and so evil. 

They were open with one another, leading to faster sharing of ideas, faster innovation. Until suddenly they weren’t. And the higher water mark of open ideas was replaced with innovation that was financially motivated. They capitalized on a recession in chips as war efforts spun down. And they changed the world. And for that, we thank them. And I think you listener, for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so, so lucky to have you. Now tune in to innovation, drop out of binge watching, and go change the world. 

Today we’re going to cover the complicated legacy of Konrad Zuse. 

Konrad Zuse is one of the biggest pioneers in early computing that relatively few have heard about. We tend to celebrate those who lived and worked in Allied countries in the World War II era. But Zuse had been born in Berlin in 1910. He worked in isolation during those early days, building his historic Z1 computer at 26 years old in his parents living room. It was 1936. 

That computer was a mechanical computer and he was really more of a guru when it came to mechanical and electromechanical computing. Mechanical computing was a lot like watch-making, with gears, and automations. There was art in it, and Zuse had been an artist early on in life. 

This was the first computer that really contained every part of what we would today think of a modern computer. It had a central processing control unit. It had memory. It had input through punched tape that could be used to program it. It even had floating point logic. It had an electric motor that ran at 1 hertz. 

This design would live inside future computers that he built, but was destroyed in 1943 during air raids, and would be lost to history until Zuse built a replica in 1989. 

He started building the Z2 in 1940. This used the same memory as the Z1 (64 words) but had 600 relays that allowed him to get up to 5 hertz. He’d also speed up calculations based on those relays, but the power required would jump up to a thousand watts. He would hand it over to the German DVL, now the German Aerospace Center. If there are Nazis on the moon, his computers likely put them there. 

And this is really where the German authorities stepped in and, as with in the US, began funding efforts in technological advancement. They saw the value of modeling all the maths on these behemoths. They ponied up the cash to build the Z3. And this turned out to ironically be the first Turing-complete computer. He’d continue 22-bit word lengths and run at 5 hertz. But this device would have 2,600 relays and would help to solve wing flutter problems and other complicated aerodynamic mathematical mysteries. The machine also used Boolean algebra, a concept brought into computing independently by Claude Shannon in the US. It was finished in 1941, two years before Tommy Flowers finished the Colossus and 1 year before the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was built. And 7 years before ENIAC. And this baby was fast. Those relays crunched multiplication problems in 3 seconds. Suddenly you could calculate square roots in no time. But the German war effort was more focused on mechanical computing and this breakthrough was never considered critical to the war effort. Still, it was destroyed by allied air raids, just as its younger siblings had been. 

The war had gone from 1939 to 1945, the year he married Gisela and his first child was born. He would finish building the Z4 days before the end of the war and met Alan Turing in 1947. He’d found Zuse KG in 1949. The Germans were emerging from a post-wartime depression and normalizing relations with the rest of Europe. The Z4 would finally go into production in Zurich in 1950. His team was now up to a couple dozen people and he was getting known. With electronics getting better and faster and better known, he was able to bring in specialists and with 2,500 relays - now 21 step-wise relays. - to get up to 40 hertz. And to under complicate something from a book I read, no Apple was not the first company to hook a keyboard up to a computer, the Zs did it in the 50s as they were now using a typewriter to help program the computer. OK, fine, ENIAC did it in 1946… But can you imagine hooking a keyboard up to a device rather than just tapping on the screen?!?! Archaic!

For two years, the Z4 was the only digital computer in all of Europe. But that was all about to change. They would refine the design and build the Z5, delivering it to Leitz GMBH in 1953. The Americans tried to recruit him to join their growing cache of computer scientists by sending Douglas Buck and others out. But he stayed on in Germany. 

They would tinker with the designs and by 1955 came the Z11, shipping in 1957. This would be the first computer they produced multiple of in an almost assembly line building 48 and gave them enough money to build their next big success, the Z22. This was his seventh and would use vacuum tubes. And actually had an ALGOL 58 compiler. If you can believe it, the  University of Applied Sciences, Karlsruhe still has one running! It added a rudimentary form of water cooling, teletype, drum memory, and core memory. They were now part of the computing mainstream. 

And in 1961 they would go transistorized with the Z23. Ferrite memory. 150 kilohertz, Algol 60. This was on par with anything being built in the world. Transistors and diodes. They’d sell nearly 100 of them over the next few years. They would even have Z25 and Z26 variants. The Z31 would ship in 1963. They would make it to the Z43.  But the company would run into financial problems and be sold to Siemens in 1967, who had gotten into computing in the 1950s. Being able to focus on something other than running a company prompted Zuse to write Calculating Space, effectively positing that the universe is a computational structure, now known as digital physics. He wasn’t weird, you’re weird. OK, he was… 

e was never a Nazi, but he did build machines that could have helped their effort.  You can trace the history of the mainframe era from gears to relays to tubes to transistors in his machines. IBM and other companies licensed his patents. And many advances were almost validated by him independently discovering them, like the use of Boolean algebra in computing. But to some degree he was a German in a lost era of history, often something that falls to the losers in a war. 

So Konrad Zuse, thank you for one of the few clean timelines. It was a fun romp. I hope you have a lovely place in history, however complicated it may be. And thank you listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you stop by. I hope you have a lovely and quite uncomplicated day!