The History of Computing

Today we’re going to cover the Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC), the first real automatic electronic digital computer.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the brainchild of John Vincent Atanasoff. He was a physics professor at Iowa State College at the time. And it’s like he was born to usher in the era of computers. His dad had emigrated to New York from Bulgaria, then a part of the Ottoman Empire, and moved to Florida after John was born. The fascination with electronics came early as his dad Ivan was an electrical engineer. And seeking to solve math problems with electronics - well, his mom Iva was a math teacher. He would get his bachelors from the University of Florida and go to Iowa State College to get his Masters. He’d end up at the University of Wisconsin to get his PhD before returning to Iowa State College to become a physics professor. 

But there was a problem with teaching physics. The students in Atanasoff’s physics courses took weeks to calculate equations, getting in the way of learning bigger concepts. So in 1934 he started working on ideas. Ideas like using binary algebra to compute tasks. Using those logic circuits to add and subtracted. Controlling clocks, using a separate memory from compute tasks, and parallel processing. By 1937 he’d developed the concept of a computer. Apparently many of the concepts came to him while driving late at night in the winter early in 1938. You know, things like functions and using vacuum tubes.

He spent the next year working out the mechanical elements required to compute his logic designs and wrote a grant in early 1939 to get $5,330 of funding to build the machine. The Research Corporation of New York City funded the project and by 1939 he pulled in a graduate student named Clifford Berry to help him build the computer. He had been impressed by Berry when introduced by another professor who was from the electrical engineering department, Harold Anderson. They got started to build a computer capable of solving linear equations in the basement of the physics building. By October of 1939 they demonstrated a prototype that had 11 tubes and sent their work off to patent attorneys at the behest of the university. 

One of the main contributions to computing was the concept of memory. Processing that data was done with vacuum tubes, 31 thyratrons, and a lot of wire. Separating processing from memory would mean taking an almost record player approach to storage. 

They employed a pair of drums that had 1600 capacitors in them and rotated, like a record player. Those capacitors were stored in 32 bands of 50 and because the drum rotated once per second, they could add or subtract 30 numbers per second. Thus, 50 bits. The concept of storing a binary bit of data and using binary logic to convert that into more of a zero or one was the second contribution to computing that persists today. 

The processing wasn’t a CPU as we’d think of it today but instead a number of logic gates that included inverters and input gates for two and three inputs. Each of these had an inverting vacuum tube amplifier and a resistor that defined the logical function. The device took input using decimals on standard IBM 80-column punched cards. It stored results in memory when further tasks were required and the logic operations couldn’t be handled in memory. Much as Atanasoff had done using a Monroe calculator hooked to an IBM tabulating machine when he was working on his dissertation. In many ways, the computer he was building was the next evolution from that just as ENIAC would be the next evolution after. Changing plugs or jumpers on the front panel was akin to programming the computer. Output was also decimal and provided using a display on the front panel.

The previous computers had been electro-mechanical. Gears and wires and coils that would look steampunk to many of us today. But in his paper Computing Machine For the Solution Of Large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations (http://jva.cs.iastate.edu/img/Computing%20machine.pdf), Atanasoff had proposed a fully digital device, which they successfully tested in 1942. By then the computer had a mile of wire in it, weighed 700 pounds, had 280 vacuum tubes, and 31 thyratrons. 

The head of the Iowa State College Statistics Department was happy to provide problems to get solved. And so George W. Snedecor became the first user of a computer to solve a real problem. We have been fighting for the users ever since. But then came World War II. Both Atanasoff and Berry got called away to World War II duties and the work on the computer was abandoned. 

The first use of vacuum tubes to do digital computation was almost lost to history. But Mauchly, who built ENIAC would come later. ENIAC would build on many of the concepts and be programmable so many consider it to be the first real computer. But Atanasoff deserves credit for many of the concepts we still use today, albeit under the hood!

Most of the technology we have today didn’t exist at the time. They gave us what evolved into DRAM. And between them and ENIAC, was Konrad Zuse's Z3 and Colossus. So the ‘first computer” is a debatable topic. 

With the pioneers off to help win the war, the computer would go into relative obscurity. At least, until the computer business started to get huge and people didn’t want to pay Mauchly and Eckert to use their patent for a computer. Mauchly certainly would have known about the ABC since he saw it in 1941 and actually spent four days with Atanasoff. And there are too many parallels between them to say that some concepts weren’t borrowed. But that shouldn’t take anything away from any of the people involved. Because of Atanasoff, the patents were voided and IBM and other companies saved millions in royalties. ABC would be designated an official IEEE Milestone in 1990, 5 years before Atanasoff passed away. 

And so their contributions would be recognized eventually and those we can’t know about due to their decades in the defense industry are surely recognized by those who enable our freedoms in the US today. But not to the general public. But we thank them for their step in the evolution that got us where we are today. Just as I think you dear listener for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you. 

Mark Weiser was the Chief Technologiest at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox Parc in 1988 when he coined the term "ubiquitous computing.” Technology hadn’t entered every aspect of our lives at the time like it has now. The concept of wearable technology probably kicks off way earlier than you might think. 

Humans have long sought to augment ourselves with technology. This includes eyeglasses, which came along in 1286  and wearable clocks, an era kicked off with the Nuremberg eggs in 1510. The technology got smaller and more precise as our capacity at precision grew. Not all wearable technology is meant to be worn by humans. We strapped cameras to pigeons in 1907.

in the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci would draw up plans for a pedometer and that concept would go on the shelf until Thomas Jefferson picked it back up during his tinkering days. And we would get an abacus ring in 1600. But computers began by needing a lot of electricity to light up those vacuum tubes to replace operations from an abacus, and so when the transistor came along in the 40s, we’d soon start looking for ways to augment our capabilities with those. 

Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka began the wearable technology craze in 1953 when they started developing what would become the TR-55 when it was released in 1955. It was the first transistor radio and when they changed their name to Sony, they would introduce the first of their disruptive technologies. We don’t think of radios as technology as much as we once did, but they were certainly an integral part of getting the world ready to accept other technological advances to come!

Manfred Clynes came up with cyborgs in his story story called Cyborgs in Space in 1960. The next year, Edward Thorp and mathematician and binary algebra guru Claude Shannon wanted to try their hands at cheating at roulette so built a small computer to that timed when balls would land. It went in a shoe. created their own version of wearable technology – a computer small enough to fit into a shoe. This would stay a secret until Thorp released his book “Beat the Dealer” telling readers they got a 44 percent improvement in making bets. By 1969 though Seiko gave us the first automatic quartz watch. 

Other technologies were coming along at about the same time that would later revolutionize portable computing once they had time to percolate for awhile. Like in the 1960s, liquid crystal displayers were being researched at RCA. The technology goes back further but George H. Heilmeier from RCA laboratories gets credit for In 1964 for operationalizing LCD. 

And Hatano developed a mechanical pedometer to track progress to 10,000 steps a day, which by 1985 had him defining that as the number of steps a person should reach in a day. But back to electronics. 

Moore’s law. The digital camera traces its roots to 1975, but Kodak didn’t really pursue it. 1975 and devices were getting smaller and smaller. Another device we don’t think of as a computer all that much any more is a calculator. But kits were being sold by then and suddenly components had gotten small enough that you could get a calculator in your watch, initially introduced by Pulsar. And those radios were cool but what if you wanted to listen to what you wanted rather than the radio? Sony would again come along with another hit: The Walkman in 1979, selling over 200 million over the ensuing decade. Akio Morita was a genius, also bringing us digital hearing aids and putting wearables into healthcare. Can you imagine the healthcare industry without wearable technology today? 

You could do more and more and by 1981, Seiko would release the UC 2000 Wrist PC. By then portable computers were a thing. But not wearables. You could put 2 whopping kilobytes of data on your wrist and use a keyboard that got strapped to an arm. Computer watches continued to improve any by 1984 you could play. Games on them, like on the Nelsonic Space Attacker Watch. 

Flash memory arguably came along in 1984 and would iterate and get better, providing many, many more uses for tiny devices and flash media cards by 1997. But those calculator watches, Marty McFly would sport one in 1985s Back To The Future and by the time I was in high school they were so cheap you could get them for $10 at the local drug store. And a few years later, Nintendo would release the Power Glove in 1989, sparking the imagination of many a nerdy kid who would later build actually functional technology. Which regrettably the Power Glove was not. 

The first portable MP3 player came along in 1998. It was the MPMan. Prototypes had come along in 1979 with the IXI digital audio player. The audible player, Diamond Rio, and Personal Jukebox came along in 1998 and on the heels of their success the NOMAX Jukebox came in y2k. But the Apple iPod exploded onto the scene in 2001 and suddenly the Walkman and Diskman were dead and the era of having a library of music on mainstream humans was upon us, sparking Microsoft to release the Zen in 2004, and the Zune in 2006. 

And those watches. Garmin brought us their first portable GPS in 1990, which continues to be one of the best such devices on the market.

The webcam would come along in 1994 when Canadian researcher Steve Mann built the first the wearable wireless webcam. That was the spark that led to the era of the Internet of Things. Suddenly we weren’t just wearing computers. We were wearing computers connected to the inter webs. 

All of these technologies brought to us over the years… They were converging. Bluetooth was invented in 2000. 

By. 2006, it was time for the iPod and fitness tracking to converge. Nike+iPod was announced and Nike would release a small transmitter that. Fit into a notch in certain shoes. I’ve always been a runner and jumped on that immediately! You needed a receiver at the time for an iPod Nano. Sign me up, said my 2006 self! I hadn’t been into the cost of the Garmin but soon I was tracking everything. Later I’d get an iPhone and just have it connect. But it was always a little wonky. Then came The Nike+ Fuelband in 2012. I immediately jumped on that bandwagon as well. You. Had to plug it in at first but eventually a model came out that sync’d over bluetooth and life got better. I would sport that thing until it got killed off in 2014 and a little beyond… Turns out Nike knew about Apple coming into their market and between Apple, Fitbit, and Android Wear, they just didn’t want to compete in a blue ocean, no matter how big the ocean would be.  

Speaking of Fitbit, they were founded in 2007 James Park and Eric Friedman with a goal of bringing fitness trackers to market. And they capitalized on an exploding market for tracking fitness. But it wasn’t until the era of the app that they achieved massive success and in 2014 they released apps for iOS, Android and Windows Mobile, which was still a thing. And the watch and mobile device came together in 2017 when they released their smartwatch. They are now the 5th largest wearables company. 

Android Wear had been announced at Google I/O in 2014. Now called Wear OS, it’s a fork of Android Lollipop, that pairs with Android devices and integrates with the Google Assistant. It can connect over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and LTE and powers the Moto 360, the LG G and Samsung Gear. And there are a dozen other manufacturers that leverage the OS in some way, now with over 50 million installations of the apps. It can use Hangouts, and leverages voice to do everything from checking into Foursquare to dictating notes. 

But the crown jewel in the smart watches is definitely the Apple Watch. That came out of hiring former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch to bring a Siri-powered watch to market, which happened in 2015. With over 33 million being sold and as of this recording on the 5th series of the watch, it can now connect over LTE, Wifi, or through a phone using Bluetooth. There are apps, complications, and a lot of sensors on these things, giving them almost limitless uses.

Those glasses from 1286. Well, they got a boost in 2013 when Google put images on them. Long a desire from science fiction, Google Glass brought us into the era of a heads up display. But Sega had introduced their virtual reality headset in 1991 and the technology actually dates back to the 70s from JPL and MIT. Nintendo experimented with Virtual boy in 1994. Apple released QuickTime VR shortly thereafter, but it wasn’t that great. I even remember some VGA “VR” headsets in the early 2000s, but they weren’t that great. It wasn’t until the Oculus Rift came along in 2012 that VR seemed all that ready. These days, that’s become the gold standard in VR headsets. The sign to the market was when Facebook bought Oculus for $2.3 billion dollars in 2014 and the market has steadily grown ever since. 

Given all of these things that came along in 2014, I guess it did deserve the moniker “The Year of Wearable Technology.” And with a few years to mature, now you can get wearable sensors that are built into yoga pants, like the Nadi X Yoga Pants, smartwatches ranging from just a few dollars to hundreds or thousands from a variety of vendors, sleep trackers, posture trackers, sensors in everything bringing a convergence between the automated home and wearables in the internet of things. Wearable cameras like the Go Pro, smart glasses from dozens of vendors, VR headsets from dozens of vendors, smart gloves, wearable onesies, sports clothing to help measure and improve performance, smart shoes, smart gloves, and even an Alexa enabled ring. 

Apple waited pretty late to come out with bluetooth headphones, releasing AirPods in 2016. These bring sensors into the ear, the main reason I think of them as wearables where I didn’t think of a lot of devices that came before them in that way. Now on their second generation, they are some of the best headphones you can buy. And the market seems poised to just keep growing. Especially as we get more and more sensors and more and more transistors packed into the tiniest of spaces. It truly is ubiquitous computing. 

Today we’re going to cover what many of you do with your evenings: Netflix.

Now, the story of Netflix comes in a few stages that I like to call the founding and pivot, the Blockbuster killer,  the streaming evolution, and where we are today: the new era of content. Today Netflix sits at more than a 187 billion dollar market cap. And they have become one of the best known brands in the world. But this story has some pretty stellar layers to it. And one of the most important in an era of eroding (or straight up excavated) consumer confidence is this thought. The IPOs that the dot com buildup created made fast millionaires. But those from the Web 2.0 era made billionaires. And you can see that in the successes of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Prelude

Hastings founded Pure Software in 1991. They made software that helped other people make… software. They went public in 1995 and merged with Atria, and were acquired the next year by Rational Software - making he and Netflix founder Marc Randolph, well, obsolete. Hastings made investors and himself a lot of money. Which at that point was millions and millions of dollars. So he went on to sit on the State Board of Education and get involved in education.

Act I: The Founding and Pivot

He and Marc Randolph had carpooled to worked while at Pure Atria and had tossed around a lot of ideas for startups. Randolph landed on renting DVDs by mail. Using the still somewhat new Internet. Randolph would become CEO and Hastings would invest the money to get started. Randolph brought in a talented team from Pure Atria and they got to work using an initial investment of two and a half million dollars in 1997. 

But taking the brick and mortar concept that video stores had been successfully using wasn’t working. They had figured out how to ship DVDs cheaply, how to sell them (until Amazon basically took that part of the business away), and even how to market the service by inking deals with DVD player manufacturers. The video stores had been slow to adopt DVDs after the disaster they found with laser disk and so the people who made the DVDs saw it as a way to get more people to buy the players. And it was mostly working. But the retention numbers sucked and they were losing money. 

So they tinkered with the business model, relentlessly testing every idea. And Hastings came back to take the role of CEO and Randolph stepped into the role of president. One of those tests had been to pivot from renting DVDs to a subscription model. And it worked. They gave customers a free month trial. The subscription and the trial are now all too common. But at the time it was a wildly innovative approach. And people loved it. Especially those who could get a DVD the next day. They also gave Netflix huge word of mouth. In 1999 they were at 110,000 subscribers. Which is how I first got introduced to them in 2000, when they were finally up to 300,000 subscribers. I had no clue, but they were already thinking about streaming all the way back then. 

But they had to survive this era. And as is often the case when there’s a free month that comes at a steep cost, Netflix was bleeding money. And running out of cash. They planned to go IPO. But because the dot com bubble had burst, cash was becoming hard to come by. They had been well funded, taking a hundred million dollars by the time they got to a series E. And they were poised for greatness. But there was that cash crunch. And a big company to contend with: Blockbuster. With 9,000 stores, $6b in revenue, tens of thousands of employees, and millions of rentals being processed a month, Blockbuster was the king of the video rental market. 

The story goes that Hastings got the Netflix idea from a late fee. So they would do subscriptions. But they had sold DVDs and done rentals first. And really, they found success because of the pivot, wherever that pivot came from. And in fact, Hastings and Randolph had flown to Texas to try and sell Netflix to Blockbuster. Pretty sure Blockbuster wishes they’d jumped on that. 

Which brings us to Act II: The Blockbuster Killer. 

Managing to keep enough cash to make it through the growth, they managed to go public in 2002 and finally got profitable in 2003. Soon they would be shipping over a million DVDs every single day. They quickly rose through word of mouth. That one day shipping was certainly a thing. They pumped money into advertising and marketing. And they continued a meteoric growth. 

They employed growth hacks and they researched a lot of options for the future, knowing that technology changes were afoot. Randolf investigated opening kiosks with Mitch Lowe. Netflix wouldn’t really be interested in doing so, and Randolph would leave the company in 2002 on good terms. Wealthy after the companies successful IPO. And Lowe took the Video Droid concept of a VHS rental vending machine to DVDs after Netflix abandoned it, and went to Redbox, which had been initially started by McDonalds in 2003. Many of the ideas he and Randolf tested in Vegas as a part of Netflix would be used and by 2005 Redbox would try to sell to Netflix and Blockbuster. 

But again, Blockbuster failed to modernize. They didn’t have just one shot at buying Netflix, Reed Hastings flew out there four times to try and sell the company to Blockbuster. Blockbuster launched their own subscription service in 2004 but it was flawed and there was bad press around late fees and other silly missteps. Meanwhile Netflix was growing fast. 

Netflix shipped the billionth DVD in 2007. And by 2007, there were more Reboxes than Blockbusters and by 2011 the kiosks accounted for half of the rental market. Blockbuster was finally forced to file for bankruptcy in 2010, after being a major name brand for 25 years. 

Netflix was modernizing though. Not with Kiosks but they were already beginning to plan for streaming. And a key to their success, as in the early days was relentless self improvement and testing every little thing, all the time. They took their time and did it right. 

Broadband was on the rise. People had more bandwidth and were experimenting with streaming music at work. Netflix posted earnings of over a hundred million dollars in 2009. But they were about to do something special. 

And so Act III: The Streaming Revolution

The streaming world came online in the early days of the Internet when Severe Tire Damage streamed the first song out of Xerox PARC in 1993. But it wasn’t really until YouTube came along in 2005 that streaming video was getting viable. By 2006 Google would acquire YouTube, which was struggling with over a million dollars a month in bandwidth fees and huge legal issues with copywritten content. This was a signal to the world that streaming was ready. I mean, Saturday Night Live was in, so it must be real! 

Netflix first experimented with making their own content in 2006 with a film production division they called Red Envelope Films. They made over a dozen movies but ultimately shut down, giving Netflix a little focus on another initiative before they came back to making their own content.

Netflix would finally launch streaming media in 2007, right around the time they shipped that billionth DVD. This was the same year Hulu launched out of AOL, Comcast, Facebook, MSN, and Yahoo. But Netflix had a card up it’s sleeve. Or a House of Cards, the first show they produced, which launched in 2013. Suddenly, Netflix was much, much more than a DVD service. They were streaming movies, and creating content. Wildly popular content. They’ve produced hundreds of shows now in well over a dozen languages. 2013 also brought us Orange is the New Black, another huge success. They started off with a whole Marvel universe in 2015 with Daredevil, followed by Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and tied that up with The Defenders. But along the way we got The Crown, Narcos and the almost iconic at this point Stranger Things. Not to mention Bojack Horseman, Voltron, and the list just goes on and on. 

That era of expansion would include more than just streaming. They would finally expand into Canada in 2010, finally going international. They would hit 20 million subscribers in 2011. By 2012 they would be over 25 million subscribers. By 2013 they would exceed 33 million. In 2014 they hit 50 million. By the end of 2015 they were at almost 70 million. 2016 was huge, as they announced an expansion into 130 new international territories at CES. And the growth continued. Explosively. At this point, despite competition popping up everywhere Netflix does over 20 billion a year in revenue and has been as instrumental in revolutionizing the world as anyone. 

That competition now includes Disney Plus, Apple, Hulu, Google, and thousands of thousands of podcasts and home spun streamers, even on Twitch. All battling to produce the most polarizing, touching, beautiful, terrifying, or mesmerizing content. 

Oh and there’s still regular tv I guess… 

Epilogue

So Y2K. The dot com bubble burst. And the overnight millionaires were about to give way to something new. Something different. Something on an entirely different scale. 

As with many of the pre-crash dot com companies, Netflix had initially begun with a pretty simple idea. Take the video store concept, where you payed per-rental. And take it out of brick and mortar and onto the internets. And if they had stuck with that, we probably wouldn’t know who they are today. We would probably be getting our content from a blue and yellow box called Blockbuster. But they went far beyond that, and in the process, they changed how we think of that model. And that subscription model is how you now pay for almost everything, including software like Microsoft Office. 

And Netflix continued to innovate. They made streaming media mainstream. They made producing content a natural adjacency to a streaming service. And they let millions cut the cord from cable and get into traditional media. They became a poster child for the fact that out of the dot com bubble and Great Recession, big tech companies would go from making fast millionaires to a different scale, fast billionaires!

As we move into a new post COVID-19 era, a new round of change is about to come. Nationalism is regrettably becoming more of a thing. Further automation and adoptions of new currencies may start to disrupt existing models even further. We have so much content we have to rethink how search works. And our interpersonal relationships will be forever changed from these months in isolation. Many companies are about to go the way of Blockbuster. Including plenty that have been around much, much longer than they were. But luckily, companies like Netflix are there for us to remind us that any company can innovate like in a multi-act play. 

And we owe them our thanks, for that. - and because what the heck else would we do stuck in quarantine, right?!?! So to the nearly 9,000 people that work at Netflix we 167 million plus subscribers thank you. For revolutionizing content distribution, revolutionizing business models, and for the machine learning and other technological advancements we didn’t even cover in this episode. You are lovely. 

And thank you listeners, for abandoning binge watching Tiger King long enough to listen to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Now get back to it!

Today we’re going to cover what many of you do with your evenings: Netflix.

Now, the story of Netflix comes in a few stages that I like to call the founding and pivot, the Blockbuster killer,  the streaming evolution, and where we are today: the new era of content. Today Netflix sits at more than a 187 billion dollar market cap. And they have become one of the best known brands in the world. But this story has some pretty stellar layers to it. And one of the most important in an era of eroding (or straight up excavated) consumer confidence is this thought. The IPOs that the dot com buildup created made fast millionaires. But those from the Web 2.0 era made billionaires. And you can see that in the successes of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Prelude

Hastings founded Pure Software in 1991. They made software that helped other people make… software. They went public in 1995 and merged with Atria, and were acquired the next year by Rational Software - making he and Netflix founder Marc Randolph, well, obsolete. Hastings made investors and himself a lot of money. Which at that point was millions and millions of dollars. So he went on to sit on the State Board of Education and get involved in education.

Act I: The Founding and Pivot

He and Marc Randolph had carpooled to worked while at Pure Atria and had tossed around a lot of ideas for startups. Randolph landed on renting DVDs by mail. Using the still somewhat new Internet. Randolph would become CEO and Hastings would invest the money to get started. Randolph brought in a talented team from Pure Atria and they got to work using an initial investment of two and a half million dollars in 1997. 

But taking the brick and mortar concept that video stores had been successfully using wasn’t working. They had figured out how to ship DVDs cheaply, how to sell them (until Amazon basically took that part of the business away), and even how to market the service by inking deals with DVD player manufacturers. The video stores had been slow to adopt DVDs after the disaster they found with laser disk and so the people who made the DVDs saw it as a way to get more people to buy the players. And it was mostly working. But the retention numbers sucked and they were losing money. 

So they tinkered with the business model, relentlessly testing every idea. And Hastings came back to take the role of CEO and Randolph stepped into the role of president. One of those tests had been to pivot from renting DVDs to a subscription model. And it worked. They gave customers a free month trial. The subscription and the trial are now all too common. But at the time it was a wildly innovative approach. And people loved it. Especially those who could get a DVD the next day. They also gave Netflix huge word of mouth. In 1999 they were at 110,000 subscribers. Which is how I first got introduced to them in 2000, when they were finally up to 300,000 subscribers. I had no clue, but they were already thinking about streaming all the way back then. 

But they had to survive this era. And as is often the case when there’s a free month that comes at a steep cost, Netflix was bleeding money. And running out of cash. They planned to go IPO. But because the dot com bubble had burst, cash was becoming hard to come by. They had been well funded, taking a hundred million dollars by the time they got to a series E. And they were poised for greatness. But there was that cash crunch. And a big company to contend with: Blockbuster. With 9,000 stores, $6b in revenue, tens of thousands of employees, and millions of rentals being processed a month, Blockbuster was the king of the video rental market. 

The story goes that Hastings got the Netflix idea from a late fee. So they would do subscriptions. But they had sold DVDs and done rentals first. And really, they found success because of the pivot, wherever that pivot came from. And in fact, Hastings and Randolph had flown to Texas to try and sell Netflix to Blockbuster. Pretty sure Blockbuster wishes they’d jumped on that. 

Which brings us to Act II: The Blockbuster Killer. 

Managing to keep enough cash to make it through the growth, they managed to go public in 2002 and finally got profitable in 2003. Soon they would be shipping over a million DVDs every single day. They quickly rose through word of mouth. That one day shipping was certainly a thing. They pumped money into advertising and marketing. And they continued a meteoric growth. 

They employed growth hacks and they researched a lot of options for the future, knowing that technology changes were afoot. Randolf investigated opening kiosks with Mitch Lowe. Netflix wouldn’t really be interested in doing so, and Randolph would leave the company in 2002 on good terms. Wealthy after the companies successful IPO. And Lowe took the Video Droid concept of a VHS rental vending machine to DVDs after Netflix abandoned it, and went to Redbox, which had been initially started by McDonalds in 2003. Many of the ideas he and Randolf tested in Vegas as a part of Netflix would be used and by 2005 Redbox would try to sell to Netflix and Blockbuster. 

But again, Blockbuster failed to modernize. They didn’t have just one shot at buying Netflix, Reed Hastings flew out there four times to try and sell the company to Blockbuster. Blockbuster launched their own subscription service in 2004 but it was flawed and there was bad press around late fees and other silly missteps. Meanwhile Netflix was growing fast. 

Netflix shipped the billionth DVD in 2007. And by 2007, there were more Reboxes than Blockbusters and by 2011 the kiosks accounted for half of the rental market. Blockbuster was finally forced to file for bankruptcy in 2010, after being a major name brand for 25 years. 

Netflix was modernizing though. Not with Kiosks but they were already beginning to plan for streaming. And a key to their success, as in the early days was relentless self improvement and testing every little thing, all the time. They took their time and did it right. 

Broadband was on the rise. People had more bandwidth and were experimenting with streaming music at work. Netflix posted earnings of over a hundred million dollars in 2009. But they were about to do something special. 

And so Act III: The Streaming Revolution

The streaming world came online in the early days of the Internet when Severe Tire Damage streamed the first song out of Xerox PARC in 1993. But it wasn’t really until YouTube came along in 2005 that streaming video was getting viable. By 2006 Google would acquire YouTube, which was struggling with over a million dollars a month in bandwidth fees and huge legal issues with copywritten content. This was a signal to the world that streaming was ready. I mean, Saturday Night Live was in, so it must be real! 

Netflix first experimented with making their own content in 2006 with a film production division they called Red Envelope Films. They made over a dozen movies but ultimately shut down, giving Netflix a little focus on another initiative before they came back to making their own content.

Netflix would finally launch streaming media in 2007, right around the time they shipped that billionth DVD. This was the same year Hulu launched out of AOL, Comcast, Facebook, MSN, and Yahoo. But Netflix had a card up it’s sleeve. Or a House of Cards, the first show they produced, which launched in 2013. Suddenly, Netflix was much, much more than a DVD service. They were streaming movies, and creating content. Wildly popular content. They’ve produced hundreds of shows now in well over a dozen languages. 2013 also brought us Orange is the New Black, another huge success. They started off with a whole Marvel universe in 2015 with Daredevil, followed by Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and tied that up with The Defenders. But along the way we got The Crown, Narcos and the almost iconic at this point Stranger Things. Not to mention Bojack Horseman, Voltron, and the list just goes on and on. 

That era of expansion would include more than just streaming. They would finally expand into Canada in 2010, finally going international. They would hit 20 million subscribers in 2011. By 2012 they would be over 25 million subscribers. By 2013 they would exceed 33 million. In 2014 they hit 50 million. By the end of 2015 they were at almost 70 million. 2016 was huge, as they announced an expansion into 130 new international territories at CES. And the growth continued. Explosively. At this point, despite competition popping up everywhere Netflix does over 20 billion a year in revenue and has been as instrumental in revolutionizing the world as anyone. 

That competition now includes Disney Plus, Apple, Hulu, Google, and thousands of thousands of podcasts and home spun streamers, even on Twitch. All battling to produce the most polarizing, touching, beautiful, terrifying, or mesmerizing content. 

Oh and there’s still regular tv I guess… 

Epilogue

So Y2K. The dot com bubble burst. And the overnight millionaires were about to give way to something new. Something different. Something on an entirely different scale. 

As with many of the pre-crash dot com companies, Netflix had initially begun with a pretty simple idea. Take the video store concept, where you payed per-rental. And take it out of brick and mortar and onto the internets. And if they had stuck with that, we probably wouldn’t know who they are today. We would probably be getting our content from a blue and yellow box called Blockbuster. But they went far beyond that, and in the process, they changed how we think of that model. And that subscription model is how you now pay for almost everything, including software like Microsoft Office. 

And Netflix continued to innovate. They made streaming media mainstream. They made producing content a natural adjacency to a streaming service. And they let millions cut the cord from cable and get into traditional media. They became a poster child for the fact that out of the dot com bubble and Great Recession, big tech companies would go from making fast millionaires to a different scale, fast billionaires!

As we move into a new post COVID-19 era, a new round of change is about to come. Nationalism is regrettably becoming more of a thing. Further automation and adoptions of new currencies may start to disrupt existing models even further. We have so much content we have to rethink how search works. And our interpersonal relationships will be forever changed from these months in isolation. Many companies are about to go the way of Blockbuster. Including plenty that have been around much, much longer than they were. But luckily, companies like Netflix are there for us to remind us that any company can innovate like in a multi-act play. 

And we owe them our thanks, for that. - and because what the heck else would we do stuck in quarantine, right?!?! So to the nearly 9,000 people that work at Netflix we 167 million plus subscribers thank you. For revolutionizing content distribution, revolutionizing business models, and for the machine learning and other technological advancements we didn’t even cover in this episode. You are lovely. 

And thank you listeners, for abandoning binge watching Tiger King long enough to listen to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Now get back to it!

Today we’re going to cover the software that would become Microsoft Office. 

Microsoft Office was announced at COMDEX in 1988. The Suite contained Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These are still the core applications included in Microsoft Office. But the history of Office didn’t start there. 

Many of the innovations we use today began life at Xerox. And Word is no different. Microsoft Word began life as as Multi-Tool Word in 1981, when Charles Simonyi was hired away from Xerox PARC where he had worked on one of the earlier word processors, Bravo. 

He brought in Richard Brodie, and by 1983, they would release it for DOS, simplifying the name to just Microsoft Word. They would port it to the Mac in 1985, shortly after the release of the iconic 1984 Macintosh. Being way more feature-rich than MacWrite, it was an instant success. 2.0 would come along in 1987, and they would be up to 5 by 1992. But Word for Windows came along in 1989, when Windows 3.0 dropped. So Word went from DOS to Mac to Windows. 

Excel has a similar history. It began life as Multiplan in 1982 though. At the time, it was popular on CP/M and DOS but when Lotus 1-2-3 came along, it knocked everything out of the hearts and minds of users and Microsoft regrouped. Doug Klunder would be the Excel lead developer and Jabe Blumenthal would act as program manager. They would meet with Bill Gates and Simonyi and hammer out the look and feel and released Excel for the Mac in 1985. And Excel came to Windows in 1987. By Excel 5 in 1993, Microsoft would completely taken the spreadsheet market and suddenly Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) would play a huge role in automating tasks. Regrettably, then came macro viruses, but for more on those check out the episode on viruses. In fact, along the way, Microsoft would pick up a ton of talented developers including Bob Frankton a co-creator of the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc.

Powerpoint was an acquisition. It began life as Presenter at Forethought, a startup, in 1983. And Robert Gaskins, a former research manager  from Bell Norther Research, would be brought in to get the product running on Windows 1. It would become PowerPoint when it was released for the Mac in 1987 and was wildly successful, selling out all of the copies from the first run. 

But then Jeff Raikes from Microsoft started getting ready to build a new presentation tool. Bill Gates had initially thought it was a bad idea but eventually gave Raikes the go-ahead to buy Forethought and Microsoft PowerPoint was born. 

And that catches up to that fateful day in 1988 when Bill Gates announced Office at COMDEX in Las Vegas, which at the time was a huge conference.

Then came the Internet. Microsoft Mail was released for the Mac in 1988 and bundled with Windows from 1991 and on. Microsoft also released a tool called Inbox. But then came Exchange, expanding beyond mail and into contacts, calendars, and eventually much more. Mail was really basic and for Exchange, Microsoft released Outlook, which was added to Office 97 and an installer was bundled with Windows Exchange Server. 

Office Professional in that era included a database utility called Access. We’ve always had databases. But desktop databases had been dominated by Borland’s dBase and FoxPro up until 1992 when Microsoft Access began to chip away at their marketshare. Microsoft had been trying to get into that market since the mid-90s with R:Base and Omega, but when Access 2 dropped in 1994, people started to take notice and by the release of Office 95 Professional it could be purchased as part of a suite and integrated cleanly. I can still remember those mdb files and setting up data access objects and later ActiveX controls!

So the core Office components came together in 1988 and by 1995 the Office Suite was the dominant productivity suite on the market. It got better in 97. Except The Office Assistant, designed by Kevan Atteberry and lovingly referred to as Clippy. By 2000 Office became the de facto standard. Everything else had to integrate with Office. That continued in the major 2003 and 2007 releases. And the products just iterated to become better and better software. 

And they continue to do that. But another major shift was on the way. A response to Google Apps, which had been released in 2006. The cloud was becoming a thing. And so Office 365 went into beta in 2010 and was launched in 2011. It includes the original suite, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams for chatting with coworkers, Yammer for social networking, Skype for Business (although video can now be done in Teams), Outlook and Outlook online, and Publisher. As well as Publisher, InfoPath, and Access for Windows. 

This Software + Services approach turned out to be a master-stroke. Microsoft was able to finally raise prices and earned well over a 10% boost to the Office segment in just a few years. The pricing for subscriptions over the term of what would have been a perpetual license was often 30% more. Yet, the Office 365 subscriptions kept getting more and more cool stuff. And by 2017 the subscriptions captured more revenue than the perpetual licenses. And a number of other services can be included with Office 365. 

Another huge impact is the rapid disappearing act of on premises Exchange servers. Once upon a time small businesses would have an Exchange server and then as they grew, move that to a colocation facility, hire MCSE engineers (like me) to run them, and have an amplified cost increase in dealing with providing groupware. Moving that to Microsoft means that Microsoft can charge more, and the customer can get a net savings, even though the subscriptions cost more - because they don’t have to pay people to run those servers. OneDrive moves files off old filers, etc. 

And the Office apps provided aren’t just for Windows and Mac. Pocket Office would come in 1996, for Windows CE. Microsoft would have Office apps for all of their mobile operating systems. And in 2009 we would get Office for Symbian. And then for iPhone in 2013 and iPad in 2014. Then for Android in 2015. 

Today over 1 and a quarter billion people use Microsoft Office. In fact, not a lot of people have *not* used Office. Microsoft has undergone a resurgence in recent years and is more nimble and friendly than ever before. Many of the people that created these tools are still at Microsoft. Simonyi left Microsoft for a time. But they ended up buying his company later. During what we now refer to as the “lost decade” at Microsoft, I would always think of these humans. Microsoft would get dragged through the mud for this or that. But the engineers kept making software. And I’m really glad to see them back making world class APIs that do what we need them to do. And building good software on top of that. 

But most importantly, they set the standard for what a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool would look like for a generation. And the ubiquity the software obtained allowed for massive leaps in adoption and innovation. Until it didn’t. That’s when Google Apps came along, giving Microsoft a kick in the keister to put up or shut up. And boy did Microsoft answer. 

So thank you to all of them. I probably never would have written my first book without their contributions to computing. And thank you listener, for tuning in, to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day. 

Today we’re going to cover the software that would become Microsoft Office. 

Microsoft Office was announced at COMDEX in 1988. The Suite contained Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These are still the core applications included in Microsoft Office. But the history of Office didn’t start there. 

Many of the innovations we use today began life at Xerox. And Word is no different. Microsoft Word began life as as Multi-Tool Word in 1981, when Charles Simonyi was hired away from Xerox PARC where he had worked on one of the earlier word processors, Bravo. 

He brought in Richard Brodie, and by 1983, they would release it for DOS, simplifying the name to just Microsoft Word. They would port it to the Mac in 1985, shortly after the release of the iconic 1984 Macintosh. Being way more feature-rich than MacWrite, it was an instant success. 2.0 would come along in 1987, and they would be up to 5 by 1992. But Word for Windows came along in 1989, when Windows 3.0 dropped. So Word went from DOS to Mac to Windows. 

Excel has a similar history. It began life as Multiplan in 1982 though. At the time, it was popular on CP/M and DOS but when Lotus 1-2-3 came along, it knocked everything out of the hearts and minds of users and Microsoft regrouped. Doug Klunder would be the Excel lead developer and Jabe Blumenthal would act as program manager. They would meet with Bill Gates and Simonyi and hammer out the look and feel and released Excel for the Mac in 1985. And Excel came to Windows in 1987. By Excel 5 in 1993, Microsoft would completely taken the spreadsheet market and suddenly Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) would play a huge role in automating tasks. Regrettably, then came macro viruses, but for more on those check out the episode on viruses. In fact, along the way, Microsoft would pick up a ton of talented developers including Bob Frankton a co-creator of the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc.

Powerpoint was an acquisition. It began life as Presenter at Forethought, a startup, in 1983. And Robert Gaskins, a former research manager  from Bell Norther Research, would be brought in to get the product running on Windows 1. It would become PowerPoint when it was released for the Mac in 1987 and was wildly successful, selling out all of the copies from the first run. 

But then Jeff Raikes from Microsoft started getting ready to build a new presentation tool. Bill Gates had initially thought it was a bad idea but eventually gave Raikes the go-ahead to buy Forethought and Microsoft PowerPoint was born. 

And that catches up to that fateful day in 1988 when Bill Gates announced Office at COMDEX in Las Vegas, which at the time was a huge conference.

Then came the Internet. Microsoft Mail was released for the Mac in 1988 and bundled with Windows from 1991 and on. Microsoft also released a tool called Inbox. But then came Exchange, expanding beyond mail and into contacts, calendars, and eventually much more. Mail was really basic and for Exchange, Microsoft released Outlook, which was added to Office 97 and an installer was bundled with Windows Exchange Server. 

Office Professional in that era included a database utility called Access. We’ve always had databases. But desktop databases had been dominated by Borland’s dBase and FoxPro up until 1992 when Microsoft Access began to chip away at their marketshare. Microsoft had been trying to get into that market since the mid-90s with R:Base and Omega, but when Access 2 dropped in 1994, people started to take notice and by the release of Office 95 Professional it could be purchased as part of a suite and integrated cleanly. I can still remember those mdb files and setting up data access objects and later ActiveX controls!

So the core Office components came together in 1988 and by 1995 the Office Suite was the dominant productivity suite on the market. It got better in 97. Except The Office Assistant, designed by Kevan Atteberry and lovingly referred to as Clippy. By 2000 Office became the de facto standard. Everything else had to integrate with Office. That continued in the major 2003 and 2007 releases. And the products just iterated to become better and better software. 

And they continue to do that. But another major shift was on the way. A response to Google Apps, which had been released in 2006. The cloud was becoming a thing. And so Office 365 went into beta in 2010 and was launched in 2011. It includes the original suite, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams for chatting with coworkers, Yammer for social networking, Skype for Business (although video can now be done in Teams), Outlook and Outlook online, and Publisher. As well as Publisher, InfoPath, and Access for Windows. 

This Software + Services approach turned out to be a master-stroke. Microsoft was able to finally raise prices and earned well over a 10% boost to the Office segment in just a few years. The pricing for subscriptions over the term of what would have been a perpetual license was often 30% more. Yet, the Office 365 subscriptions kept getting more and more cool stuff. And by 2017 the subscriptions captured more revenue than the perpetual licenses. And a number of other services can be included with Office 365. 

Another huge impact is the rapid disappearing act of on premises Exchange servers. Once upon a time small businesses would have an Exchange server and then as they grew, move that to a colocation facility, hire MCSE engineers (like me) to run them, and have an amplified cost increase in dealing with providing groupware. Moving that to Microsoft means that Microsoft can charge more, and the customer can get a net savings, even though the subscriptions cost more - because they don’t have to pay people to run those servers. OneDrive moves files off old filers, etc. 

And the Office apps provided aren’t just for Windows and Mac. Pocket Office would come in 1996, for Windows CE. Microsoft would have Office apps for all of their mobile operating systems. And in 2009 we would get Office for Symbian. And then for iPhone in 2013 and iPad in 2014. Then for Android in 2015. 

Today over 1 and a quarter billion people use Microsoft Office. In fact, not a lot of people have *not* used Office. Microsoft has undergone a resurgence in recent years and is more nimble and friendly than ever before. Many of the people that created these tools are still at Microsoft. Simonyi left Microsoft for a time. But they ended up buying his company later. During what we now refer to as the “lost decade” at Microsoft, I would always think of these humans. Microsoft would get dragged through the mud for this or that. But the engineers kept making software. And I’m really glad to see them back making world class APIs that do what we need them to do. And building good software on top of that. 

But most importantly, they set the standard for what a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool would look like for a generation. And the ubiquity the software obtained allowed for massive leaps in adoption and innovation. Until it didn’t. That’s when Google Apps came along, giving Microsoft a kick in the keister to put up or shut up. And boy did Microsoft answer. 

So thank you to all of them. I probably never would have written my first book without their contributions to computing. And thank you listener, for tuning in, to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day. 

Today we’re going to review the innovations in electricity that led to the modern era of computing. 

As is often the case, things we knew as humans, once backed up with science, became much, much more. Electricity is a concept that has taken hundreds of years to really take shape and be harnessed. And whether having done so is a good thing for humanity, we can only hope. 

We’ll take this story back to 1600. Early scientists were studying positive and negative elements and forming an understanding that electricity flowed between them. Like the English natural scientist, William Gilbert  - who first established some of the basics of electricity and magnetism in his seminal work De Magnete, published in 1600, when he coined the term electricity. There were others but the next jump in understanding didn’t come until the time of Sir Thomas Browne, who along with other scientists of the day continued to refine theories. He was important because he documented where the scientific revolution was in his 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica. He codified that word electricity. And computer by the way. 

And electricity would be debated for a hundred years and tinkered with in scientific societies, before the next major innovations would come. Then another British scientist, Peter Collinson, sent Benjamin Franklin an electricity tube, which these previous experiments had begun to produce. 

Benjamin Franklin spent some time writing back and forth with Collinson and flew a kite and proved that electrical currents flowed through a kite string and that a metal key was used to conduct that electricity. This proved that electricity was fluid. Linked capacitors came along in 1749. That was 1752 and Thomas-Francois Dalibard also proved the hypothesis using a large metal pole struck by lightning. 

James Watt was another inventor and scientist who was studying steam engines from the 1760s to the late 1790s. Watt used to quantify the rate of energy transfer, a unit to measure power. Today we often measure those watts in terms of megawatts. His work in engines would prove important for converting thermal into mechanical energy and producing electricity later. But not yet. 

1799, Alessandro Volta built a battery, the Volta Pile. We still refer to the resistance of an ohm when the current of an amp flows through it as a volt. Suddenly we were creating electricity from an electrochemical reaction. 

Humphry Davy took a battery and invented the “arc lamp.” By attaching a piece of carbon that glowed to it with wires.

Budding scientists continued to study electricity and refine the theories. And by the 1820s, Hans Christian Orsted proved that an electrical current creates a circular magnetic field when flowing through a wire. Humans were able to create electrical current and harness it from nature. Inspired by Orsted’s discoveries, André-Marie Ampère began to put math on what Orsted had observed. Ampére observed two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract and that they repeled each other, depending on the direction of the currents, the foundational principal of electrodynamics. He took electricity to an empirical place. He figured out how to measure electricity, and for that, the ampere is now the unit of measurement we use to track electric current.

In 1826 Georg Ohm defined the relationship between current, power, resistance, and voltage. This is now called “Ohms Law” and we still measure electrical resistance in ohms. 

Michael Faraday was working in electricity as well, starting with replicating a voltaic pile and he kinda’ got hooked. He got wind of Orsted’s discovery as well and he ended up building an electric motor. He studied electromagnetic rotation, and by. 1831 was able to generate electricity using what we now call the Faraday disk. He was the one that realized the link between the various forms of electricity and experimented with various currents and voltages to change outcomes. He also gave us the Faraday cage, Faraday constant, Faraday cup, Faraday's law of induction, Faraday's laws of electrolysis, the Faraday effect, Faraday paradox, Faraday rotator, Faraday wave, and the Faraday wheel. It’s no surprise that Einstein kept a picture of Faraday in his study. 

By 1835, Joseph Henry developed the electrical relay and we could send current over long distances. 

Then, in the 1840s, a brewer named James Joule had been fascinated by electricity since he was a kid. And he discovered the relationship between mechanical work and heat. And so the law of conservation of energy was born. Today, we still call a joule a unit of energy. He would also study the relationship between currents that flowed through resistors and how they let off heat, which we now call Joules first law. By the way, he also worked with Lord Kelvin to develop the Kelvin scale. 

1844, Samuel Morse gave us the electrical telegraph and Morse code. After a few years coming to terms with all of this innovation, JC Maxwell unified magnetism and electricity and gave us Maxwell’s Equations, which gave way to electric power, radios, television, and much, much more. 

By 1878 we knew more and more about electricity. The boom of telegraphs had sparked many a young inventor into action and by 1878 we saw the lightbulb and a lamp that could run off a generator. This led Thomas Edison to found Edison Light and Electric and continue to refine electric lighting. By 1882, Edison fired up the Pearl Street Power station and could light up 5,000 lights using direct current power. A hydroelectric station opened in Wisconsin the same year. The next year, Edison gave us the vacuum tube.

Tesla gave us the Tesla coil and therefore alternating current in 1883, making it more efficient to send electrical current to far away places. Tesla would go on to develop polyphase ac power and patent the generator to transformer to motor and light system we use today, which was bought by George Westinghouse. By 1893, Westinghouse would use aC power to light up the World’s Fair in Chicago, a turning point in the history of electricity. 

And from there, electricity spread fast. Humanity discovered all kinds of uses for it. 1908 gave us the vacuum and the washing machine. The air conditioner came in 1911 and 1913 brought the refrigerator. And it continued to spread.

By 1920, electricity was so important that it needed to be regulated in the US and the Federal Power Commission was created. By 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority established a plan to built damns across the US to light cities. And by 1935 The Federal Power Act was enacted to regulate the impact of damns on waterways.

And in the history of computing, the story of electricity kinda’ ends with the advent of the transistor, in 1947. Which gave us modern computing. The transmission lines for the telegraph put people all over the world in touch with one another. The time saved with all these innovations gave us even more time to think about the next wave of innovation. And the US and other countries began to ramp up defense spending, which led to the rise of the computer. But none of it would have been possible without all of the contributions of all these people over the years. So thank you to them.

And thank you, listeners, for tuning in. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Today we’re going to review the innovations in electricity that led to the modern era of computing. 

As is often the case, things we knew as humans, once backed up with science, became much, much more. Electricity is a concept that has taken hundreds of years to really take shape and be harnessed. And whether having done so is a good thing for humanity, we can only hope. 

We’ll take this story back to 1600. Early scientists were studying positive and negative elements and forming an understanding that electricity flowed between them. Like the English natural scientist, William Gilbert  - who first established some of the basics of electricity and magnetism in his seminal work De Magnete, published in 1600, when he coined the term electricity. There were others but the next jump in understanding didn’t come until the time of Sir Thomas Browne, who along with other scientists of the day continued to refine theories. He was important because he documented where the scientific revolution was in his 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica. He codified that word electricity. And computer by the way. 

And electricity would be debated for a hundred years and tinkered with in scientific societies, before the next major innovations would come. Then another British scientist, Peter Collinson, sent Benjamin Franklin an electricity tube, which these previous experiments had begun to produce. 

Benjamin Franklin spent some time writing back and forth with Collinson and flew a kite and proved that electrical currents flowed through a kite string and that a metal key was used to conduct that electricity. This proved that electricity was fluid. Linked capacitors came along in 1749. That was 1752 and Thomas-Francois Dalibard also proved the hypothesis using a large metal pole struck by lightning. 

James Watt was another inventor and scientist who was studying steam engines from the 1760s to the late 1790s. Watt used to quantify the rate of energy transfer, a unit to measure power. Today we often measure those watts in terms of megawatts. His work in engines would prove important for converting thermal into mechanical energy and producing electricity later. But not yet. 

1799, Alessandro Volta built a battery, the Volta Pile. We still refer to the resistance of an ohm when the current of an amp flows through it as a volt. Suddenly we were creating electricity from an electrochemical reaction. 

Humphry Davy took a battery and invented the “arc lamp.” By attaching a piece of carbon that glowed to it with wires.

Budding scientists continued to study electricity and refine the theories. And by the 1820s, Hans Christian Orsted proved that an electrical current creates a circular magnetic field when flowing through a wire. Humans were able to create electrical current and harness it from nature. Inspired by Orsted’s discoveries, André-Marie Ampère began to put math on what Orsted had observed. Ampére observed two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract and that they repeled each other, depending on the direction of the currents, the foundational principal of electrodynamics. He took electricity to an empirical place. He figured out how to measure electricity, and for that, the ampere is now the unit of measurement we use to track electric current.

In 1826 Georg Ohm defined the relationship between current, power, resistance, and voltage. This is now called “Ohms Law” and we still measure electrical resistance in ohms. 

Michael Faraday was working in electricity as well, starting with replicating a voltaic pile and he kinda’ got hooked. He got wind of Orsted’s discovery as well and he ended up building an electric motor. He studied electromagnetic rotation, and by. 1831 was able to generate electricity using what we now call the Faraday disk. He was the one that realized the link between the various forms of electricity and experimented with various currents and voltages to change outcomes. He also gave us the Faraday cage, Faraday constant, Faraday cup, Faraday's law of induction, Faraday's laws of electrolysis, the Faraday effect, Faraday paradox, Faraday rotator, Faraday wave, and the Faraday wheel. It’s no surprise that Einstein kept a picture of Faraday in his study. 

By 1835, Joseph Henry developed the electrical relay and we could send current over long distances. 

Then, in the 1840s, a brewer named James Joule had been fascinated by electricity since he was a kid. And he discovered the relationship between mechanical work and heat. And so the law of conservation of energy was born. Today, we still call a joule a unit of energy. He would also study the relationship between currents that flowed through resistors and how they let off heat, which we now call Joules first law. By the way, he also worked with Lord Kelvin to develop the Kelvin scale. 

1844, Samuel Morse gave us the electrical telegraph and Morse code. After a few years coming to terms with all of this innovation, JC Maxwell unified magnetism and electricity and gave us Maxwell’s Equations, which gave way to electric power, radios, television, and much, much more. 

By 1878 we knew more and more about electricity. The boom of telegraphs had sparked many a young inventor into action and by 1878 we saw the lightbulb and a lamp that could run off a generator. This led Thomas Edison to found Edison Light and Electric and continue to refine electric lighting. By 1882, Edison fired up the Pearl Street Power station and could light up 5,000 lights using direct current power. A hydroelectric station opened in Wisconsin the same year. The next year, Edison gave us the vacuum tube.

Tesla gave us the Tesla coil and therefore alternating current in 1883, making it more efficient to send electrical current to far away places. Tesla would go on to develop polyphase ac power and patent the generator to transformer to motor and light system we use today, which was bought by George Westinghouse. By 1893, Westinghouse would use aC power to light up the World’s Fair in Chicago, a turning point in the history of electricity. 

And from there, electricity spread fast. Humanity discovered all kinds of uses for it. 1908 gave us the vacuum and the washing machine. The air conditioner came in 1911 and 1913 brought the refrigerator. And it continued to spread.

By 1920, electricity was so important that it needed to be regulated in the US and the Federal Power Commission was created. By 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority established a plan to built damns across the US to light cities. And by 1935 The Federal Power Act was enacted to regulate the impact of damns on waterways.

And in the history of computing, the story of electricity kinda’ ends with the advent of the transistor, in 1947. Which gave us modern computing. The transmission lines for the telegraph put people all over the world in touch with one another. The time saved with all these innovations gave us even more time to think about the next wave of innovation. And the US and other countries began to ramp up defense spending, which led to the rise of the computer. But none of it would have been possible without all of the contributions of all these people over the years. So thank you to them.

And thank you, listeners, for tuning in. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

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 look at Y Combinator. 

Here’s a fairly common startup story. After finishing his second book on Lisp, Paul Graham decides to found a company. He and Robert Morris start Viaweb in 1995, along with Trevor Blackwell. Some of the code came from Lisp - you know, like the books Graham had worked on. It was one of the earliest SaaS startups, which let users host online stores - similar to Shopify today. Viaweb had an investor named Julian Weber, who invested $10,000 in exchange for 10% of the company. Weber gave them invaluable advice. By 1998 they were acquired by Yahoo! for about $50 million in stock, which was a little shy of half a million shares. Viaweb would became the Yahoo Store. Both Graham and Morris have PhDs from Harvard.

Here’s where the story gets different. Graham would write a number of essays, establishing himself as an influencer of sorts. 2005 rolls around and Graham decides to start doing seed funding for startups, following the model that Weber had established with Viaweb. He gets the gang back together, hooking up with his Viaweb co-founders Robert Morris (the guy that wrote the Morris worm) and Trevor Blackwell, and adding girlfriend and future wife Jessica Livingston - and they create Y Combinator. 

Graham would pony up $100,000, Morris and Blackwell would each chip in $50,000 and they would start with $200,000 to invest in companies. Being Harvard alumni, it was called Cambridge Seed. And as is the case with many of the companies they invest in, the name would change quickly, to Y Combinator. 

They would hold their first session in Boston and called it the Summer Founders Program. And they got a great batch of startups! So they decided to do it again, this time in Mountain View, using space provided by Blackwell. This time, a lot more startups applied and they decided to run two a year, one in each location. And they had plenty of startups looking to attend. But why? 

There have always been venture capital firms. Well, not always, but ish. They invest in startups. And incubators had become more common in business since the 1950s. The incubators mostly focused on planning, launching, and growing a company. But accelerators we just starting to become a thing, with the first one maybe being Colorado Venture Centers in 2001. The concept of accelerators really took off because of Y Combinator though.

There have been incubators and accelerators for a long, long time. Y Combinator didn’t really create those categories. But they did change the investment philosophy of many. You see, Y Combinator is an investor and a school. But. They don’t provide office space to companies. They have an open application process. They invest in the ideas of founders they like. They don’t invest much. But they get equity in the company in return. They like hackers. People that know how to build software. People who have built companies and sold companies. People who can help budding entrepreneurs. 

Graham would launch Hacker News in 2007. Originally called Startup News, it’s a service like Reddit that was developed in a language Graham co-wrote called Arc. I guess Arc would be more a stripped down dialect of Lisp, built in Racket. He’d release Arc in 2008. I wonder why he prefers technical founders…

They look for technical founders. They look for doers. They look for great ideas, but they focus on the people behind the ideas. They coach on presentation skills, pitch decks, making products. They have a simple motto: “Make Something People Want”. And it works. By 2008 they were investing in 40 companies a year and running a program in Boston and another in Silicon Valley. It was getting to be a bit much so they dropped the Boston program and required founders who wanted to attend the program to move to the Bay Area for a couple of months. They added office hours to help their founders and by 2009 the word was out, Y Combinator was the thing every startup founder wanted to do. Sequoia Capital ponied up $2,000,000 and Y Combinator was able to grow to 60 investments a year. And it was working out really well. So Sequoia put in another $8,250,000 round. 

The program is a crash course in building a startup. They look to grow fast. They host weekly dinners that Graham used to cook. Often with guest speakers from the VC community or other entrepreneurs. They build towards Demo Day, where founders present to crowds of investors. 

It kept growing. It was an awesome idea but it took a lot of work. The more the word spread, the more investments like Yuri Milner wanted to help fun every company that graduated from Y Combinator. They added non profits in 2013 and continued to grow. By 2014, Graham stepped down as President and handed the reigns to Sam Altman. The amount they invested went up to $120,000. More investments required more leaders and others would come in to run various programs. Altman would step down in 2019.

They would experiment with some other ideas but in the end, the original concept was perfect. Several alumni would come back and contribute to the success of future startups. People from companies like Justin.tv and twitch. In fact, their cofounder Michel Seibel would recommend Y Combinator to the founders of Airbnb. He ran Y Combinator Core for a while. Many of the founders who had good exits have gone from starting companies to investing in companies.  

Y Combinator changed the way seed investments happen. By 2015, a third of startups got their Series A funding from accelerators. The combined valuation of the Y Combinator companies who could be surveyed is well over $150 billion dollars in market capitalization. Graduates include Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, DoorDash, Instacart, Reddit. Massive success has led to over 15,000 applicants for just a few spots. To better serve so many companies, they created a website called Startup School in 2017 and over 1,500 startups went through it in the first year alone. 

Y Combinator has been quite impactful in a lot of companies. More important than the valuations and name brands, graduates are building software people want. They’re iterating societal change, spurring innovation at a faster pace. They’re zeroing in on helping founders build what people want rather than just spinning their wheels and banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out why people aren’t buying what they’re selling. 

My favorite part of Y Combinator has been the types of founders they look for. They give $150,000 to mostly technical founders. And they get 7% of the company in exchange for that investment. And their message of finding the right product market fit has provided them with massive returns on their investments. At. This point they’ve helped over 2,000 companies by investing and countless others with the startup School and by promoting them on Hacker News. 

Not a lot of people can say they changed the world. But this crew did. And there’s a chance Airbnb, Doordash, Reddit, Stripe, Dropbox and countless others would have launched and succeeded, but we’re all better off for the thousands of companies who have gone through YC having done so. So thank you for helping us get there. 

And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so, so lucky to have you. Have a great day. 

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 look at Y Combinator. 

Here’s a fairly common startup story. After finishing his second book on Lisp, Paul Graham decides to found a company. He and Robert Morris start Viaweb in 1995, along with Trevor Blackwell. Some of the code came from Lisp - you know, like the books Graham had worked on. It was one of the earliest SaaS startups, which let users host online stores - similar to Shopify today. Viaweb had an investor named Julian Weber, who invested $10,000 in exchange for 10% of the company. Weber gave them invaluable advice. By 1998 they were acquired by Yahoo! for about $50 million in stock, which was a little shy of half a million shares. Viaweb would became the Yahoo Store. Both Graham and Morris have PhDs from Harvard.

Here’s where the story gets different. Graham would write a number of essays, establishing himself as an influencer of sorts. 2005 rolls around and Graham decides to start doing seed funding for startups, following the model that Weber had established with Viaweb. He gets the gang back together, hooking up with his Viaweb co-founders Robert Morris (the guy that wrote the Morris worm) and Trevor Blackwell, and adding girlfriend and future wife Jessica Livingston - and they create Y Combinator. 

Graham would pony up $100,000, Morris and Blackwell would each chip in $50,000 and they would start with $200,000 to invest in companies. Being Harvard alumni, it was called Cambridge Seed. And as is the case with many of the companies they invest in, the name would change quickly, to Y Combinator. 

They would hold their first session in Boston and called it the Summer Founders Program. And they got a great batch of startups! So they decided to do it again, this time in Mountain View, using space provided by Blackwell. This time, a lot more startups applied and they decided to run two a year, one in each location. And they had plenty of startups looking to attend. But why? 

There have always been venture capital firms. Well, not always, but ish. They invest in startups. And incubators had become more common in business since the 1950s. The incubators mostly focused on planning, launching, and growing a company. But accelerators we just starting to become a thing, with the first one maybe being Colorado Venture Centers in 2001. The concept of accelerators really took off because of Y Combinator though.

There have been incubators and accelerators for a long, long time. Y Combinator didn’t really create those categories. But they did change the investment philosophy of many. You see, Y Combinator is an investor and a school. But. They don’t provide office space to companies. They have an open application process. They invest in the ideas of founders they like. They don’t invest much. But they get equity in the company in return. They like hackers. People that know how to build software. People who have built companies and sold companies. People who can help budding entrepreneurs. 

Graham would launch Hacker News in 2007. Originally called Startup News, it’s a service like Reddit that was developed in a language Graham co-wrote called Arc. I guess Arc would be more a stripped down dialect of Lisp, built in Racket. He’d release Arc in 2008. I wonder why he prefers technical founders…

They look for technical founders. They look for doers. They look for great ideas, but they focus on the people behind the ideas. They coach on presentation skills, pitch decks, making products. They have a simple motto: “Make Something People Want”. And it works. By 2008 they were investing in 40 companies a year and running a program in Boston and another in Silicon Valley. It was getting to be a bit much so they dropped the Boston program and required founders who wanted to attend the program to move to the Bay Area for a couple of months. They added office hours to help their founders and by 2009 the word was out, Y Combinator was the thing every startup founder wanted to do. Sequoia Capital ponied up $2,000,000 and Y Combinator was able to grow to 60 investments a year. And it was working out really well. So Sequoia put in another $8,250,000 round. 

The program is a crash course in building a startup. They look to grow fast. They host weekly dinners that Graham used to cook. Often with guest speakers from the VC community or other entrepreneurs. They build towards Demo Day, where founders present to crowds of investors. 

It kept growing. It was an awesome idea but it took a lot of work. The more the word spread, the more investments like Yuri Milner wanted to help fun every company that graduated from Y Combinator. They added non profits in 2013 and continued to grow. By 2014, Graham stepped down as President and handed the reigns to Sam Altman. The amount they invested went up to $120,000. More investments required more leaders and others would come in to run various programs. Altman would step down in 2019.

They would experiment with some other ideas but in the end, the original concept was perfect. Several alumni would come back and contribute to the success of future startups. People from companies like Justin.tv and twitch. In fact, their cofounder Michel Seibel would recommend Y Combinator to the founders of Airbnb. He ran Y Combinator Core for a while. Many of the founders who had good exits have gone from starting companies to investing in companies.  

Y Combinator changed the way seed investments happen. By 2015, a third of startups got their Series A funding from accelerators. The combined valuation of the Y Combinator companies who could be surveyed is well over $150 billion dollars in market capitalization. Graduates include Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, DoorDash, Instacart, Reddit. Massive success has led to over 15,000 applicants for just a few spots. To better serve so many companies, they created a website called Startup School in 2017 and over 1,500 startups went through it in the first year alone. 

Y Combinator has been quite impactful in a lot of companies. More important than the valuations and name brands, graduates are building software people want. They’re iterating societal change, spurring innovation at a faster pace. They’re zeroing in on helping founders build what people want rather than just spinning their wheels and banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out why people aren’t buying what they’re selling. 

My favorite part of Y Combinator has been the types of founders they look for. They give $150,000 to mostly technical founders. And they get 7% of the company in exchange for that investment. And their message of finding the right product market fit has provided them with massive returns on their investments. At. This point they’ve helped over 2,000 companies by investing and countless others with the startup School and by promoting them on Hacker News. 

Not a lot of people can say they changed the world. But this crew did. And there’s a chance Airbnb, Doordash, Reddit, Stripe, Dropbox and countless others would have launched and succeeded, but we’re all better off for the thousands of companies who have gone through YC having done so. So thank you for helping us get there. 

And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so, so lucky to have you. Have a great day.