The History of Computing

The History Of Cisco 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 talk about the history of Cisco. They have defined the routing and switching world for decades. Practically since the beginning of the modern era. They’ve bought companies, they’ve grown and shrunk and grown again. And their story feels similar in many ways to the organizations that came out of the tail end of the grants tossed around by DARPA. These companies harnessed the incredibly innovative ideas and technology to found the companies who commercialized all of that amazing research and changed the world. These companies ushered in a globally connected network, almost instantaneously transmitting thoughts and hopes and dreams and failures and atrocities. They made money. Massive, massive truckloads of money. But they changed the world for the better. Hopefully in an irrevocable kind of way. The Cisco story is interesting because it symbolizes a time when we were moving from the beginnings of the Internet. Stanford had been involved in ARPAnet since the late 60s but Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had been advancing TCP and IP in the 70s, establishing IPv4 in 1983. And inspired by ALOHAnet, Bob Metcaffe and the team at Xerox PARC had developed Ethernet in 74. And the computer science research community had embraced these, with the use of Email and time sharing spurring more and more computers to be connected to the Internet. Raw research being done out of curiosity and to make the world a better place. The number of devices connected to the growing network was increasing. And Stanford was right in the center of it. Silicon Valley founders just keep coming out of Stanford but this one, they were professors, and early on. They invented the multi-protocol router and finance the startup with their own personal credit cards. Leonard Bosack and Sandy K. Lerner are credited for starting Cisco, but the company rose out of projects to network computers on the Stanford campus. The project got started after Xerox PARC donated some Alto workstations and Ethernet boards they didn’t need anymore in 1980, shortly after Metcaffe left Xerox to start 3COM. And by then Cerf was off to MCI to help spur development of the backbones faster. And NSFnet came along in 1981, bringing even more teams from universities and private companies into the fold. The Director of Computer Facilities, Ralph Gorin, needed to be able to get longer network cables to get even more devices connected. He got what would amount to a switch today. The team was informal. They used a mother board from Andy Bechtolsheim, later the founder of Sun Microsystems. They borrow boards from other people. Bosack himself, who had been an ARPAnet contributor, donated a board. And amongst the most important was the software, which William Yeager wrote, which had a little routing program that connected medical center computers to the computer science department computers and could use the Parc Universal Packet (PUP), XNS, IP and CHAOSNet.. The network linked any types of computers, from Xerox Altos to mainframes using a number of protocols, including the most important for the future, IP, or the Internet Protocol. They called it the Blue Box. And given the number of computers that were at Stanford, various departments around campus started asking for them, as did other universities. There were 5,000 computers connected at Stanford by the time they were done. Seeing a potential business here, Bosack, then running the computers for the Computer Science department, and Lerner, then the Director of Computer Facilities for the Graduate School of Business, founded Cisco Systems in 1984, short for San Francisco, and used an image of the Golden Gate Bridge a their logo. You can see the same pattern unfold all over. When people from MIT built something cool, it was all good. Until someone decided to monetize it. Same with chip makers and others. By 1985, Stanford formally started a new project to link all the computers they could on the campus. Yeager gave the source to Bosack and Kirk Lougheed so they could strip out everything but the Internet Protocol and beef that up. I guess Yeager saw routers as commercially viable and he asked the university if he could sell the Blue Box. They said no. But Bosack and Lougheed were plowing ahead, using Stanford time and resources. But Bosack and Lerner hadn’t asked and they were building these routers in their home and it was basically the same thing as the Blue Box, including the software. Most of the people at Stanford thought they were crazy. They kept adding more code and logic and the devices kept getting better. By 1986, Bosack’s supervisor Les Earnest caught wind and started to investigate. He went to the dean and Bosack was given an ultimatum, it was go the wacky Cisco thing or stay at Stanford. Bosack quit to try to build Cisco into a company. Lougheed ran into something similar and quit as well. Lerner had already left but Greg Satz and Richard Troiano left as well, bringing them up to 5 people. Yeager was not one of them, even though he’d worked a lot on the software, including on nights and weekends. But everyone was learning and when it was to benefit the university, it was fine. But then when things went commercial, Stanford got the lawyers involved. Yeager looked at the code and still saw some of his in there. I’m sure the Cisco team considered that technical debt. Cisco launched the Advanced Gateway Server (AGS) router in 1986, two years after the Mac was released. The software was initially written by Yeager but improved by Bosack and Lougheed, as the operating system, later called Cisco IOS. Stanford thought about filing a criminal complaint of theft but realized it would be hard to prosecute, and ugly especially given that Stanford itself is a non-profit. They had $200,000 in contracts and couldn’t really be paying all this attention to lawsuits and not building the foundations of the emerging Internet. So instead they all agreed to license the software and the imprint of the physical boards being used (known as photomasks), to the fledgling Cisco Systems in 1987. This was crucial as now Cisco could go to market with products without the fear of law suits. Stanford got discounts on future products, $19,300 up front, and $150,000 in royalties. No one knew what Cisco would become so it was considered a fair settlement at the time. Yeager, being a mensch and all, split his 80% of the royalties between the team. He would go on to give us IMAP and Kermit, before moving to Sun Microsystems. Speaking of Sun, there was bad blood between Cisco and Stanford, which I always considered ironic given that a similar thing happened when Sun was founded in some part, using Stanford intellectual property and unused hardware back in 1982. I think the difference is trying to hide things and being effusive with the credit for code and inventions. But as sales increased, Lougheed continued to improve the code and the company hired Bill Graves to be CEO in 1987 who was replaced with John Mordridge in 1988. And the sales continued to skyrocket. Cisco went public in 1990 when they were valued at $224 million. Lerner was fired later that year and Bosack decided to join her. And as is so often the case after a company goes public, the founders who had a vision of monetizing great research, were no longer at the startup. Seeing a need for more switching, Cisco acquired a number of companies including Grand Junction and Crescendo Communications which formed like Voltron to become the Cisco Catalyst, arguably the most prolific switching line in computing. Seeing the success of Cisco and the needs of the market, a number of others started building routers and firewalls. The ocean was getting redder. John Mays had the idea to build a device that would be called the PIX in 1994 and Branley Coile in Athens, Georgia programmed it to become a PBX running on IP. We were running out of IP addresses because at the time, organizations used public IPs. But NAT was about to become a thing and RFC 1918 was being reviewed by the IETF. They brought in Johnson Wu and shipped a device that could run NAT that year, ushering in the era of the Local Area Network. John T. Chambers replaced Mordridge in 1995 and led Cisco as its CEO until 2015. Cisco quickly acquired the company and the Cisco PIX would become the standard firewall used in organizations looking to get their computers on the Internets. The PIX would sell and make Cisco all the monies until it was replaced by the Cisco ASA in 2008. In 1996, Cisco's revenues hit $5.4 billion, making it one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories. By 1998 they were up to $6B. Their stock peaked in 2000. By the end of the dot-com bubble in the year 2000, Cisco had a more than $500 billion market capitalization. They were building an industry. The CCNA, or Cisco Certified Network Associate, and CCNE, Cisco Certified Network Engineer were the hottest certifications on the market. When I got mine it was much easier than it is today. The market started to fragment after that. Juniper came out strong in 1999 and led a host of competitors that landed in niche markets and expanded into core markets. But the ASA combined Cisco’s IPS, VPN concentration, and NAT functionality into one simpler box that actually came with a decent GUI. The GUI seemed like sacrilege at the time. And instead of sitting on top of a network operating system, it ran on Linux. At the top end they could handle 10 million connections, important once devices established and maintained so many connections to various services. And you could bolt on antivirus and other features that were becoming increasingly necessary at various layers of connectivity at the time. They went down-market for routing devices with an acquisition of Linksys in 2003. They acquired Webex in 2007 for over $3 billion dollars and that became the standard in video conferencing until a solid competitor called Zoom emerged recently. They acquired SourceFire in 2013 for $2.7B and have taken the various services offered there to develop Cisco products, such as the anti-virus to be a client-side malware scanning tool called Cisco AMP. Juniper gave away free training unlike the Cisco training that cost thousands of dollars and Alcatel-Lucent, Linksys, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, SonicWall, Barracuda, CheckPoint, and rising giant Huawei led to a death by a thousand competitors and Cisco’s first true layoffs by 2011. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in 2015 to establish a core part of what’s now known as Cisco Umbrella. This gives organizations insight into what’s happening on increasingly geographically distributed devices; especially mobile devices due to a close partnership with Apple. And they acquired Broadsoft in 2017 to get access to even more sellers and technology in the cloud communication space. Why? Because while they continue to pump out appliances for IP connectivity, they just probably can’t command a higher market share due to the market dynamics. Every vendor they acquire in that space will spawn two or more new serious competitors. Reaching into other spaces provides a more diverse product portfolio and gives their sellers more SKUs in the quiver to make quotas. And pushes the world forward with newer concepts, like fog computing. Today, Cisco is still based in San Jose and makes around $50 billion a year in revenue and boasts close to 75,000 employees. A lot has happened since those early days. Cisco is one of the most innovative and operationally masterful companies on the planet. Mature companies can have the occasional bumps in the road and will go through peaks and valleys. But their revenues are a reflection of their market leadership, sitting around 50 billion dollars. Yes, most of their true innovation comes from acquisitions today. However, the insights on whom to buy and how to combine technologies, and how to get teams to work well with one another. That’s a crazy level of operational efficiency. There’s a chance that the Internet explosion could have happened without Cisco effectively taking the mantle in a weird kind of way from BBN for selling and supporting routing during the storm when it came. There’s also a chance that without a supply chain of routing appliances to help connect the world that the whole thing might have tumbled down. So consider this: technological determinism. If it hadn’t of been Cisco, would someone else have stepped up to get us to the period of the dot com bubble? Maybe. And since they made so much money off the whole thing I’ve heard that Cisco doesn’t deserve our thanks for the part they played. But they do. Without their training and appliances and then intrusion prevention, we might not be where we are today. So thank you Cisco for teaching me everything I know about OSI models and layers and all that. And you know… helping the Internet become ubiquitous and all. And thank you, listener, for tuning in to yet another episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so very lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Computing In Poland 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 do something a little different. Based on a recent trip to Katowice and Krakow, and a great visit to the Museum of Computer and Information Technology in Katowice, we’re going to look at the history of computing in Poland. Something they are proud of and should be proud of. And I’m going to mispronounce some words. Because they are averse to vowels. But not really, instead because I’m just not too bright. Apologies in advance. First, let’s take a stroll through an overly brief history of Poland itself. Atilla the Hun and other conquerors pushed Germanic tribes from Poland in the fourth century which led to a migration of Slavs from the East into the area. After a long period of migration, duke Mieszko established the Piast dynasty in 966, and they created the kingdom of Poland in 1025, which lasted until 1370 when Casimir the Great died without an heir. That was replaced by the Jagiellonian dynasty which expanded until they eventually developed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. Turns out they overextended themselves until the Russians, Prussians, and Austria invaded and finally took control in 1795, partitioning Poland. Just before that, Polish clockmaker Jewna Jakobson built a mechanical computing machine, a hundred years after Pascal, in 1770. And innovations In mechanical computing continued on with Abraham Izrael Stern and his son through the 1800s and Bruno’s Intergraph, which could solve complex differential equations. And so the borders changed as Prussia gave way to Germany until World War I when the Second Polish Republic was established. And the Poles got good at cracking codes as they struggled to stay sovereign against Russian attacks. Just as they’d struggled to stay sovereign for well over a century. Then the Germans and Soviets formed a pact in 1939 and took the country again. During the war, Polish scientists not only assisted with work on the Enigma but also with the nuclear program in the US, the Manhattan Project. Stanislaw Ulam was recruited to the project and helped with ENIAC by developing the Monte Carlo method along with Jon Von Neumann. The country remained partitioned until Germany fell in WWII and the Soviets were able to effectively rule the Polish People’s Republic until a socal-Democratic movement swept the country in 1989, resulting in the current government and Poland moving from the Eastern Bloc to NATO and eventually the EU around the same time the wall fell in Berlin. Able to put the Cold War behind them, Polish cities are now bustling with technical innovation and is now home some of the best software developers I’ve ever met. Polish contributions to a more modern computer science began in 1924 when Jan Lukasiewicz developed Polish Notation, a way of writing mathematical expressions such that they are operator-first. during World War II when the Polish Cipher Bureau were the first that broke the Enigma encryption, at different levels from 1932 to 1939. They had been breaking codes since using them to thwart a Russian invasion in the 1920s and had a pretty mature operation at this point. But it was a slow, manUal process, so Marian Rejewski, one of the cryptographers developed a card catalog of permutations and used a mechanical computing device he invented a few years earlier called a cyclometer to decipher the codes. The combination led to the bomba kryptologiczna which was shown to the allies 5 weeks before the war started and in turn led to the Ultra program and eventually Colossus once Alan Turing got a hold of it, conceptually after meeting Rejewski. After the war he became an accountant to avoid being forced into slave cryptographic work by the Russians. In 1948 the Group for Mathematical Apparatus of the Mathematical Institute in Warsaw was formed and the academic field of computer research was formed in Poland. Computing continued in Poland during the Soviet-controlled era. EMAL-1 was started in 1953 but was never finished. The XYZ computer came along in 1958. Jack Karpiński built the first real vacuum tube mainframe in Poland, called the AAH in 1957 to analyze weather patterns and improve forecasts. He then worked with a team to build the AKAT-1 to simulate lots of labor intensive calculations like heat transfer mechanics. Karpinski founded the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He would win a UNESCO award and receive a 6 month scholarship to study in the US, which the polish government used to spy on American progress in computing. He came home armed with some innovative ideas from the West and by 1964 built what he called the Perceptron, a computer that could be taught to identify shapes and even some objects. Nothing like that had existed in Poland or anywhere else controlled by communist regimes at the time. From 65 to 68 he built the KAR-65, even faster, to study CERN data. By then there was a rising mainframe and minicomputer industry outside of academia in Poland. Production of the Odra mainframe-era computers began in 1959 in Wroclaw, Poland and his work was seen by them and Elwro as a threat do they banned him from publishing for a time. Elwro built a new factory in 1968, copying IBM standardization. In 1970, Karpiński realized he had to play ball with the government and got backing from officials in the government. He would then designed the k-202 minicomputer in 1971. Minicomputers were on the rise globally and he introduced the concept of paging to computer science, key in virtual memory. This time he recruited 113 programmers and hardware engineers and by 73 were using Intel 4004 chips to build faster computers than the DEC PDP-11. But the competitors shut him down. They only sold 30 and by 1978 he retired to Switzerland (that sounds better than fled) - but he returned to Poland following the end of communism in the country and the closing of the Elwro plant in 1989. By then the Personal Computing revolution was upon us. That had begun in Poland with the Meritum, a TRS-80 clone, back in 1983. More copying. But the Elwro 800 Junior shipped in 1986 and by 1990 when the communists split the country could benefit from computers being mass produced and the removal of export restrictions that were stifling innovation and keeping Poles from participating in the exploding economy around computers. Energized, the Poles quickly learned to write code and now graduate over 40,000 people in IT from universities, by some counts making Poland a top 5 tech country. And as an era of developers graduate they are founding museums to honor those who built their industry. It has been my privilege to visit two of them at this point. The description of the one in Krakow reads: The Interactive Games and Computers Museum of the Past Era is a place where adults will return to their childhood and children will be drawn into a lots of fun. We invite you to play on more than 20 computers / consoles / arcade machines and to watch our collection of 200 machines and toys from the '70's-'90's. The second is the Museum of Computer and Information Technology in Katowice, and the most recent that I had the good fortune to visit. Both have systems found at other types of computer history museums such as a Commodore PET but showcasing the locally developed systems and looking at them on a timeline it’s quickly apparent that while Poland had begun to fall behind by the 80s, it was more a reflection of why the strikes throughout caused the Eastern Bloc to fall, because Russian influence couldn’t. Much as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth couldn’t support Polish control of Lithuania in the late 1700s. There were other accomplishments such as The ZAM-2. And the first fully Polish machine, the BINEG. And rough set theory. And ultrasonic mercury memory.

Attacking Iran with Stuxnet 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 Stuxnet, which we now considered the first real act of cyber warfare. Iran has arguably been in turmoil since the fall of the Persian empire. Alexander the Great conquered Iran in 336 BC and then the Macedonians ruled until the empire fragmented and one arm, the Seleucids ruled until the Parthians took it in 129BC. Then the Sasanians, of Persian descent, ruled until the Muslim conquest of Persia in 651. The region was then ruled by a collection of Muslim dynasties until this weirdo Ghengis Khan showed up around 1220. After a few decades the Muslim forces regained control in 1256 and the area returned to turning over to different Muslim dynasties every couple hundred years on average until 1925 when the Pahlavi took control. The final Shah of that regime was ousted during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Ruholla Khomeini ruled for the first ten years until Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khameneh took over after his death in 1989. Something very important happened the year before that would shape Iran up until today. In 1988 Pakistan became a nuclear power. Iran started working toward a nuclear program shortly thereafter, buying equipment from Pakistan. Those centrifuges would be something those, including the US, would attempt to keep out of Iranian hands through to today. While you can argue the politics of that, those are the facts. Middle Eastern politics, wars over oil, and wars over territory have all ensued. In 2015, Iran reached agreement on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal, with the US and the EU, and their nuclear ambitions seemed to be stalled until US president Donald Trump pulled out of it. A little before the recording of this episode General Sullemani was killed by a US attack. One of the reasons negotiated the JCPA was that the Iranians received a huge setback in their nuclear program in 2010 when the US attacked an Iranian nuclear facility. It’s now the most Well researched computer worm. But Who was behind stuxnet? Kim Zetter took a two year journey researching the worm, now documented in her book Countdown to 0 day. The Air Force was created in 1947. In the early 2000s, advanced persistent threat, or APTs, began to emerge following Operation Eligible Receiver in 1997. These are pieces of malware that are specifically crafted to attack specific systems or people. Now that the field was seen as a new frontier of war, the US Cyber command was founded in 2009. And they developed weapons to attack SCADA systems, or supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems amongst other targets. By the mid-2000s, Siemens has built these industrial control systems. The Marrucci incident had brought these systems to light as targets and developers had not been building these systems with security in mind, making them quite juicy targets. So the US and Israel wrote some malware that destroyed centrifuges by hitting the Siemens software sitting on windows embedded operating systems. It was initially discovered by virus Blocada engineer Sergey Ulasen, and called Tootkit.Tmphider. Symantec originally called it W32.Temphid and then changed the name to W32.Stuxnet based on a mashup of stub and mrxnet.sys from the source code. The malware was signed and targeted a bug in the operating system to install a root kit. Sergey reported the bug to Microsoft and went public with the discovery. This led us into an era of cyber warfare as a the first widespread attack hitting industrial control systems. Stuxnet wasn’t your run of the mill ddos attack. Each of the 3 variants from 2010 had 150,000 lines of code and targeted those control systems and destroyed a third of Iranian centrifuges by causing the step-7 software systems to handle the centrifuges improperly. Iranian nuclear engineers had obtained the Step-7 software even though it was embargoed and used a back door password to change the rotation speed of engines that targeted a specific uranium enrichment facility. In 2011, Gary Samore, acting White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, would all but admit the attack was state sponsored. After that, in 2012, Iranian hackers use wiper malware, destroying 35,000 computers of Saudi Aramco costing the organization tens of millions of dollars. Cypem was hit in 2018. And the Sands casino after Sheldon Adelsyon said the US should nuke Iran. While not an official response, Stuxnet would hit another plant in the Hormozgon province a few months later. And continues in some form today. Since Iran and Israel are such good friends, it likely came as a shock when Gabi Ashkenazi, head of the Israeli Defense Forces, listed Stuxnet as one of his successes. And so the age of State sponsored Asymmetric cyber conflicts was born. Iran, North Korea, and others were suddenly able to punch above their weight. It was proven that what began in cyber could have real-world consequences. And very small and skilled teams could get as much done as larger, more beaurocratic organizations - much as we see small, targeted teams of developers able to compete head-on with larger software products. Why is that? Because often times, a couple of engineers with deep domain knowledge are equally as impactful as larger teams with a wider skill set.

Windows 95 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’s episode is the third installment of our Microsoft Windows series, covering Windows 95. Windows 1 was released in 1985 and Windows 3 came along a few years later. At the time, Windows 95 was huge. I can remember non-technical people talking about how it was 32-bit. There was a huge media event. Microsoft paid massive amounts to bring the press in from all over the world. They promised a lot. They made a huge bet. And it paid off. After all this time, no single OS has come with as much fanfare or acclaim. Codenamed Chicago, development began back in 1992 alongside Cairo, which would be NT 4. New processors and memory had continued getting faster, smaller, and cheaper trending along Moore’s law. The Intel 80486 was out now, and RAM was actually in the megabytes. Microsoft required a 386 and 4 megabytes of memory but recommended one of those 486 chips and 8 megabytes of memory. And the 32-bit OS promised to unlock all that speed for a better experience that was on par, if not better, than anything on the market at the time. And it showed in gaming. Suddenly DirectX and new video options unlocked an experience that has evolved into the modern era. Protected Mode programs also had preemptive multitasking, a coup at the time. Some of those were virtual device drivers or vxds. Windows 95 kinda’ sat on top of DOS but when Windows loaded, the virtual machine manager coordinated a lot of the low-level functions of the machine for The New Shell as they called it at the time. And that new GUI was pretty fantastic. It introduced the world to that little row of icons known as the Taskbar. It introduced the Start menu, so we could find the tools we needed more easily. That Start Menu triggered an ad campaign that heavily used the Start Me Up hit from The Rolling Stones. Jennifer Anniston and Matthew Perry showcased a $300 million dollar ad campaign. There were stories on the news of people waiting in lines that wrapped around computer stores. They had the Empire State Building fly the Microsoft Windows colors. They sold 4 million copies in 4 days and within a couple of years held nearly 60% of the operating system market share. This sparked a run from computer manufacturers to ship devices that had Windows 95 OEM versions pre-installed. And they earned that market share, bringing massive advancements to desktop computing. We got the Graphics Device Interface, or GDI and user.exe, which managed the windows, menus, and buttons. The desktop metaphor was similar to the Mac but the underpinnings had become far more advanced at the time. And the Stones weren’t the only musicians involved in Windows 95. Brian Eno composed all 6 seconds of the startup sound, which was eventually called The Microsoft Sound. It was a threaded OS. Many of the internals were still based on 16-bit Windows 3.1 executables. In fact while many hardware components could use built-in or even custom 32-bit drivers, it could fallback to generic 16-but drivers, making it easier to get started and use. One was it was easier to use was the Plug and Play wizards that prompted you to install those drivers when new hardware was detected. At release time the file system still used FAT16 and so was limited to 2 gigabytes in drive sizes. But you could have 255 character file names. And we got Windows Briefcase to sync files to disks so we could sneakernet them between computers. The program manager was no longer necessary. You could interact with the explorer desktop and have a seamless experience interacting with files and applications. Windows 95 was made for networking. It shipped with TCP/IP which by then was the way most people connected to the Internet. It also came with IPX/SPX so you could access the Netware file servers it seemed everyone had at the time. These features and how simple they suddenly were as impactful to the rise of the Internet as were the AOL disks floating around all over the place. Microsoft also released MSN alongside Windows 95, offering users a dial-up service to compete with those AOL disks. And Windows 95 brought us Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser by installing Windows 95's Plus! Installation pack, which also included themes. Unix had provided support for multiple users for awhile. But Windows 95 also gave us a multi-user operating system for consumers. Sure, the security paradigm wasn’t complete but it was a start. And importantly users started getting accustomed to working in these types of environments. Troubleshooting was a thing. Suddenly you had GUI-level control of IRQs and Windows 95 gave us Safe Mode, making it easy to bypass all those drivers and startup items, since most boot problems were their fault and all. I remember the first time I installed 95. We didn’t have machines that could use the CD-ROM that the OS came with so we had to use floppy disks. It took 13. We got CD-ROMs before installing 95 on more computers. It was the first time I saw people change desktop backgrounds just to mess with us. Normally there were inappropriate images involved. Windows 95 would receive a number of updates. These included Service Release 2 in 1996 which brought us FAT32, which which allowed for 2 terabyte partitions. It wasn’t an easy process to move from fat16 to fat32 so I remember a lot of people just installing another drive and mapping the d drive to it. The Internet Explorer 4 update even brought us into the Active Desktop era, giving way to many of the Bill Gates demands from his famous “The Internet Tidal Wave” memo. And the Internet certainly came. And Microsoft sat able to dominate the market for over 20 years. They built an acceptable operating system with Windows 1. They built a good operating system in Windows 3. They built a great operating system in Windows 95. The competition had been fierce. The Mac might have in some ways been better and in many ways, been the inspiration. But Microsoft out-maneuvered Apple. OS/2 3.0 or “OS/2 Warp” might have been a great OS. But Microsoft out-marketed the company sending them into a tailspin that resulted in layoffs. Hardware had to work with the new Microsoft plug and play paradigm, or it would die a fiery death in the market. Microsoft had paid careful attention in building DOS and all the other DOS makers were soon to be out of business, sending Gary Kildall of CP/M into alcoholism and by then, dead. Everyone standing in Microsoft’s way had been defeated. Not defeated, crushed, destroyed. If you’ve played Civilization it’s terribly difficult to win if you don’t destroy at least a couple of the other empires. And for a long time, Microsoft was able to give us a number of great innovations and push the market forward. This is all as impressive as it is sad. Following a lull in innovation, Microsoft left the door to the operating system market open for a resurgence of Apple and the new player, Google. They built sub-par mobile operating systems that just didn’t resonate. And the market was ready for a shift, anyway. And they got it. And so today, we have competition again, and so Microsoft has become innovative again. Their APIs are amongst the best in my opinion. I’ve worked with developers who built me a graph API endpoint and shipped it over a weekend. So they’re also inspired. Maybe market domination is good for a little while, to solidify the market. But as we’ve seen time and time again, markets need diversity. Otherwise vendors get complacent. And so think about this… What vendors are overly dominant and complacent today? Is it time. Maybe. That you disrupt them? If so, count me as an ally! So thank you for joining us for this episode and thank you for your innovations, I hope I get to do an episode on them soon! Have a great day.

General Magic 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’s episode is on a little-known company called General Magic who certainly had a substantial impact on the modern, mobile age of computing. Imagine if you had some of the best and brightest people in the world. And imagine if they were inspired by a revolutionary idea. The Mac changed the way people thought about computers when it was released in 1984. And very quickly thereafter they had left Apple. What happened to them? They got depressed and many moved on. The Personal Computer Revolution was upon us. And people who have changed the world can be hard to inspire. Especially at A big company like what Apple was becoming, where they can easily lose the ability to innovate. Mark Pratt had an idea. The mobile device was going to be the next big thing. The next wave. I mean, Steve Jobs has talked about mobile computing all the way back in 83. And it had been researched at PARC before that and philosophically the computer science research community had actually conceptualized ubiquitous computing. But Pratt knew they couldn’t build something at Apple. So in 1990 John Sculley, then CEO at Apple, worked with Pratt and they got The Apple board of directors to invest in the idea, which they built a company for, called General Magic. He kept his ideas in a book called Pocket Crystal. Two of the most important members of the original Mac team, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were inspired by the vision and joined on as well. Now legends, everyone wanted to work with them. It was an immediate draw for the best and brightest in the world. Megan Smith, Dan Winkler, amy Lindbergh, Joanna Hoffman, Scott Canaster, Darin Adler, Kevin Lynch, big names in software. They were ready to change the world. Again. They would build a small computer into a phone. A computer... in your pocket. It would be described as a telephone, a fax, and a computer. They went to Fry’s. A lot. USB didn’t exist yet. So they made it. ARPANET was a known quantity but The Internet hadn’t been born yet. Still, a pocket computer with the notes from your refrigerator, files from your computer, contacts , schedules, calculators. They had a vision. They wanted expressive icons, so they invented emoticons. And animated them. There was no data network to connect computers on phones with. So they reached out to AT&T and Go figure, they signed on. Sony, Phillips, Motorola, Mitsubishi gave them 6 million each. And they created an alliance of partners. Frank Canova built a device he showed off as “Angler” at COMDEX in 1992. Mobile devices were on the way. By 1993, the Apple Board of Directors was pressuring Sculley for the next Mac-type of visionary idea. So the Newton was announced in 1994, with the General Magic team feeling betrayed by Sculley. And General Magic got shoved out of the nest of stealth mode. After a great announcement they got a lot of press. They went public without having a product. The devices were trying to do a lot. Maybe too much. The devices were slow. Some aspects of the devices worked, for other aspects, They faked demos. The web showed up and They didn’t embrace it. In fact, Dean Omijar with Auctionweb was on the team. He thought the web was way cooler than the mobile device but the name needed work so it became eBay. The team didn’t embrace management or working together. They weren’t finishing projects. They were scope creeping the projects. The delays started. Some of the team had missed delays for the Mac and that worked. But other devices shipped. After 4 years, they shipped the Sony Magic Link in 1994. The devices were $800. People weren’t ready to be connected all the time. The network was buggy. They sold less than 3k. The stock tumbled and by 95 the Internet miss was huge. They were right. The future was in mobile computing. They needed the markets to be patient. They weren’t. They had inspired a revolution in computing and it slipped through their fingers. AT&T killed the devices, Marc was ousted as CEO, and after massive losses, they laid off nearly a quarter of the team and ultimately filed chapter 11. They weren’t the only ones. Sculley has invested so much into the Newton that he got sacked from Apple. But the vision and the press. They inspired a wave of technology. Rising like a Phoenix from the postPC, ubiquitous ashes CDMA would slowly come down in cost over the next decade and evolve connectivity through 3g and the upcoming 5g revolution. And out of their innovations came the Simon Personal Communicator by BellSouth and manufactured as the IBM Simon by Mitsubishi. The Palm, Symbian, and Pocket PC, or Windows CE would come out shortly thereafter and rise in popularity over the next few years. Tony Farrell repeated the excersize when helping invent the iPod as well and Steve Jobs even mentioned he had considered some of the tech from Magic Hat. He would later found Nest. And Andy Rubin, one of the creators of Android, also come from General Magic. Next time you read about the fact that Samsung and Apple combined control 98% of the mobile market or that Android overtook Windows for market share by double digits you can thank General Magic for at least part of the education that shaped those. The alumni include the head of speech recognition from Google, VPs from Google, Samsung, Apple, Blacberry, ebay, the CTOs of Twitter, LinkedIn, Adobe, and the United States. Alumni also include the lead engineers of the Safari browser and AI at Apple, cofounders of webtv, leaders from Pinterest, creator of dreamweaver. And now there’s a documentary about their journey called appropriately, General Magic. Their work and vision inspired the mobility industry. They touch nearly every aspect of mobile devices today and we owe them for bringing us forward into one of the most transparent and connected eras of humanity. Next time you see a racist slur recorded from a cell phone, next time a political gaffe goes viral, next time the black community finally shows proof of the police shootings they’ve complained about for decades, next time political dissenters show proof of mass killings, next time abuse at the hands of sports coaches is caught and next time all the other horrible injustices of humanity are forced upon us, thank them. Just as I owe you my thanks. I am sooooo lucky you chose to listen to this episode of the history of computing podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. Have a great day!