The History of Computing

You Cannot Arrest An Idea Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of computers. Because understanding the helps us handle what’s coming in future - and maybe helps us build what’s next, without repeating some of our mistakes. Or if we do make mistakes, maybe we do so without taking things too seriously. Todays episode is a note from a hacker named Topiary, which perfectly wraps feelings many of us have had in words that… well, we’ll let you interpret it once you hear it. First, a bit of his story. It’s February, 2011. Tflow, Sabu, Keila, Topiary, and Ryan Ackroyd attack computer security firm HBGary Federal after CEO Barr decides to speak at a conference outing members of then 7 year old hacking collective Anonymous with the motto: We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. As a part of Anonymous he would help hack Zimbabwe, Libya, Tunisia and other sites in support of Arab Spring protestors. They would go on to hack Westboro Baptist Church live during an interview. But that was part of a large collective. They would go on to form a group called Lulzsec with PwnSauce and AVunit. At Lulzsec, the 7 went on a “50 days of Lulz” spree. During this time they hit Fox.com, leaked the database of X factor Contestants, took over the PBS news site and published an article that Tupac was still alive and living in New Zealand. They published an article on the Sun claiming Rupert Murdoch died rather than testify in the voice mail hacking trials that were big at the time. They would steal data from Sony, DDoS All the Things, and they would go on to take down and or steal data from the US CIA, Department of Defense, and Senate. The light hearted comedy mixed with a considerable amount of hacking skills had earned them the love and adoration of tens of thousands. What happened next? Hackers from all over the world sent them their Lulz. Topiary helped get their haxies posted. Then Sabu was caught by the FBI and helped to out the others. Or did he. Either way, as one could expect, by July 2011, all had been arrested except AVunit. Topiary’s last tweet said “You cannot arrest an idea.” The British government might disagree. Or maybe counter that you can arrest for acting on an idea. Once unmasked, Jake Davis was in jail and then banned from the Internet for 2 years. During that time Topiary, now known as Jake Davis, wrote what is an exceptional piece of writing, to have come from a 20 year old. Here it is: “Hello, friend, and welcome to the Internet, the guiding light and deadly laser in our hectic, modern world. The Internet horde has been watching you closely for some time now. It has seen you flock to your Facebook and your Twitter over the years, and it has seen you enter its home turf and attempt to overrun it with your scandals and “real world” gossip. You need to know that the ownership of cyberspace will always remain with the hivemind. The Internet does not belong to your beloved authorities, militaries, or multi-millionaire company owners. The Internet belongs to the trolls and the hackers, the enthusiasts and the extremists; it will never cease to be this way. You see, the Internet has long since lost its place in time and its shady collective continues to shun the fact that it lives in a specific year like 2012, where it has to abide by 2012’s morals and 2012’s society, with its rules and its punishments. The Internet smirks at scenes of mass rape and horrific slaughtering followed by a touch of cannibalism, all to the sound of catchy Japanese music. It simply doesn’t give tuppence about getting a “job,” getting a car, getting a house, raising a family, and teaching them to continue the loop while the human race organizes its own death. Custom-plated coffins and retirement plans made of paperwork… The Internet asks why? You cannot make the Internet feel bad, you cannot make the Internet feel regret or guilt or sympathy, you can only make the Internet feel the need to have more lulz at your expense. The lulz flow through all in the faceless army as they see the twin towers falling with a dancing Hitler on loop in the bottom-left corner of their screens. The lulz strike when they open a newspaper and care nothing for any of the world’s alleged problems. They laugh at downward red arrows as banks and businesses tumble, and they laugh at our glorious government overlords trying to fix a situation by throwing more currency at it. They laugh when you try to make them feel the need to “make something of life,” and they laugh harder when you call them vile trolls and heartless web terrorists. They laugh at you because you’re not capable of laughing at yourselves and all of the pointless fodder they believe you surround yourselves in. But most of all they laugh because they can. This is not to say that the Internet is your enemy. It is your greatest ally and closest friend; its shops mean you don’t have to set foot outside your home, and its casinos allow you to lose your money at any hour of the day. Its many chat rooms ensure you nao longer need to interact with any other members of your species directly, and detailed social networking conveniently maps your every move and thought. Your intimate relationships and darkest secrets belong to the horde, and they will never be forgotten. Your existence will forever be encoded into the infinite repertoire of beautiful, byte-sized sequences, safely housed in the cyber cloud for all to observe. And how has the Internet changed the lives of its most hardened addicts? They simply don’t care enough to tell you. So welcome to the underbelly of society, the anarchistic stream-of-thought nebula that seeps its way into the mainstream world — your world — more and more every day. You cannot escape it and you cannot anticipate it. It is the nightmare on the edge of your dreams and the ominous thought that claws its way through your online life like a blinding virtual force, disregarding your philosophies and feasting on your emotions. Prepare to enter the hivemind” I hope Topiary still has a bit of funsies here and there. I guess we all grow up at some point. He now hunts for bug bounties rather than Lulz. One was addressed in iOS 10.13.1 when you could DoS an iOS device by shoving a malicious file into CoreText. That would be CVE-2017-7003. Hacking solutions together or looking for flaws in software. It can be like a video game. For better or worse. But I love that he’s pointed that big ugly Victorian ASCII humble boat in the direction of helping to keep us betterer. And the world is a more secure place today than it was before them. And a bit more light hearted. So thank you Topiary, for making my world better for awhile. I’m sorry you paid a price for it. But I hope you’re well.

TOR: The Dark Net Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! I’ve heard people claim the Internet was meant to be open. The Internet was built using United States defense department grants. It wasn’t meant to be a freedom movement. These concepts were co-opted by some of the hippies who worked on the Internet. People I highly respect, like Stuart Brand and Doug Engelbart. Generations of engineers and thinkers later we got net neutrality, we got the idea that people should be anonymous. They rightfully looked to the Internet as a new freedom. But to be clear, those were never in the design requirement for any of the original Internet specifications. And sometimes the intent tells you a lot about the architecture and therefore explains the evolution and why certain aspects were necessary. The Internet began in the 1960s. But the modern Internet began in 1981 when the National Science Foundation took over funding and implemented Internet Protocol Suite, giving the IP part of the name to the acronym TCP/IP. Every device on the Internet has an IP address. You ask another host on the Internet for information and the site responds with that information. That response routes to the IP address listed as the source IP address in the packets of data you sent when you made the request. You can send the source IP address as an address other than your own, but then the response will be sent to the wrong place. Every device in a communication between two computers is meant to know the source and destination address of all the other devices involved in that communication. The Internet was meant to be resilient. It’s really expensive to have a private network, or a network where your computer talks directly to another. Let’s say your computer and another computer would like to have a conversation. That conversation likely passes through 10-12 other devices, if not more. The devices between you were once called IMPs but they’re now called routers. Those devices keep a table of addresses they’ve attempted to communicate with and the routes between other routers that they took to get there. Thus the name. Once upon a time those routes were programmed in manually. Later the routers got smarter, forming a pyramid scheme where they look to bigger routers that have more resources to host larger and larger routing tables. The explosion of devices on the Internet also led to a technology called Network Address Translation. This is where one of the 3,720,249,092 is split into potentially hundreds of thousands of devices and your device communicates with the Internet through that device. These are routers that route traffic back to the private address you’re using to communicate with the Internet. When bad people started to join us on the Internet these devices ended up with a second use, to keep others from communicating with your device. That’s when some routers started acting as a firewall. Putting names to the side, this is the most basic way to explain how computers communicate over the Internet. This public Internet was then a place where anyone with access to those routers could listen to what was passing over them. Thus we started to encrypt our communications. Thus http became https. Each protocol would encrypt traffic in its own way. But then we needed to hide all of our traffic. And maybe even what sites we were going to. A common technique to hide who you are online is to establish a VPN into a computer. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a point to point network, established over existing Internet protocols. The VPN server you are logging into knows what IP address you are on. It can also intercept your communications, replay them, and even if encrypted, be aware of who you are actually communicating with. So a few minutes of over-simplified text lays out the basis of the Internet routing scheme under IPv4, that was initiated in 1983, the year the movie WarGames was released. Remember, the Internet was meant o build a resilient, fault tolerant network so that in the event of nuclear war, the US could retaliate and kill the other half of the people left in the world. If you’ve seen WarGames you have a pretty good idea of what we’re talking about here. Just to repeat: Privacy was never a concern in the design of the Internet. The United States has people in every country in the world that need to communicate home in real time. They need to do so in a secure and private manner. Part of the transition of the Internet to the National Science Foundation was to implement MilNet, their own network. But let’s say you’re an operative in Iran. If you try to connect to milnet then you’re likely to nat have a very good day. So these operatives needed to communicate back to the United States over a public network. If they used a VPN then the connection isn’t fully secured and they run the risk of getting found because eventually someone would be discovered and all traffic to a given address would be analyzed and that source device tracked down and more bad days. Let’s say you’re a political dissident in a foreign country. You want to post photos of war crimes. You need a way to securely and anonymously communicate with a friendly place to host that information. Enter the United States Naval Research Laboratory with Paul Syverson, David Goldschlag, and Michael Reed who were asked to find some ways to help protect the US intelligence community when they were on the public Internet. Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson would join the project and DARPA would pick up funding in 1997. They came up with what we now called TOR, or The Onion Router. Any property on the Internet that is intentionally exclusionary to the public can be considered a dark net or part of the dark web. Although usually we aren’t talking about your company intranet when we refer to these networks. Tor is simple and incredibly complicated. You install software, or a browser extension. Tor routes your data through a bunch of nodes. Each of those computers or routers is only aware of the node in front of or behind it in the communication route and encrypting the next node sent. Since each step is encrypted, these layers of encryption can be considered like a network with layers like an onion. The name might also come from the fact that a lot of people cry when they realize what TOR speeds are like. So if each step is partially encrypted, a compromise of any device in the route will still defeat network surveillance. Instead we’re *usually* talking about something like Tor. This is all pretty ingenious. So anyone can access the Internet anonymously? Yes. And when they do they can do anything they want, totally anonymously, right? Yes. And this is what is often called the Dark Web? Ish. There are sites you can access anonymously through Tor. Those sites might deal in drugs, fraud, counterfeit anything, gambling, hacking, porn, illegal guns, prostitution, anything. And anything might be really, really bad. You can quickly find terrible things, from violence for hire to child pornography. Humans can be despicable. Wait, so are we saying the US government really supports TOR? Yes. Most of the funding for the TOR project comes from the US government. Human Rights Watch, Reddit, and Google kick in money here and there. But it’s not much comparably. China, Turkey, and Venezuela banned Tor? Duh. They would ban it in North Korea but they don’t need to. TOR was used by Edward Snowden in 2013 to send leaked information to The Washington Post and The Guardian. And the use of the network has picked up ever since. According to leaked information the NSA finds TOR annoying. Even though the US government funds it. As does the Russian government, who’s offered a bounty for deanonymization techniques. After the fallout from Snowden’s leaked data, the US passed a bill allowing libraries to run Tor, opening the door for more exit nodes, or public-facing IP addresses for Tor. Now Tor isn’t the be all end-all. Your traffic is sent through an exit node. So let’s think about those library computers. If you’re listening to network traffic on one of those computers and the traffic being sent isn’t encrypted then, well, your email password is exposed. And flaws do come up every now and then. But they’re publicly exposed and then the maintainers solve for them. I’ve heard people claim that since Tor is government-funded, it’s watched by the government. Well, anything is possible. But consider this, the source code is published as well. It’s on GitHub at GitHub.com/torproject. If there are any intentional flaws they’re right there in broad daylight. The projects have been available for years. Given the fact that you have the source code, why don’t you give cracking it a shot? I have about 500 more episodes to record in the queue. We’ll see who wins that race. I should probably go start recording the next one now. All you spooks out there listening through Tor, stay safe. And to all the listeners, thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Visual Basic Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to cover an important but often under appreciated step on the path to ubiquitous computing: Visual Basic. Visual Basic is a programming language for Windows. It’s in most every realistic top 10 of programming languages of all time. It’s certainly split into various functional areas over the last decade or so, but it was how you did a lot of different tasks in Windows automation and programming for two of the most important decades through a foundational period of the PC movement. But where did it come from? Let’s go back to 1975. This was a great year. The Vietnam War ended, Sony gave us Betamax, JVC gave us VHS. Francisco Franco died. I don’t wish ill on many, but if I could go back in time and wish ill on him, I would. NASA launched a joint mission with the Soviet Union. The UK voted to stay the EU. Jimmy Hoffa disappears. And the Altair ships. Altair Basic is like that lego starter set you buy your kid when you think they’re finally old enough to be able to not swallow the smallest pieces. From there, you buy them more and more, until you end up stepping on those smallest pieces and cursing. Much as I used to find myself frequently cursing at Visual Basic. And such is life. Or at least, such is giving life to your software ideas. No matter the language, there’s often plenty of cursing. So let’s call the Altair a proto-PC. It was underpowered, cheap, and with this Microsoft Basic programming language you could, OMG, feed it programs that would blink lights, or create early games. That was 1978. And based largely on the work of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurts, the authors of the original BASIC in 1964, at Dartmouth College. As the PC revolution came, BASIC was popular on the Apple II and original PCs with QuickBASIC coming in 1985, and an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, for QuickBASIC shipped in 2.0. At the time Maestro was the biggest IDE in use, but they’d been around since Microsoft released the first in 1974. Next, you could compile these programs into DOS executables, or .exe files in 3.0 and 4.0 brought debugging in the IDE. Pretty sweet. You could run the interpreter without ever leaving the IDE! No offense to anyone but Apple was running around the world pitching vendors to build software for the Mac, but had created an almost contentious development environment. And it showed from the number of programs available for the Mac. Microsoft was obviously investing heavily in enabling developers to develop in a number of languages and it showed; Microsoft had 4 times the software titles. Many of which were in BASIC. But the last version of QuickBASIC as it was known by then came in 4.5, in 1988, the year the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan - probably while watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit on pirated VHS tapes. But by the late 80s, use began to plummet. Much as my daughters joy of the legos began to plummet when she entered tweenhood. It had been a huge growth spurt for BASIC but the era of object oriented programming was emerging. But Microsoft was in an era of hyper growth. Windows 3.0 - and what’s crazy is they were just entering the buying tornado. 1988, the same year as the final release of QuickBASIC, Alan Cooper created a visual programming language he’d been calling Ruby. Now, there would be another Ruby later. This language was visual and Apple had been early to the market on Visual programming, with the Mac - introduced in 1984. Microsoft had responded with Windows 1.0 in 1985. But the development environment just wasn’t very… Visual. Most people at the time used Windows to open a Window of icky text. Microsoft leadership knew they needed something new; they just couldn’t get it done. So they started looking for a more modern option. Cooper showed his Ruby environment to Bill Gates and Gates fell in love. Gates immediately bought the product and it was renamed to Visual Basic. Sometimes you build, sometimes you partner, and sometimes you buy. And so in 1991, Visual Basic was released at Comdex in Atlanta, Georgia and came around for DOS the next year. I can still remember writing a program for DOS. They faked a GUI using ASCII art. Gross. VB 2 came along in 1992, laying the foundations for class modules. VB 3 came in 93 and brought us the JET database engine. Not only could you substantiate an object but you had somewhere to keep it. VB 4 came in 95 because we got a 32-bit option. That adds a year or 6 for every vendor. The innovations that Visual Basic brought to Windows can still be seen today. VBX and DLL are two of the most substantial. A DLL is a “dynamic link library” file that holds code and procedures that Windows programs can then consume. DLL allow multiple programs to use that code, saving on memory and disk space. Shared libraries are the cornerstone of many an object-oriented language. VBX isn’t necessarily used any more as they’ve been replaced with OCXs but they’re similar and the VBX certainly spawned the innovation. These Visual Basic Extensions, or VBX for short, were C or C++ components that were assembled into an application. When you look at applications you can still see DLLs and OCXs. VB 4 was when we switched from VBX to OCX. VB 5 came in 97. This was probably the most prolific, both for software you wanted on your computer and malware. We got those crazy ActiveX controls in VB 5. VB 6 came along in 1998, extending the ability to create web apps. And we sat there for 10 years. Why? The languages really started to split with the explosion of web tools. VBScript was put into Active Server Pages . We got the .NET framework for compiled web pages. We got Visual Basic for Applications, allowing Office to run VB scripts using VBA 7. Over the years the code evolved into what are now known as Unified Windows Platform apps, written in C++ with WinRT or C++ with CX. Those shared libraries are now surfaced in common APIs and sandboxed given that security and privacy have become a much more substantial concern since the Total Wave of the Internet crashed into our lego sets, smashing them back to single blocks. Yah, those blocks hurt when you step on them. So you look for ways not to step on them. And controlling access to API endpoints with entitlements is a pretty good way to walk lightly. Bill Gates awarded Cooper the first “Windows Pioneer Award” for his work on Visual Basic. Cooper continued to consult with companies, with this crazy idea of putting users first. He was an earlier proponent of User Experience and putting users first when building interfaces. In fact, his first book was called “About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design.” That was published in 1995. He still consults and trains on UX. Honestly, Alan Cooper only needs one line on his resume: “The Father of Visual Basic.” Today Eclipse and Visual Studio are the most used IDEs in the world. And there’s a rich ecosystem of specialized IDEs. The IDE gives code completion, smart code completion, code search, cross platform compiling, debugging, multiple language support, syntax highlighting, version control, visual programming, and so much more. Much of this isn’t available on every platform or for every IDE, but those are the main features I look for - like the first time I cracked open IntelliJ. The IDE is almost optional in functional programming - but In an era of increasingly complex object-oriented programming where classes are defined in hundreds or thousands of itty bitty files, a good, smart, feature-rich IDE is a must. And Visual Studio is one of the best you can use. Given that functional programming is dead, there’s no basic remaining in any of the languages you build modern software in. The explosion of object-orientation created flaws in operating systems, but we’ve matured beyond that and now get to find all the new flaws. Fun right? But it’s important to think, from Alan Kay’s introduction of Smalltalk in 1972, new concepts in programming in programming had been emerging and evolving. The latest incarnation is the API-driven programming methodology. Gone are the days when we accessed memory directly. Gone are the days when the barrier of learning to program was understanding functional and top to bottom syntax. Gone are the days when those Legos were simple little sets. We’ve moved on to building Death Stars out of legos with more than 3500 pieces. Due to increasingly complex apps we’ve had to find new techniques to keep all those pieces together. And as we did we learned that we needed to be much more careful. We’ve learned to write code that is easily tested. And we’ve learned to write code that protects people. Visual Basic was yet another stop towards the evolution to modern design principals. We’ve covered others and we’ll cover more in coming episodes. So until next time, think of the continuing evolution and what might be next. You don’t have to be in front of it, but it does help to have a nice big think on how it can impact projects you’re working on today. So thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re 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 by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is gonna’ be a bit boring. It’s on APIs. An API is an Application Program Interface this is a set of tools, protocols or routines used for building applications. See boring! Most applications and code today are just a collection of REST endpoints interconnected with fancy development languages. We can pull in a lot of information from other apps and get a lot of code as we call it these days “for free”. It’s hard to imagine a world without APIs. It’s hard to imagine what software would be like if we still had to write memory to a specific register in order to accomplish basic software tasks. Obfuscating these low level tasks is done by providing classes of software to give developers access to common tasks they need to perform. These days, we just take this for granted. But once upon a time, you did have to write all of that code over and over, on PCs, initially in BASIC, PASCAL, or assembly for really high performance tasks. Then along comes Roy Fieldings. He writes the Architectural Styles and Design of Network-based Software Architectures dissertation in 2000. But APIs came out of a need for interaction between apps and devices. Between apps and web services. Between objects and other objects. The concept of the API started long before y2k though. In the 60s, we had libraries in operating systems. But what Subrata Dasgupta referred to as the second age of computer science in the seminal book by the same name began in 1970. And the explosion of computer science as a field in the 70s gave us the rise of Message Oriented Middleware and then Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) becomes the bridge into mainframe systems. This started a weird time. IBM ruled the world, but they were listening to the needs of customers and released MQSeries, to facilitate message queues. I release message queues are boring. Sorry. I’ve always felt like the second age of computer science is split right down the middle. The 1980s brought us into the era of object oriented programming when Alan Kotok and his coworkers from Xerox PARC gave us Smallltalk, the first popular object oriented programming language and began to codify methods and classes. Life was pretty good. This led to a slow adoption across the world of the principals of Alan Kay vis a viz Doug Engelbart vis a viz and Vanever Bush. The message passing and queuing systems were most helpful in very large software projects where there were a lot of procedures or classes you might want to share to reduce the cyclomatic complexity of those projects. Suddenly distributed computing began to be a thing. And while it started in research institutes like PARC and academia, it proliferated into the enterprise throughout the 80s. Enterprise computing is boring. Sorry again. The 90s brought grunge. And I guess this little uninteresting thing called the web. And with the web came JavaScript. It was pretty easy to build an API endpoint, or a programmatic point that you programmed to talk to a site, using a JSP or JavaServer Page helps software developers create dynamically generated pages such as those that respond to a query for information and then pass that query on to a database and provide the response. You could also use PHP, Ruby, ASP, and even NeXT’s Web Objects, the very name of which indicates an Object Oriented Programming language. The maturity of an API development environment led to Service-Oriented Architectures in the early 2000s, where we got into more function-based granularity. Instead of simply writing an endpoint to make data that was in our pages accessible, we would build those endpoints to build pages on and then build contracts for those endpoints that guaranteed that we would not break the functionality other teams needed. Now other teams could treat our code as classes they’d written themselves. APIs had shot into the mainstream. Roy Fielding’s dissertation legitimized APIs and over the next few years entire methodologies for managing teams based on the model began to emerge. Fielding wasn’t just an academic. He would help create the standards for HTTP communication. And suddenly having an API became a feature that helped propel the business. This is where APIs get a bit more interesting. You could transact online. eBay shipped an API in 2000, giving developers the ability to build their own portals. They also released low-code options called widgets that you could just drop into a page and call to produce a tile, or iFrame. The first Amazon APIs shipped in 2002, in an early SOAP iteration, along with with widgets as well. In fact, embedding widgets became much bigger than APIs and iFrames are still common practice today, although I’ve never found a *REAL* developer who liked them. I guess I should add that to my interview questions. The Twitter API, released in 2006, gave other vendors the ability to write their own Twitter app, but also gave us the concept of OAuth, a federated identity. Amazon released their initial APIs that year, making it possible to use their storage and compute clusters and automate the tasks to set them up and tear them down. Additional APIs would come later, giving budding developers the ability to write software and host data in databases, even without building their own big data compute clusters. This too helped open the doors to an explosion of apps and web apps. These days they basically offer everything, including machine learning, as a service, all accessible through an API. The iPhone 3g wasn’t boring. It came along in 2009. All of a sudden; and suddenly the world of mobile app development was unlocked. Foursqure came along at about the same time and opened up their APIs. This really gave the whole concept of using other vendor APIs as a way to accomplish various tasks without having to write all the code to do some of those tasks themselves. From there, more and more vendors began to open APIs and not only could you pull in information but you could also push more information out. And the ability to see settings gives us the ability to change them as well. From the consumer Foursqure to the Enterprise, now we have microservices available to do anything you might want to do. Microservices are applications that get deployed as modular services. Private APIs, or those that are undocumented. Public APIs, or interfaces anyone can access. Partner APIs, or those requiring a key to access. At this point, any data you might want to get into an app, is probably available through an API. Companies connect to their own API to get data, especially for apps. And if a vendor refuses to release their own API, chances are some enterprising young developer will find a way if there’s an actual desire to leverage their data, which is what happened to Instagram. Until they opened up their API at least. And Facebook, who released their API to any developer well over a decade is probably the most villainized in this regard. You see, Facebook allowed a pretty crazy amount of data to be accessible in their API until all of a sudden Cambridge Analytica supposedly stole elections with that data. There’s nothing boring about stealing elections! Whether you think that’s true or not, the fact that Facebook is the largest and most popular social network in the history of the world shines a light when technology currently being used by everyone in the industry is taken advantage of. I’m not sticking up for them or villainizing them; but when I helped to write one of the early Facebook games and I was shown what we now refer to as personally identifiable data, and able to crawl a user to get to their friends to invite them to add our game, and then their friends, it didn’t seem in the least bit strange. We’d done spidery things with other games. Nothing weird here. The world is a better place now that we have OAUth grant types and every other limiter on the planet. Stripe in fact gave any developer access to quickly and easily process financial transactions. And while there were well-entrenched competitors, they took over the market by making the best APIs available. They understood that if you make it easy and enjoyable for developers, they will push for adoption. And cottage industries of apps have sprung up over the years, where apps aggregate data into a single pane of glass from other sources. Tools like Wikipedia embrace this, banks allow Mint and Quickbooks to aggregate and even control finances, while advertising-driven businesses like portals and social networks seem to despise it, understandably. Sometimes they allow it to gain market share and then start to charge a licensing fee when they reach a point where the cost is too big not to, like what happened with Apple using Google Maps until suddenly they started their own mapping services. Apple by the way has never been great about exposing or even documenting their publicly accessible APIs outside of those used in their operating systems, APNs and profile management environment. The network services Apple provides have long been closed off. Today, if you write software, you typically want that software to be what’s known as API-first. API-first software begins with the tasks users want your software to perform. The architecture and design means the front-end or any apps just talk to those backend services and perform as little logic not available through an API as possible. This allows you to issue keys to other vendors and build integrations so those vendors can do everything you would do, and maybe more. Suddenly, anything is possible. Combined with continuous deployment, contiuous testing, continuous design, and continuous research, we heavily reduce the need to build so much, slashing the time it takes to market and the cost it takes to get to market substantially. When I think of what it means to be nimble. No matter how big the team, that’s what I think of. Getting new products and innovations to market shouldn’t be boring. APIs have helped to fulfill some of the best promises of the Information Age, putting an unparalleled amount of information at our fingertips. The original visionary of all of this, Vannevar Bush, would be proud. But I realize that this isn’t the most exciting of topics. So thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re 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 for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to look at Pong. In the beginning there was Pong. And it was glorious! Just think of the bell bottoms at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California on November 29th 1972. The first Pong they built was just a $75 black and white tv from a Walgreens and some cheap parts. The cabinet wasn’t even that fancy. And after that night, the gaming industry was born. It started with people starting to show up and play the game. They ended up waiting for the joint to open, not drinking, and just gaming the whole time. The bartender had never seen anything like it. I mean, just a dot being knocked around a screen. But it was social. You had to have two players. There was no machine learning to play the other side yet. Pretty much the same thing as real ping pong. And so Pong was released by Atari in 1972. It reminded me of air hockey the first time I saw it. You bounced a ball off a wall and tried to get it past the opponent using paddles. It never gets old. Ever. That’s probably why of all the Atari games at the arcade, more quarters got put into it than any. The machines were sold for three times the cost to produce them; unheard of at the time. The game got popular, that within a year, the company had sold 2,500 , which they tripled in 1974. I wasn’t born yet. But I remember my dad telling me that they didn’t have a color tv yet in 72. They’d manufactured the games in an old skate rink. And they were cheap because with the game needing so few resources they pulled it off without a CPU. But what about the code? It was written by Al Alcorn as a training exercise that Nolan Bushnell gave him after he was hired at Atari. He was a pretty good hire. It was supposed to be so easy a kid could play it. I mean, it was so easy a kid could play it. Bushnell would go down as the co-creator of Pong. Although maybe Ralph Baer should have as well, given that Bushnell tested his table tennis game at a trade show the same year he had Alcorn write Pong. Baer had gotten the idea of building video games while working on military systems at a few different electronics companies in the 50s and even patented a device called the Brown Box in 1973, which was filed in 1971 prior to licensing it to Magnavox to become the Odyssey. Tennis for Two had been made available in 1958. Spacewar! had popped up in 1962 , thanks to MIT’s Steven “Slug” Russel’s being teased until he finished it. It was initially written on the TX-0 and was ported to the PDP, slowly making its way across the world as the PDP was shipping. Alan Kotok had whipped up some sweet controllers, but it could be played with just the keyboard as well. No revolution seemed in sight yet as it was really just shipping to academic institutions. And to very large companies. The video game revolution was itching to get out. People were obsessed with space at the time. Space was all over science fiction, there was a space race being won by the United States, and so Spacewar gave way to Computer Space, the first arcade game to ship, in 1971, modeled after Spacewar!. But as an early coin operated video game it was a bit too complicated. As was Galaxy Game, whipped up in 1971 by Bushnell and cofounder Ted Dabney, who’s worked together at Ampex. They initially called their company Syzygy Engineering but as can happen, there was a conflict on that trademark and they changed the name to Atari. Atari had programmed Galaxy Game, but it was built and distributed by Nutting Associates. It was complex and needed a fair amount of instructions to get used to it. Pong on the other hand needed no instructions. A dot bounced from you to a friend and you tried to get it past the other player. Air hockey. Ping pong. Ice hockey. Football. It just kinda’ made sense. You bounced the dot off a paddle. The center of each returned your dot at a regular 90 degree angle and the further out you got, the smaller that angle. The ball got faster the longer the game went on. I mean, you wanna’ make more quarters, right?!?! Actually that was a bug, but one you like. They added sound effects. They spent three months. It was glorious and while Al Alcorn has done plenty of great stuff in his time in the industry I doubt many have been filled with the raw creativity he got to display during those months. It was a runaway success. There were clones of Pong. Coleco released Telestar and Nintendo came out with Color TV Game 6. In fact, General Instruments just straight up cloned the chip. Something else happened in 1972. The Magnavox Odyssey shipped and was the first console with interchangeable dice. After Pong, Atari had pumped out Gotcha, Rebound, and Space Race. They were finding success in the market. Then Sears called. They wanted to sell Pong in the home. Atari agreed. They actually outsold the Odyssey when they finally made the single-game console. Magnavox sued, claiming the concept had been stolen. They settled for $700k. Why would they settle? Well, they could actual prove that they’d written the game first and make a connection for where Atari got the idea from them. The good, the bad, and the ugly of intellectual property is that the laws exist for a reason. Baer beat Atari to the punch, but he’d go on to co-develop Simon says. All of his prototypes now live at the Smithsonian. But back to Pong. The home version of pong was released in 1974 and started showing up in homes in 1975, especially after the Christmas buying season in 1975. It was a hit, well on its way to becoming iconic. Two years later, Atari released the iconic Atari 2600, which had initially been called the VCS. This thing was $200 and came with a couple of joysticks, a couple of paddles, and a game called Combat. Suddenly games were showing up in homes all over the world. They needed more money to make money and Bushnell sold the company. Apple would become one of the fastest growing companies in US History with their release of the Apple II, making Steve Jobs a quarter of a billion dollars in 1970s money. But Atari ended up selling of units and becoming THE fastest growing company in US history at the time. There were sequels to Pong but by the time Breakout and other games came along, you really didn’t need them. I mean, pin-pong? Pong Doubles was fine but , Super Pong, Ultra Pong, and Quadrapong, never should have happened. That’s cool though. Other games definitely needed to happen. Pac Man became popular and given it wasn’t just a dot but a dot with a slice taken out for a mouth, it ended up on the cover of Time in 1982. A lot of other companies were trying to build stuff, but Atari seemed to rule the world. These things have a pretty limited life-span. The video game crash of 1983 caused Atari to lose half a billion dollars. The stock price fell. At an important time in computers and gaming, they took too long to release the next model, the 5200. It was a disaster. Then the Nintendo arrived in some parts of the world in 1983 and took the US by storm in 1985. Atari went into a long decline that was an almost unstoppable downward spiral in a way. That was sad to watch. I’m sure it was sadder to be a part of. it was even sadder when I studied corporate mergers in college. I’m sure that was even sadder to be a part of as well. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, the founders of Atari, wanted a hit coin operated game. They got it. But they got way more than they bargained for. They were able to parlay Pong into a short lived empire. Here’s the thing. Pong wasn’t the best game ever made. It wasn’t an original Bushnell idea. It wasn’t even IP they could keep anyone else from cloning. But It was the first successful video game and helped fund the development of the VCS, or 2600, that would bring home video game consoles into the mainstream, including my house. And the video game industry would later eclipse the movie industry. But the most important thing pong did was to show regular humans that microchips were for more than… computing. Ironically the game didn’t even need real microchips. The developers would all go on to do fun things. Bushnell founded Chuck E. Cheese with some of his cresis-mode cash. Once it was clear that the Atari consoles were done you could get iterations of Pong for the Sega Genesis, the Playstation, and even the Nintendo DS. It’s floated around the computer world in various forms for a long, long time. The game is simple. The game is loved. Every time I see it I can’t help but think about bell bottoms. It launched industries. And we’re lucky to have had it. Just like I’m lucky to have had you as a listener today. Thank you so much for choosing to spend some time with us. We’re so lucky to have you.