The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to cover one of the most important and widely distributed server platforms ever: The Apache Web Server. Today, Apache servers account for around 44% of the 1.7 Billion web sites on the Internet. But at one point it was zero. And this is crazy, it’s down from over 70% in 2010. Tim Berners-Lee had put the first website up in 1991 and what we now know as the web was slowly growing. In 1994 and begins with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Yup, NCSA is also the organization that gave us telnet and Mosaic, the web browser that would evolve into Netscape. After Rob leaves NCSA, the HTTPdaemon goes a little, um, dormant in development. The distress had forked and the extensions and bug fixes needed to get merged into a common distribution. Apache is a free and open source web server that was initially created by Robert McCool and written in C in 1995, the same year Berners-Lee coined the term World Wide Web. You can’t make that name up. I’d always pictured him as a cheetah wearing sunglasses. Who knew that he’d build a tool that would host half of the web sites in the world. A tool that would go on to be built into plenty of computers so they can spin up sharing services. Times have changed since 1995. Originally the name was supposedly a cute name referring to a Patchy server, given that it was based on lots of existing patches of craptostic code from NCSA. So it was initially based on NCSA HTTPd is still alive and well all the way up to the configuration files. For example, on a Mac these are stored at /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. The original Apache group consisted of * Brian Behlendorf * Roy T. Fielding * Rob Hartill * David Robinson * Cliff Skolnick * Randy Terbush * Robert S. Thau * Andrew Wilson And there were additional contributions from Eric Hagberg, Frank Peters, and Nicolas Pioch. Within a year of that first shipping, Apache had become the most popular web server on the internet. The distributions and sites continued to grow to the point that they formed the Apache Software Foundation that would give financial, legal, and organizational support for Apache. They even started bringing other open source projects under that umbrella. Projects like Tomcat. And the distributions of Apache grew. Mod_ssl, which brought the first SSL functionality to Apache 1.17, was released in 1998. And it grew. The Apache Foundation came in 1999 to make sure the project outlived the participants and bring other tools under the umbrella. The first conference, ApacheCon came in 2000. Douglas Adams was there. I was not. There were 17 million web sites at the time. The number of web sites hosted on Apache servers continued to rise. Apache 2 was released in 2004. The number of web sites hosted on Apache servers continued to rise. By 2009, Apache was hosting over 100 million websites. By 2013 Apache had added that it was named “out of a respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache”. The history isn’t the only thing that was rewritten. Apache itself was rewritten and is now distributed as Apache 2.0. there were over 670 million web sites by then. And we hit 1 billion sites in 2014. I can’t help but wonder what percentage collections of fart jokes. Probably not nearly enough. But an estimated 75% are inactive sites. The job of a web server is to serve web pages on the internet. Those were initially flat HTML files but have gone on to include CGI, PHP, Python, Java, Javascript, and others. A web browser is then used to interpret those files. They access the .html or .htm (or other one of the other many file types that now exist) file and it opens a page and then loads the text, images, included files, and processes any scripts. Both use the http protocol; thus the URL begins with http or https if the site is being hosted over ssl. Apache is responsible for providing the access to those pages over that protocol. The way the scripts are interpreted is through Mods. These include mod_php, mod_python, mod_perl, etc. The modular nature of Apache makes it infinitely extensible. OK, maybe not infinitely. Nothing’s really infinite. But the Loadable Dynamic Modules do make the system more extensible. For example, you can easily get TLS/SSL using mod_ssl. The great thing about Apache and its mods are that anyone can adapt the server for generic uses and they allow you to get into some pretty really specific needs. And the server as well as each of those mods has its source code available on the Interwebs. So if it doesn’t do exactly what you want, you can conform the server to your specific needs. For example, if you wanna’ hate life, there’s a mod for FTP. Out of the box, Apache logs connections, includes a generic expression parser, supports webdav and cgi, can support Embedded Perl, PHP and Lua scripting, can be configured for public_html per-user web-page, supports htaccess to limit access to various directories as one of a few authorization access controls and allows for very in depth custom logging and log rotation. Those logs include things like the name and IP address of a host as well as geolocations. Can rewrite headers, URLs, and content. It’s also simple to enable proxies Apache, along with MySQL, PHP and Linux became so popular that the term LAMP was coined, short for those products. The prevalence allowed the web development community to build hundreds or thousands of tools on top of Apache through the 90s and 2000s, including popular Content Management Systems, or CMS for short, such as Wordpress, Mamba, and Joomla. * Auto-indexing and content negotiation * Reverse proxy with caching * Multiple load balancing mechanisms * Fault tolerance and Failover with automatic recovery * WebSocket, FastCGI, SCGI, AJP and uWSGI support with caching * Dynamic configuration * Name- and IP address-based virtual servers * gzip compression and decompression * Server Side Includes * User and Session tracking * Generic expression parser * Real-time status views * XML support Today we have several web servers to choose from. Engine-X, spelled Nginx, is a newer web server that was initially released in 2004. Apache uses a thread per connection and so can only process the number of threads available; by default 10,000 in Linux and macOS. NGINX doesn’t use threads so can scale differently, and is used by companies like AirBNB, Hulu, Netflix, and Pinterest. That 10,000 limit is easily controlled using concurrent connection limiting, request processing rate limiting, or bandwidth throttling. You can also scale with some serious load balancing and in-band health checks or with one of the many load balancing options. Having said that, Baidu.com, Apple.com, Adobe.com, and PayPal.com - all Apache. We also have other web servers provided by cloud services like Cloudflare and Google slowly increasing in popularity. Tomcat is another web server. But Tomcat is almost exclusively used to run various Java servers, servelets, EL, webscokets, etc. Today, each of the open source projects under the Apache Foundation has a Project Management committee. These provide direction and management of the projects. New members are added when someone who contributes a lot to the project get nominated to be a contributor and then a vote is held requiring unanimous support. Commits require three yes votes with no no votes. It’s all ridiculously efficient in a very open source hacker kinda’ way. The Apache server’s impact on the open-source software community has been profound. It iis partly explained by the unique license from the Apache Software Foundation. The license was in fact written to protect the creators of Apache while giving access to the source code for others to hack away at it. The Apache License 1.1 was approved in 2000 and removed the requirement to attribute the use of the license in advertisements of software. Version two of the license came in 2004, which made the license easier for projects that weren’t from the Apache Foundation. This made it easier for GPL compatibility, and using a reference for the whole project rather than attributing software in every file. The open source nature of Apache was critical to the growth of the web as we know it today. There were other projects to build web servers for sure. Heck, there were other protocols, like Gopher. But many died because of stringent licensing policies. Gopher did great until the University of Minnesota decided to charge for it. Then everyone realized it didn’t have nearly as good of graphics as other web servers. Today the web is one of the single largest growth engines of the global economy. And much of that is owed to Apache. So thanks Apache, for helping us to alleviate a little of the suffering of the human condition for all creatures of the world. By the way, did you know you can buy hamster wheels on the web. Or cat food. Or flea meds for the dog. Speaking of which, I better get back to my chores. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to listen! You probably get to your chores as well though. Sorry if I got you in trouble. But hey, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Susan Kare 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! Today we’ll talk about a great innovator, Susan Kare. Can you imagine life without a Trash Can icon? What about the Mac if there had never been a happy Mac icon. What would writing documents be like if you always used Courier and didn’t have all those fonts named after cities? They didn’t just show up out of nowhere. And the originals were 8 bit. But they were were painstakingly designed, reviewed, reviewed again, argued over, obsessed over. Can you imagine arguing with Steve Jobs? He’s famous for being a hard person to deal with. But one person brought us all of these things. One pioneer. One wizard. She cast her spell over the world. And that spell was to bring to an arcane concept called the desktop metaphor into everyday computers. Primitive versions had shipped in Douglas Engelbart’s NLS, in Alan Kay’s Smalltalk. In Magic Desk on the Commodore 64. But her class was not an illusionist as those who came before her were, but a mage, putting hexadecimal text derived from graph paper so the bits would render on the screen the same, for decades to come. And we still use her visionary symbols, burned into the spell books of all visual designers from then to today. She was a true innovator. She sat in a room full of computer wizards that were the original Mac team, none was more important than Susan Kare. Born in 1954 in Ithaca, New York this wizard got her training in the form of a PhD from New York University and then moved off to San Francisco in the late 1970s, feeling the draw of a generation’s finest to spend her mage apprenticeship as a curator at a Fine Arts Museum. But like Gandalph, Raistlin, Dumbledoor, Merlin, Glinda the good witch and many others, she had a destiny to put a dent in the universe. To wield the spells of the infant user interface design art to reshape the universe, 8-bits at a time. She’d gone to high school with a different kind of wizard. His name was Andy Hertzfeld and he was working at a great temple called Apple Computer. And his new team team would build a new kind of computer called the Macintosh. They needed some graphics and fonts help. Susan had used an Apple II but had never done computer graphics. She had never even dabbled in typography. But then, Dr Strange took the mantle with no experience. She ended up taking the job and joining Apple as employee badge number 3978. She was one of two women on the original Macintosh team. She had done sculpture and some freelance work as a designer. But not this weird new art form. Almost no one had. Like any young magician, she bought some books and studied up on design, equating bitmap graphics to needlepoint. She would design the iconic fonts, the graphics for many of the applications, and the icons that went into the first Mac. She would conjure up the hex (that’s hexadecimal) for graphics and fonts. She would then manually type them in to design icons and fonts. Going through every letter of every font manually. Experimenting. Testing. At the time, fonts were reserved for high end marketing and industrial designers. Apple considered licensing existing fonts but decided to go their own route. She painstakingly created new fonts and gave them the names of towns along train stops around Philadelphia where she grew up. Steve Jobs went for the city approach but insisted they be cool cities. And so the Chicago, Monaco, New York, Cairo, Toronto, Venice, Geneva, and Los Angeles fonts were born - with her personally developing Geneva, Chicago, and Cairo. And she did it in 9 x 7. I can still remember the magic of sitting down at a computer with a graphical interface for the first time. I remember opening MacPaint and changing between the fonts, marveling at the typefaces. I’d certainly seen different fonts in books. But never had I made a document and been able to set my own typeface! Not only that they could be in italics, outline, and bold. Those were all her. And she painstakingly created them out of pixels. The love and care and detail in 8-bit had never been seen before. And she did it with a world class wizard: someone with a renowned attention to detail and design sense like Steve Jobs looking over her shoulder and pressuring her to keep making it better. They brought the desktop metaphor into the office. Some of it pre-existed her involvement. The trash can had been a part of the Lisa graphics already. She made it better. The documents icon pre-dated her. She added a hand holding a pencil to liven it up, making it clear which files were applications and which were documents. She made the painting brush icon for MacPaint that, while modernized, is still in use in practically every drawing app today. In fact when Bill Atkinson was writing MacSketch and saw her icon, the name was quickly changed to MacPaint. She also made the little tool that you use to draw shapes and remove them called the lasso, with Bill Atkinson. Before her, there were elevators to scroll around in a window. After her, they were called scroll bars. After her, the places you dropped your images was called the Scrapbook. After her the icon of a floppy disk meant save. She gave us the dreaded bomb. The stop watch. The hand you drag to move objects. The image of a speaker making sound. The command key, still on the keyboard of every Mac made. You can see that symbol on Nordic maps and it denotes an “area of interest” or more poignant for the need: “Interesting Feature”. To be clear, I never stole one of those signs while trampsing around Europe. But that symbol is a great example of what a scholarly mage can pull out of ancient tomes, as it is called a Gorgon knot or Saint John Arm’s and dates back over fifteen hundred years - and you can see that in other hieroglyphs she borrowed from obscure historical references. And almost as though those images are burned into our DNA, we identified with them. She worked with the traditionally acclaimed wizards of the Macintosh: Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Bruce Horn, Bud Tribble, Donn Denman, Jerome Coonen, Larry Kenos, and Steve Capps. She helped Chris Espinosa, Clement Mok, Ellen Romana, and Tom Hughes out with graphics for manuals, and often on how to talk about a feature. But there was always Steve Jobs. Some icons took hours; others took days. And Jobs would stroll in and have her recast her spell if it wasn’t just right. Never acknowledging the effort. If it wasn’t right, it wasn’t right. The further the team pushed on the constantly delayed release of the Mac the more frantic the wizards worked. The less they slept. But somehow they knew. It wasn’t just Jobs’ reality distortion field as Steven Levy famously phrased it. They knew that what they were building would put a dent in the Universe. And when they all look back, her designs on “Clarus the Dogcow” were just the beginning of her amazing contributions. The Mac launched. And it did not turn out to be a commercial success, leading to the ouster of Steve Jobs - Sauron’s eye was firmly upon him. Kare left with Jobs to become the tenth employee at NeXT computer. But she introduced Jobs to Paul Rand, who had helped design the IBM logo, to design their logo. When IBM, the Voldemort of the time, was designing OS/2, she helped with their graphics. When Bill Gates, the Jafar of the computer industry called, she designed the now classic solitaire for Windows. And she gave them Notepad and Control Panels. And her contributions have continued. When Facebook needed images for the virtual gifts feature. They called Kare. You know that spinning button when you refresh Pinterest. That’s Kare. And she still does work all the time. The Museum of Modern Art showed her original Sketches in a 2015 Exhibit called “This is for everyone.” She brought us every day metaphors to usher in the and ease the transition into a world of graphical user interfaces. Not a line of the original code remains. But it’s amazing how surrounded by all the young wizards, one that got very little attention in all the books and articles about the Mac was the biggest wizard of them all. Without her iconic designs, the other wizards would likely be forgotten. She is still building one of the best legacies in all of the technology industry. By simply putting users into user interface. When I transitioned from the Apple II to the Mac, she made it easy for me with those spot-on visual cues. And she did it in only 8 bits. She gave the Mac style and personality. She made it fun, but not so much fun that it would be perceived as a toy. She made the Mac smile. Who knew that computers could smile?!?! The Mac Finder still smiles at me every day. Truly Magical. Thanks for that, Susan Kare. And thanks to you inquisitive and amazing listeners. For my next trick. I’ll disappear. But 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 talk about Gopher. Gopher was in some ways a precursor to the world wide web, or more specifically, too http. The University of Minnesota was founded in 1851. It gets cold in Minnesota. Like really cold. And sometimes, it’s dangerous to walk around outside. As the University grew, they needed ways to get students between buildings on campus. So they built tunnels. But that’s not where the name came from. The name actually comes from a political cartoon. In the cartoon a bunch of not-cool railroad tycoons were pulling a train car to the legislature. The rest of the country just knew it was cold in Minnesota and there must be gophers there. That evolved into the Gopher State moniker, the Gopher mascot of the U and later the Golden Gophers. The Golden Gophers were once a powerhouse in college football. They have won the 8th most National titles of any University in college football, although they haven’t nailed one since 1960. Mark McCahill turned 4 years old that year. But by the late 80s he was in his thirties. McCahill had graduated from the U in 1979 with a degree in Chemistry. By then he managed the Microcomputer Center at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. The University of Minnesota had been involved with computers for a long time. The Minnesota Education Computing Consortium had made software for schools, like the Oregon Trail. And even before then they’d worked with Honeywell, IBM, and a number of research firms. At this point, the University of Minnesota had been connected to the ARPANET, which was evolving into the Internet, and everyone wanted it to be useful. But it just wasn’t yet. TCP/IP maybe wasn’t the right way to connect to things. I mean, maybe bitnet was. But by then we knew it was all about TCP/IP. They’d used FTP. And saw a lot of promise in the tidal wave you could just feel coming of this Internet thing. There was just one little problem. A turf war between batch processed mainframes had been raging for a time with the suit and tie crowd thinking that big computers were the only place real science could happen and the personal computer kids thinking that the computer should be democratized and that everyone should have one. So McCahill writes a tool called POPmail to make it easy for people to access this weird thing called email on the Macs that were starting to show up at the University. This led to his involvement writing tools for departments. 1991 rolls around and some of the department heads around the University meet for months to make a list of things they want out of a network of computers around the school. Enter Farhad Anklesaria. He’d been working with those department heads and reduced their demands to something he could actually ship. A server that hosted some files and a client that accessed the files. McCahill added a search option and combined the two. They brought in four other programmers to help finish the coding. They finished the first version in about three weeks. Of those original programmers, Bob Alberti, who’d helped write an early online multiplayer game already, named his Gopher server Indigo after the Indigo Girls. Paul Lindner named one of his Mudhoney. They coded between taking support calls in the computing center. They’d invented bookmarks and hyperlinks which led McCahill to coin the term “surf the internet” Computers at the time didn’t come with the software necessary to access the Internet but Apple was kind enough to include a library at the time. People could get on the Internet and pretty quickly find some documents. Modems weren’t fast enough to add graphics yet. But, using the Gopher you could search the internet and retrieve information linked from all around the world. Wacky idea, right? The world wanted it. They gave it the name of the school’s mascot to keep the department heads happy. It didn’t work. It wasn’t a centralized service hosted on a mainframe. How dare they. They were told not to work on it any more but kept going anyway. They posted an FTP repository of the software. People downloaded it and even added improvements. And it caught fire underneath the noses of the University. This was one of the first rushes on the Internet. These days you’d probably be labeled a decacorn for the type of viral adoption they got. The White House jumped on the bandwagon. MTV veejay Adam Curry wore a gopher shirt when they announced their Gopher site. There were GopherCons. Al Gore showed up. He wasn’t talking about the Internet as though it were a bunch of tubes yet. So then Tim Berners-Lee had put the first website up in 1991, introducing html on Gopher and what we now know as the web was slowly growing. McCahill then worked with Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Alan Emtage and former MIT whiz kid, Peter J. Deutsch. Oh and the czar of the Internet Jon Postel. McCahill needed a good way of finding things on his new Internet protocol. So he invented something that we still use considerably: URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators. You know when you type http://www.google.com that’s a URL. The http indicates the protocol to use. Every computer has a default handler for those protocols. Everything following the :// is the address on the Internet of the object. Gopher of course was gopher://. FTP was ftp:// and so on. There’s of course more to the spec, but that’s the first part. Suddenly there were competing standards. And as with many rapid rushes to adopt a technology, Gopher started to fall off and the web started to pick up. Gopher went through the hoops. It went to an IETF RFC in 1993 as RFC 1436, The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol). I first heard of Mark McCahill when I was on staff at the University of Georgia and had to read up on how to implement this weird Gopher thing. I was tasked with deploying Gopher to all of the Macs in our labs. And I was fascinated, as were so many others, with this weird new thing called the Internet. The internet was decentralized. The Internet was anti-authoritarian. The Internet was the Subpop records of the computing world. But bands come and go. And the University of Minnesota wanted to start charging a licensing fee. That started the rapid fall of Gopher and the rise of the html driven web from Berners-Lee. It backfired. People were mad. The team hadn’t grown or gotten headcount or funding. The team got defensive publicly and while traffic continued to grow, the traffic on the web grew 300 times faster. The web came with no licensing. Yet. Modems got faster. The web added graphics. In 1995 an accounting disaster came to the U and the team got reassigned to work on building a modern accounting system. At a critical time, they didn’t add graphics. They didn’t further innovate. The air was taken out of their sales from the licensing drama and the lack of funding. Things were easier back then. You could spin up a server on your computer and other people could communicate with it without fear of your identity being stolen. There was no credit card data on the computer. There was no commerce. But by the time I left the University of Georgia we were removing the gopher apps in favor of NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape. McCahill has since moved on to Duke University. Perhaps his next innovation will be called Document Devil or World Wide Devil. Come to think of it, that might not be the best idea. Wouldn’t wanna’ upset the Apple Cart. Again. The web as we know it today wasn’t just some construct that happened in a vacuum. Gopher was the most popular protocol to come before it but there were certainly others. In those three years, people saw the power of the Internet and wanted to get in on that. They were willing it into existence. Gopher was first but the web built on top of the wave that gopher started. Many browsers still support gopher either directly or using an extension to render documents. But Gopher itself is no longer much of a thing. What we’re really getting at is that the web as we know it today was deterministic. Which is to say that it was almost willed into being. It wasn’t a random occurrence. The very idea of a decentralized structure that was being willed into existence, by people who wanted to supplement human capacity or by a variety of other motives including “cause it seemed cool at the time, man.” It was almost independent of the action of any specific humans. It was just going to happen, as though free will of any individual actors had been removed from the equation. Bucking authority, like the department heads at the U, hackers from around the world just willed this internet thing into existence. And all these years later, many of us are left in awe at their accomplishments. So thank you to Mark and the team for giving us Gopher, and for the part it played in the rise of the Internet.

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 my daughter’s favorite thing to do these days: Snapchat. Today Snapchat has over 203 million users. That’s up from 188 just a year ago. And with around 50 million logging in monthly, it’s becoming one of the most used social networks in the world. But how does a company manage to go from nothing to, well, so… much… more… You see, the numbers don’t tell the full story. Nearly 80 percent of people on the Internet between 18 and 24 use Snapchat. As does pretty much every kid I know who’s younger than that. A lot of people don’t really like Snapchat, but the seems to be partly because a lot of them don’t seem to understand it. Neither does the world of finance. They have yet to figure out how to turn a profit. But in a world where users means once that number starts to slow, the adults will be called in to make all the money. This doesn’t mean the stock of Snap Inc doesn’t jump around. Facebook did it. And in the short term, life looked good. But in the long term, many of those decisions Facebook made has led to talk of breaking up Facebook, and has caused CEO Mark Zuckerberg to spend more time in front of the leaders of various nation states than I think he’d like. But Snapchat is a Gen Z company. And there’s something more there. How did Snapchat end up in these types of conversations? In part this was because with the popularity of Facebook growing amongst older generations, Gen Z and beyond wanted to stay connected but more more authentically and less for show as is common when trying to just go out and gather likes. This starts with how the company was founded. Snapchat was started in 2011 by now-CEO Evan Spiegel and partners Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown, while going to school at Stanford University. They had a core tenant: that messages are removed once viewed. In the beginning, it was just for sharing pictures from one person to another. And it was the first social app to really embrace a mobile-first design philosophy. They worked on Picaboo, the first name, for a few months and after launch kicked out Reggie Brown, who had the idea in the first place. They rebranded to Snapchat, keeping Reggie;s Ghostface Chillah icon though. They would later settle with good old Brown for a little more than $150 million dollars in 2014. At release time in 2011, Snapchat was an iOS app. The next year, they released an Android app and similar to the guys from Silicon Valley they were having a rough time keeping up with demand of over 20 million photos per day already zipping through their network. 2013 brought a bunch of features like the ability to find friends, to reply by double-tapping, better navigation, and Snapkidz for children 13 and lower. The “My Story” feature allowed users to put snaps in storylines. In 2013 Snapchat also taught the world about API rate limiting. Given that they didn’t limit the number of possible API connections they leaked about 4 and a half million usernames and phone numbers on a website called SnapchatDB.info. As is often the case, getting hacked in no way hurt them. I mean they said they were sorry. I think that’s painful for Stanford… Nevermind. They added video in 2014. The network continued to grow and Snapchat teamed up with Square in 2014 to send money to friends through Snapchat. After 4 years, Snapcash was discontinued in 2018. 2015 Brough in app purchases to get more replays. I never liked that. They also relaxed the requirement to hold down a button while watching snaps but didn’t remove the requirement that you couldn’t take a screenshot without alerting the sender. But the big thing was adding effects. This led to an explosion in popularity. Bunny ears and noses were everywhere. And world lenses led to those little frames at special events all over the world. Snapchat got big enough to release a notable figures feature. 2015 also saw Spiegel say that Snapchat was for rich people, not Indians or the Spanish. They temporarily lost 1.5% in share price but… I guess it’s like when people have been drinking too much wine, they say what they really think. 2016 brought Snapchat Memories, which allow saving story posts in a private location in the app. We also got geofilters in 2016, bitmojis, and locking snaps with a PIN. They managed to raise $1.8 billion in private equity that year. In 2017, you could view a snap for an unlimited amount of time, but they would be removed at the end of the viewing time. 2017 also saw links in chats and given the popularity of other graphical tools, we got backgrounds. We also got custom stories which let people make stories by combining images. They bought Zenly in 2017. 2018 gave us the Snap Camera and Snapchat lenses which allow for those silly bunny filters video chat and live streaming services such as Skype, Twitch, YouTube, and Zoom. Seeing that they would like to foster a spirit of integration, Snapchat also released an integration platform known as Snap Kit, which allows for OAuth logins with OMG bitmoji avatars. They also released a new interface in 2018. One that Kylie Jenner dissed, supposedly causing the company to drop over a billion in market cap. Pretty sure that drop lasted less time than how long people will actually know who Kylie is. 2019 mostly just gave us Snapchat employees spying on other people using an internal tool called SnapLion. Pretty sure that’s not SOC2 compliant. Also pretty sure there will be law suits. It’s crap like that that can stifle the growth of a company. Instagram added similar features and investors later sued Snap for not disclosing how substantial a threat Instagram ended up being. This with dropping over a billion dollars a year to keep gaining that marketshare. Becoming a big name on Snapchat and Insta can skyrocket people to stardom and open the floodgates for an entire new career: influencer. People long thought Apple would buy Snapchat. They have enough cash on hand to do so and they’ve tried for a long time to build social networks to no avail. But Apple builds frameworks others use for Augmented Reality, not Augmented Reality worlds. Others thought Amazon would acquire the company to further build out the Snapchat camera and further promotional options to a younger audience. Snapchat also has better visual searching options than Amazon. Tencent owned 17 percent of the Class A shares of Snap in 2018 who has a market cap of over ten billion dollars. I believe they call that a decacorn. People keep trying to say Snapchat can’t stand alone forever. They sure burn through a lot of cash. But Facebook has tried to buy Snapchat and failed, just as Friendster tried to buy Facebook once upon a time. Special aint it. A lot of these tech empires are built by buying up smaller scrappier companies. What’s a couple hundred million here and there? The fact that Snapchat has managed to stand alone should be an inspiration. Until they become the company gobbling up everyone else. My daughter, who’s my Super BFF, sends me tons of snaps. It’s become one of her favorite things to do I think. It’s sweet. I don’t get snaps from anyone else. But then, I’m also a different generation. Which is both good and bad. She also chats me up a plenty in Instagram. Personally, I just want to see it all in one place and don’t care which place that is. So if you wanna’ hit me up listeners, you can find me at krypted dot com. And I’d be happy to take any feedback on the podcast that you might have. Or at Snapchat. Or at Twitter. Or… Well, you get the point. And thank you for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re 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 cover a special moment in time. Picture this if you will. It’s 1968. A collection of some 1,000 of the finest minds in computing is sitting in the audience of the San Francisco Civic Center. They’re at a joint conference of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fall Join Computer Conference in San Francisco. They’re waiting to see the a session called A research center for augmenting human intellect. Many had read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” Atlantic article in 1946 that signified the turning point that inspired so many achievements over the previous 20 years. Many had witnessed the evolution from the mainframe to the transistorized computer to timesharing systems. The presenter for this session would be Douglas Carl Engelbart. ARPA had strongly recommended he come to finally make a public appearance. Director Bob Taylor in fact was somewhat adamant about it. The talk was six years in the making and ARPA and NASA were ready to see what they had been investing in. ARPA had funded his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI, or the Stanford Research Institute. The grad instigator J.C.R. Licklider had started the funding when ARPA was still called DARPA in 1963 based on a paper Engelbart published in 1962. But it had really been going since Engelbart got married in 1950 and realized computers could be used to improve human capabilities, to harness the collective intellect, to facilitate truly interactive computing and to ultimately make the world a better place. Englebart was 25. He’d been from Oregon where he got his Bachelors in 48 after serving in World War II as a radar tech. He then come to Berkely in 53 for is Masters, sating through 1955 to get his PhD. He ended up at Stanford’s SRI. There, he hired people like Don Andrews, Bill Paxton, Bill English, and Jeff Rulifson. And today Engelbart was ready to show the world what his team had been working on. The computer was called the oNLine System, or NLS. Bill English would direct things onsite. Because check this out, not all presenters were onsite on that day in 1968. Instead, some were at ARC in Menlo Park, 30 miles away. To be able to communicate onsite they used two 1200 baud modems connecting over a leased line to their office. But they would also use two microwave links. And that was for something crazy: video. The lights went dark. The OnLine Computer was projected onto a 22 foot high screen using an Eidophor video projector. Bill English would flip the screen up as the lights dimmed. The audience was expecting a tall, thin man to come out to present. Instead, they saw Doug Englebart on the screen in front of them. The one behind the camera, filming Engelbart, was Stewart Russel Brand, the infamous editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. It seems Englebart was involved in more than just computers. But people destined to change the world have always travelled in the same circles I supposed. Englebart’s face came up on the screen, streaming in from all those miles away. And the screen they would switch back and forth to. That was the Online System, or NLS for short. The camera would come in from above Englebart’s back and the video would be transposed with the text being entered on the screen. This was already crazy. But when you could see where he was typing, there was something… well, extra. He was using a pointing device in his right hand. This was the first demo of a computer mouse Which he had applied for a patent for in 1967. He called it that because it had a tail which was the cabe that connected the wooden contraption to the computer. Light pens had been used up to this point, but it was the first demonstration of a mouse and the team had actually considered mounting it under the desk and using a knee to move the pointer.But they decided that would just be too big a gap for normal people to imagine and that the mouse would be simpler. Engelbart also used a device we might think of more like a macro pad today. It was modeled after piano keys. We’d later move this type of functionality onto the keyboard using various keystrokes, F keys, and a keyboard and in the case of Apple, command keys. He then opened a document on his screen. Now, people didn’t do a lot of document editing in 1968. Really, computers were pretty much used for math at that point. At least, until that day. That document he opened. He used hyperlinks to access content. That was the first real demo of clickable hypertext. He also copied text in the document. And one of the most amazing aspects of the presentation was that you kinda’ felt like he was only giving you a small peak into what he had. You see, before the demo, they thought he was crazy. Many were probably only there to see a colossal failure of a demo. But instead they saw pure magic. Inspiration. Innovation. They saw text highlighted. They saw windows on screens that could be resized. They saw the power of computer networking. Video conferencing. A stoic Engelbart was clearly pleased with his creation. Bill Paxton and Jeff Rulifson were on the other side, helping with some of the text work. His style worked well with the audience, and of course, it’s easy to win over an audience when they have just been wowed by your tech. But more than that, his inspiration was so inspiring that you could feel it just watching the videos. All these decades later. can watching those videos. Engelbart and the team would receive a standing ovation. And to show it wasn’t smoke and mirrors, ARC let people actually touch the systems and Engelbart took questions. Many people involved would later look back as though it was an unfinished work. And it was. Andy van Dam would later say Everybody was blown away and thought it was absolutely fantastic and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact. People thought it was too far out and they were still working on their physical teletypes, hadn't even migrated to glass teletypes yet. But that’s not really fair or telling the whole story. In 1969 we got the Mansfield Amendment - which slashed the military funding pure scientific research. After that, the budget was cut and the team began to disperse, as was happening with a lot of the government-backed research centers. Xerox was lucky enough to hire Bob Taylor, and many others immigrated to Xerox PARC, or Palo Alto Research Center, was able to take the concept and actually ship a device in 1973, although not as mass marketable yet as later devices would be. Xerox would ship the Alto in 1973. The Alto would be the machine that inspired the Mac and therefore Windows - so his ideas live on today. His own team got spun out of Stanford and sold, becoming Tymshare and then McDonnel Douglas. He continued to have more ideas but his concepts were rarely implemented at McDonnel Douglas so he finally left in 1986, starting the Bootstrapp Alliance, which he founded with his daughter. But he succeeded. He wanted to improve the plight of man and he did. Hypertext and movable screens directly influenced a young Alan Kay who was in the audience and was inspired to write Smalltalk. The Alto at Xerox also inspired Andy van Dam, who built the FRESS hypertext system based on many of the concepts from the talk as well. It also did multiple windows, version control on documents, intradocument hypertext linking, and more. But, it was hard to use. Users needed to know complex commands just to get into the GUI screens. He was also still really into minicomputers and timesharing, and kinda’ missed that the microcomputer revolution was about to hit hard. The hardware hacker movement that was going on all over the country, but most concentrated in the Bay Area, was about to start the long process of putting a computer, and now mobile device, in every home in the world. WIth smaller and smaller and faster chips, the era of the microcomputer would transition into the era of the client and server. And that was the research we were transitioning to as we moved into the 80s. Charles Irby was a presentter as well, being a designer of NLS. He would go on to lead the user interface design work on the Xerox star before founding a company then moving on to VP of development for General Magic, a senior leader at SGI and then the leader of the engineering team that developed the Nintendo 64. Bob Sproull was in the audience watching all this and would go on to help design the Xerox Alto, the first laser printer, and write the Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics before becoming a professor at Conegie Mellon and then ending up helping create Sun Microsystems Laboratories, becoming the director and helping design asuynchronous processors. Butler Lampson was also there, a found of Xerox PARC, where the Alto was built and co-creator of Ethernet. Bill Paxton (not the actor) would join him at PARC and later go on to be an early founder of Adobe. In 2000, Engelbart would receive the National Medal of Technology for his work. He also He got the Turing Award in 1997, the Locelace Medal in 2001. He would never lose his belief in the collective intelligence. He wrote Boosting Our Collective IQ in 1995 and it has Englebart passed away in 2013. He will forever be known as the inventor of the mouse. But he gave us more. He wanted to augment the capabilities of humans, allowing us to do more, rather than replace us with machines. This was in contrast to SAIL and the MIT AI Lab where they were just doing research for the sake of research. The video of his talk is on YouTube, so click on the links in the show notes if you’d like to access it and learn more about such a great innovator. He may not have brought a mass produced system to market, but as with Vanevar Bush’s article 20 years before, the research done is a turning point in history; a considerable milestone on the path to the gleaming world we now live in today. The NLS teaches us that while you might not achieve commercial success with years of research, if you are truly innovative, you might just change the world. Sometimes the two simply aren’t mutually exclusive. And when you’re working on a government grant, they really don’t have to be. So until next time, dare to be bold. Dare to change the world, and 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! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY