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 look at Java. Java is an Indonesian island with over 141 million people. Java man lived there 1.7 million years ago. Wait, wrong java. The infiltration of coffee into the modern world can really trace its roots to ancient coffee forests on the Ethiopian plateau. Sufis in Yemen began importing coffee in the 1400s to make a beverage that would aid in concentration and as a kind of spiritual intoxication. Um, still the wrong java… Although caffeine certainly has a link somewhere, somehow. The history of the Java programming language dates back to early 1991. It all started at Sun Microsystems with the Stealth Project. Patrick Naughton had considered going to NeXT due to limitations in C++ and the C APIs. But he stayed to join Stealth, a secret team of engineers led by a developer Sun picked up from Carnegie Mellon named James Gosling . Stealth was formed to explore new opportunities in the consumer electronics market. This came up when Gosling was writing a program to port software from perf to vax and emulating hardware as many, many, many programers had done before him. I wonder if he realized when he went to build the first Java compiler and the original virtual machine code that would go on to write a dozen books about Java and it would consume most of his professional life. I wonder how much coffee he would have consumed if he had. They soon added Patrick Sheridan to the team. The project was later known as the “Green” project and with the advent of the web, somewhat pivoted into more of a web project. You see, Microsoft and the clones had some runaway success but Apple and other vendors were a factor in the home market. But Sun saw going down market as the future of the company. They added a few more people and rented separate offices in Menlo Park. Lisa Friendly was the first employee in the Java Products Group. Gosling would be lead engineer. John Gage would direct the project. Jonni Kanerva would write Java FAQ1. The team started to build C++ ++ —. Sun founder Bill Joy wanted a language that combined the the best parts of Mesa and C. In 1993, NCSA gave us Mozilla. That Andreessen guy was on the news saying the era of the desktop was over. These brilliant designers knew they needed an embedded application, one that could even be used in a web browser, or an applet. The language was initially called “Oak,” but was later renamed “Java” in 1995, supposedly from a list of random words but really due to massive consumption of coffee imported from the island of Java. By the way, it only aids in concentration up to a point. Then you get jumpy. Like a Halfling. It took the Java team 18 months to develop the first working version. It is unknown how much Java they drank in this time. Between the initial implementation of Oak in the fall of 1992 and the public announcement of Java in the spring of 1995, around 13 people ended up contributing to the design and evolution of the language. They were going to build a language that could sit on top of the operating systems on the market. This would allow them to be platform agnostic. In 1995, the team announced that the evolution of Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, would provide support for Java. Java gave us Write Once, Run Anywhere platform independence. You could run the code on a Mac, on Solaris, or on Windows. Java derives its syntax from C and many of the object oriented features were influenced by C++. Several of Java’s defining characteristics come from—or are responses to—its predecessors. Therefore, Java was meant to build on these and become a simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architectural neutral, portable, high performance, multithreaded, and dynamic language. Before I forget. The "Mocha Java" blend pairs coffee from Yemen and Java to get a thick, syrupy, and highly caffeinated blend that is often found with a hint of cinnamon or clove. Similar to all other computer language, all innovation in the design of the language was driven by the need to solve a fundamental problem that the preceding languages could not solve. To start, the creation of C is considered by many to have marked the beginning of the modern age of computer languages. It successfully synthesized the conflicting attributes that had so troubled earlier languages. The result was a powerful, efficient, structured language that was relatively easy to learn. It also included one other, nearly intangible aspect: it was a programmer’s language. Prior to the invention of C, computer languages were generally designed either as academic exercises or by bureaucratic committees. C was designed, implemented, and developed by real, working programmers, reflecting how they wanted to write code. Its features were honed, tested, thought about, and rethought by the people who actually used the language. C quickly attracted many followers who had a near-religious zeal for it. As such, it found wide and rapid acceptance in the programmer community. In short, C is a language designed by and for programmers, as is Java. Throughout the history of programming, the increasing complexity of programs has driven the need for better ways to manage that complexity. C++ is a response to that need in C. To better understand why managing program complexity is fundamental to the creation of C++, consider that in the early days of programming, computer programing was done by manually toggling in the binary machine instructions by use of the front panel or punching cards. As long as programs were just a few hundred instructions long, this worked. Then came Assembly and Fortran and then But as programs grew, assembly language was invented so that a programmer could deal with larger, increasingly complex programs by using symbolic representations of the machine instructions. As programs continued to grow, high-level languages were introduced that gave the programmer more tools with which to handle complexity. This gave birth to the first popular programing language; FORTRAN. Though impressive it had its shortcomings as it didn’t encourage clear and easy-to-understand programs. In the 1960s structured programming was born. This is the method of programming championed by languages such as C. The use of structured languages enabled programmers to write, for the first time, moderately complex programs fairly easily. However, even with structured programming methods, once a project reaches a certain size, its complexity exceeds what a programmer can manage. Due to continued growth, projects were exceeding the limits of the structured approach. To overcome this problem, a new way to program had to be invented; it is called object-oriented programming (OOP). Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming methodology that helps organize complex programs through the use of inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. In spite of the fact that C is one of the world’s great programming languages, there is still a limit to its ability to handle complexity. Once the size of a program exceeds a certain point, it becomes so complex that it is difficult to grasp as a totality. While the precise size at which this occurs differs, depending upon both the nature of the program and the programmer, there is always a threshold at which a program becomes unmanageable. C++ added features that enabled this threshold to be broken, allowing programmers to comprehend and manage larger programs. So if the primary motivation for creating Java was the need for a platform-independent, architecture-neutral language, it was to create software to be embedded in various consumer electronic devices, such as microwave ovens and remote controls. The developers sought to use a different system to develop the language one which did not require a compiler as C and C++ did. A solution which was easier and more cost efficient. But embedded systems took a backseat when the Web took shape at about the same time that Java was being designed. Java was suddenly propelled to the forefront of computer language design. This could be in the form of applets for the web or runtime-only packages known as Java Runtime Environments, or JREs. At the time, developers had fractured into the three competing camps: Intel, Macintosh, and UNIX. Most software engineers stayed in their fortified boundary. But with the advent of the Internet and the Web, the problem that the portability of software between platforms suddenly got important in ways it hadn’t been since the forming of ARPANET. Even though many platforms are attached to the Internet, users would like them all to be able to run the same program. What was once an irritating but low-priority problem had become a high-profile necessity. The team realized this pressing need and later made the switch to refocus Java from embedded, consumer electronics to Internet programming. So while the desire for an architecture-neutral programming language provided the initial spark, the Internet ultimately led to Java’s large-scale success. So if Java derives much of its character from C and C++, this is by intent. The original designers knew that using familiar syntax would make their new language appealing to legions of experienced C/C++ programmers. Java also shares some of the other attributes that helped make C and C++ successful. Java was designed, tested, and refined by real, working programmers. Not scientists. Java is a programmer’s language. Java is also cohesive and logically consistent. If you program well, your programs reflect it. If you program poorly, your programs reflect that, too. Put differently, Java is not a language with training wheels. It is a language for professional programmers. Java 1 would be released in 1996 for Solaris, Windows, Mac, and Linux. It was released as the Java Development Kit, or JDK, and to this day we still refer to the version we’re using as JDK 11. Version 2, or 1.2 came in 1998 and with the rising popularity we had a few things that the burgeoning community needed. These included event listeners, Just In Time compilers, and change thread synchronizations. 1.3, code named Kestrel came in 2000, bringing RMI for CORBA compatibility, synthetic proxy classes, the Java Platform Debugger Architecture, Java Naming and Directory Interface in core libraries, the HostSpot JVM, and Java Sound. Merlin, or 1.4 came in 2002 bringing the frustrating regular expressions, native XML processing, logging, Non-Blocking I/O, and SSL. Tiger, or 1.5 came in 2004. This was important. We could autobox, get compile time type safety in generics, static import the static part of a class, annotations for declarative programming, and run time libraries were mapped into memory - a huge improvements to how JVMs work. Java 5 also gave us the version number change. So JDK 1.5 was officially recognized as Java 5. JDK 1.6, or Mustang, came in 2006. This was a big update, bringing monitoring and management tools, compiler access gave us programmatic access to javac and pluggable annotations allowed us to analyze code semantically as a step before javac compiles the code. WebStart got a makeover and SE 6 unified plugins with webstart. Enhanced XML services would be important (at least until he advent of son) and you could mix javascript up with Java. We also got JDBC 4, Character Large Objects, SwingWorker, JTable, better SQL datatypes, native PKI, Kerberos, LDAP, and honestly the most important thing was that it was stable. Although I’ve never written code stable enough to encounter their stability issues… Not enough coffee I suppose. Sun purchased Oracle in 2009. Wait, no, that’s one of my Marvel What If comic book fantasies where the world was a better place. Oracle bought Sun in 2009. After ponying up $5.6 billion dollars, Oracle had a lot of tech based on Sun products and seeing Sun as an increasingly attractive acquisition target by other companies, Oracle couldn’t risk someone else swooping in and buying Sun. With all the turmoil created, it took 5 years during a pretty formative time on the web, but we finally got Dolphin, or 1.7, which came in 2011 and gave us compressed, 64-bit pointers, strings in switch statements, the ability to make a binary integer and use underscores in literals, better graphics APIs, more cryptography algorithms, and a new I/O library that gave even better platform compatibilities. Spider, or 1.8, came along in 2014. We got the ability to Launch JavaFX application Jars, statically-linked JNI libraries, a new date an time API, annotation for java types, unsigned integer arithmetic, a JavaScript runtime that allowed us to embed Javascript code in apps - whether this is a good idea or not is still tbd. Lambda functions had been dropped in Java 7 so here we also got lambda expressions. And this kickstarted a pretty interesting time in the development of Java. We got 9 in 2017, 10 and 11 in 2018, 12, 13, and 14 in 2019. Of these, only 8 and 11 are LTS, or commercial Long Term Support releases, basically meaning we got the next major release after 8 in 2018 and according to my trend line should expect the next LTS in 2021 or 2022. JDK 13, when released later in 2019, will give us text blocks, Switch Expressions, improved memory management by returning unused heap memory to the OS, improves application class and data sharing, and brings back the legacy socket API. But it won’t likely be an LTS release. Today there are over 45 billion active Java Virtual Machines and java remains arguably the top language for micro service, ci/cd environments, and a number of other use cases. Other languages have come. Other languages have gone. Many are better in their own right. Some are not. Java is not perfect. It was meant to reduce complexity. But as languages evolve they become more complex. A project with a million lines of code is monolithic and probably incorporates plugins or frameworks like spring security as an example, that make code even more complex. But Java is meant to reduce cyclomatic complexity, to allow for a language that is simple enough for a professional to pick up quickly and only be as complex as the quality of the code being compiled. I don’t personally love Java. I respect it. And I adore high-quality programmers and their code in any language. But I’ve had to redo so much work because other languages have come and gone over the years that if I were to be starting a new big monolithic web-app today, I’d probably use Java every time. Which isn’t to say that Java isn’t useful in micro-service architectures. According to what’s required from the contract testing on a service, I might use Java, Go, node, python or even the formerly hipster Ruby. Although I don’t love drinking PBR… If I’m writing an Android app, I need to know Java. No matter what the lawyers say. If I’m planning on an enterprise webapp, Java needs to be in the conversation. But usually, I can do the work in a fraction of the time using something like python. But most big companies speak Java. And for good reason. Because of the write once run anywhere approach and the level of permissions a JRE needs, there have been security challenges with running Java on desktop computers. Apple deprecated Java on the Mac in 2010. Users could still instal lications and is the gold standard for those. I’m certainly not advocating going back to the 90s and running Java apps on our desktops any more. No matter what you think of Java, one thing you have to admit, the introduction of the language and the evolution have had a substantial impact on the IT industry and it will continue to do so. A great takeaway here might be that there’s always a potential alternative that might be better suited for a given task. But when it comes to choosing a platform that will be there in a decade or 3, getting support, getting a team that can scale, sometimes you might end up using a solution that doesn’t immediately seem as well suited to a need. But it can get the job done. As it’s been doing since James Gosling and the rest of the team started the project back in the early 90s. So thank you listeners, for sticking with us through this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you.

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 the Tech Model Railroad Club, an obsessive group of young computer hackers that helped to shape a new vision for the young computer industry through the late 50s and early 60s. We’ve all seen parodies it in the movies. Queue up a montage. Iron Man just can’t help but tinker with new models of his armor. Then viola, these castaway hack jobs are there when a new foe comes along. As is inspiration to finish them. The Lambda Lamda Lamda guys get back at the jock frat boys in Revenge of the Nerds. The driven inventor in Honey I Shrunk the Kids just can’t help himself but build the most insane inventions. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. There’s a drive. And those who need to understand, to comprehend, to make sense of what was non-sensical before. I guess it even goes back to Dr Frankenstein. Some science just isn’t meant to be conquered. But trains. Those are meant to be conquered. They’re the golden spike into the engineering chasm that young freshman who looked like the cast of Stand By Me, but at MIT, wanted to conquer. You went to MIT in the 50s and 60s because you wanted a deeper understanding of how the world worked. But can you imagine a world where the unofficial motto of the MIT math department was that “there’s no such thing as computer science. It’s witchcraft!” The Tech Model Railroad Club, or TMRC, had started in 1946. World War II had ended the year before and the first first UN General Assembly and Security Council met, with Iran filing the first complaint against the Soviet Union and UNICEF being created. Syria got their independence from France. Jordan got their independence from Britain. The Philippines gained their independence from the US. Truman enacted the CIA, Stalin accounted a 5 year plan for Russia, ushering in the era of Soviet reconstruction and signaling the beginning of the col war, which would begin the next year. Anti-British protests exploded in India, and Attlee agreed to their independence. Ho Chi Minh became president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and France recognized their statehood days later, with war between his forces and the French breaking out later that year resulting in French martial law. Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain Speech. Italy and Bulgaria abolished their monarchies. The US Supreme Court ordered desegregation of busses and Truman ordered desegregation of the armed forces and created the Committee on Civil Rights using an executive order. And there was no true computer industry. But the ENIAC went into production in 1946. And a group of kids at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology weren’t thinking much about the new world order being formed nor about the ENIAC which was being installed just a 5 or 6 hour drive away. They were thinking about model trains. And over the next few years they would build, paint, and make these trains run on model tracks. Started by Walter Marvin and John Fitzallen Moore, who would end up with over a dozen patents after earning his PhD from Columbia and having a long career at Lockheed, EMI Medical who invented the CT scan. By the mid-50s the club had grown and there were a few groups of people who were really in it for different things. Some wanted to drink cocacola while they painted trains. But the thing that drew many a student though was the ARRC, or Automatic Railroad Running Computer. This was built by the Signals and Power Subcommittee who used relays from telephone switches to make the trains do all kinds of crazy things, even cleaning the tracks. Today there we’re hacking genes, going to lifehacker.com, and sometimes regrettably getting hacked, or losing data in a breach. But the term came from one who chops or cuts, going back to the 1200s. But on a cool day in 1955, on the third floor of Build 20, known as the Plywood Palace, that would change. Minutes of a meeting at the Tech Model Railroad Club note “Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.” Maybe they were chopping parts of train tracks up. Maybe the term was derived from something altogether separate. But this was the beginning of a whole new culture. One that survives and thrives today. Hacking began to mean to do technical things for enjoyment in the club. And those who hacked became hackers. The OG hacker was Jack Dennis, an alumni of the TMRC. Jack Dennis had gotten his bachelors from MIT in 1953 and moved on to get his Masters then Doctorate by 1958, staying until he retired in 1987, teaching and influencing many subsequent generations of young hackers. You see, he studied artificial intelligence, or taking these computers built by companies like IBM to do math, and making them… intelligent. These switches and relays under the table of the model railroad were a lot of logical circuits strung together and in the days before what we think of as computers now, these were just a poor college student’s way of building a computer. Having skipped two grades in high school, this “computer” was what drew Alan Kotok to the TMRC in 1958. And incoming freshman Peter Samson. And Bob Saunders, a bit older than the rest. Then grad student Jack Dennis introduced the TMRC to the IBM 704. A marvel of human engineering. It was like your dad’s shiny new red 1958 corvette. Way too expensive to touch. But you just couldn’t help it. The young hackers didn’t know it yet, but Marvin Minsky had shown up to MIT in 1958. John McCarthy was a research fellow there. Jack Dennis got his PhD that year. Outside of MIT, Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby were giving us the Integrated Circuit, we got FORTRAN II, and that McCarthy guy. He gave us LISP. No, he didn’t speak with a LISP. He spoke IN LISP. And then president Lyndon Johnson established ARPA in response to Sputnik, to speed up technological progress. Fernando Corbato got his PhD in physics in 1956 and stayed on with the nerds until he retired as well. Kotok ended up writing the first chess program with McCarthy on the IBM 7090 while still a teenager. Everything changed when Lincoln Lab got the TX-0, lovingly referred to as the tikso. Suddenly, they weren’t loading cards into batch processing computers. The old IBM way was the enemy. The new machines allowed them to actually program. They wrote calculators and did work for courses. But Dennis kinda’ let them do most anything they wanted. So of course we ended up with very early computer games as well, with tic tac toe and Mouse in the Maze. These kids would write anything. Compilers? Sure. Assemblers? Got it. They would hover around the signup sheet for access to the tikso and consume every minute that wasn’t being used for official research. At this point, the kids were like the budding laser inventors in Weird Science. They were driven, crazed. And young Peter Deutsch joined them, writing the Lisp 1.5 implementation for the PDP at 12. Can you imagine being a 12 year old and holding your own around a group of some of the most influential people in the computer industry. Bill Gosper got to MIT in 1961 and so did the second PDP-1 ever built. Steve Russell joined the team and ended up working on Spacewar! When he wasn’t working on Lisp. Speaking of video games. They made Spacewar during this time with a little help from Kotok Steve Piner, Samson, Suanders, and Dan Edwards. In fact, Kotok and Saunders created the first gamepad, later made popular for Nintendo, so they could play Spacewar without using the keyboard. This was work that would eventually be celebrated by the likes of Rolling Stone and Space War and in fact would later become the software used to smoke test the PDP once it entered into the buying tornado. Ricky Greenblatt got to MIT in 1962. And this unruly, unkempt, and extremely talented group of kids hacked their way through the PDP, with Greenblatt becoming famous for his hacks, hacking away the first FORTRAN compiler for the PDP and spending so much time at the terminal that he didn’t make it through his junior year at MIT. These formative years in their lives were consumed with cocacola, Chinese food, and establishing many paradigms we now consider fundamental in computer science. The real shift from a batch process mode of operations, fed by paper tape and punchcards, to a interactive computer was upon us. And they were the pioneers who through countless hours of hacking away, found “the right thing.” Project MAC was established at MIT in 1963 using a DARPA grant and was initially run by legendary J. C. R. Licklider. MAC would influence operating systems with Multics which served as the inspiration for Unix, and the forming of what we now know as computer science through the 1960s and 70s. This represented a higher level of funding and a shift towards the era of development that led to the Internet and many of the standards we still use today. More generations of hackers would follow and continue to push the envelope. But that one special glimpse in time, let’s just say if you listen at just the right frequency you can hear screaming at terminals when a game of Spacewar didn’t go someone’s way, or when something crashed, or with glee when you got “the right thing.” And if you listen hard enough at your next hackathon, you can sometimes hear a Kotok or a Deutsch or a Saunders whisper in your ear exactly what “the right thing” is - but only after sufficient amounts of trial, error, and Spacewar. This free exercise gives way to innovation. That’s why Google famously gives employees free time to pursue their passions. That’s why companies run hackathons. That’s why everyone from DARPA to Netflix has run bounty programs. These young mathematicians, scientists, physicists, and engineers would go on to change the world in their own ways. Uncle John McCarthy would later move to Stanford, where he started the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From there he influenced Sun Microsystems (the S in Sun is for Stanford), Cisco, and dozens of other Silicon Valley powerhouses. Dennis would go on to found Multics and be an inspiration for Ken Thompson with the first versions of Unix. And after retiring he would go to NASA and then Acorn Networks. Slug Russell would go on to a long career as a developer and then executive, including a stop mentoring two nerdy high school kids at Lakeside School in Seattle. They were Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who would go on to found Microsoft. Alan Kotok would go on to join DEC where he would work for 30 years, influencing much of the computing through the 70s and into the 80s. He would work on the Titan chip at DEC and in the various consortiums around the emergent Internet. He would be a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium. Ricky Greenblatt ended up spending too much of his time hacking. He would go on to found Lisp Machines, coauthor the time sharing software for the PDP-6 and PDP-10, write Maclisp, and write the first computer chess program to beat world class players in Hubert Dreyfus. Peter Samson wrote the Tech Model Railroad Club’s official dictionary which would evolve into the now-famous Jargon file. He wrote the Harmony compiler, a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-6, made music for the first time with computers, became an architect at DEC, would oversee hardware engineering at NASA, and continues to act as a docent at the Computer History Museum. Bob Saunders would go on to be a professor at the University of California, becoming president of the IEEE, and Chairman of the Board during some of the most influential years in that great body of engineers and scientists. Peter Deutsch would go on to get his PhD from Berkeley, found Aladdin Enterprises, write Ghostscript, create free Postscript and PDF alternatives, work on Smalltalk, work at Sun, be an influential mind at Xerox PARC, and is now a composer. We owe a great deal to them. So thank you to these pioneers. And thank you, listeners, for sticking through to the end of this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you.

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! Todays episode is on Agile Software Development. Agile software development is a methodology, or anti-methodology, or approach to software development that evolves the requirements a team needs to fulfill and the solutions they need to build in a collaborative, self-organized, and cross-functional way. Boy, that’s a lot to spit out there. I was in an elevator the other day and I heard someone say: “That’s not very agile.” And at that moment, I knew that I just couldn’t help but do an episode on agile. I’ve worked in a lot of teams that use a lot of variants of agile, scrum, Kanban, scrumban, Extreme Programing, Lean Software Development. Some of these are almost polar opposites and you still hear people talk about what is agile and if they want to make fun of people doing things an old way, they’ll say something like waterfall. Nothing ever was waterfall, given that you learn on the fly, find re-usable bits or hit a place where you just say that’s not possible. But that’s another story. The point here is that agile is, well, weaponized to back up what a person wants someone to do. Or how they want a team to be run. And it isn’t always done from an informed point of view. Why is Agile an anti-methodology? Think of it more like a classification maybe. There were a number of methodologies like Extreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, Feature Driven Development, Adaptive Software Development, RAD, and Lean Software Development. These had come out to bring shape around a very similar idea. But over the course of 10-20 years, each had been developed in isolation. In college, I had a computer science professor who talked about “adaptive software development” from his days at a large power company in Georgia back in the 70s. Basically, you are always adapting what you’re doing based on speculation of how long something will take, collaboration on that observation and what you learn while actually building. This shaped how I view software development for years to come. He was already making fun of Waterfall methodologies, or a cycle where you write a large set of requirements and stick to them. Waterfall worked well if you were building a computer to land people on the moon. It was a way of saying “we’re not engineers, we’re software developers.” Later in college, with the rapid proliferation of the Internet and computers into dorm rooms I watched the emergence of rapid application development, where you let the interface requirements determine how you build. But once someone weaponized that by putting a label on it, or worse forking the label into spiral and unified models, then they became much less useful and the next hot thing had to come along. Kent Beck built a methodology called Extreme Programming - or XP for short - in 1996 and that was the next hotness. Here, we release software in shorter development cycles and software developers, like police officers on patrol work in pairs, reviewing and testing code and not writing each feature until it’s required. The idea of unit testing and rapid releasing really came out of the fact that the explosion of the Internet in the 90s meant people had to ship fast and this was also during the rise of really main-stream object-oriented programming languages. The nice thing about XP was that you could show a nice graph where you planned, managed, designed, coded, and tested your software. The rules of Extreme Programming included things like “Code the unit test first” - and “A stand up meeting starts each day.” Extreme Programming is one of these methodologies. Scrum is probably the one most commonly used today. But the rest, as well as the Crystal family of methodologies, are now classified as Agile software development methodologies. So it’s like a parent. Is agile really just a classification then? No. So where did agile come from? By 2001, Kent Beck, who developed Extreme Programming met with Ward Cunningham (who built WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki), Dave Thomas, a programmer who has since written 11 books, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, who designed Scrum. Jim Highsmith, who developed that Adaptive Software Development methodology, and many others were at the time involved in trying to align an organizational methodology that allowed software developers to stop acting like people that built bridges or large buildings. Most had day jobs but they were like-minded and decided to meet at a quaint resort in Snowbird, Utah. They might have all wanted to use the methodologies that each of them had developed. But if they had all been jerks then they might not have had a shift in how software would be written for the next 20+ years. They decided to start with something simple, a statement of values; instead of Instead of bickering and being dug into specific details, they were all able to agree that software development should not be managed in the same fashion as engineering projects are run. So they gave us the Manifesto for Agile Software Development… The Manifesto reads: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: * Individuals and interactions over processes and tools * Working software over comprehensive documentation * Customer collaboration over contract negotiation * Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. But additionally, the principles dig into and expand upon some of that adjacently. The principles behind the Agile Manifesto: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Working software is the primary measure of progress. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. Many of the words here are easily weaponized. For example, “satisfy the customer.” Who’s the customer? The product manager? The end user? The person in an enterprise who actually buys the software? The person in that IT department that made the decision to buy the software? In the scrum methodology, the customer is not known. The product owner is their representative. But the principles should need to identify that, just use the word so each methodology makes sure to cover it. Now take “continuous delivery.” People frequently just lump CI in there with CD. I’ve heard continuous design, continuous improvement, continuous deployment, continuous podcasting. Wait, I made the last one up. We could spend hours going through each of these and identifying where they aren’t specific enough. Or, again, we could revel in their lack of specificity by pointing us into the direction of a methodology where these words get much more specific meanings. Ironically, I know accounting teams at very large companies that have scrum masters, engineering teams for big projects with a project manager and a scrum master, and even a team of judges that use agile methodologies. There are now scrum masters embedded in most software teams of note. But once you see Agile on the cover of The Harvard Business Review, you hate to do this given all the classes in agile/XP/scrum - but you have to start wondering what’s next? For 20 years, we’ve been saying “stop treating us like engineers” or “that’s waterfall.” Every methodology seems to grow. Right after I finished my PMP I was on a project with someone else that had just finished theirs. I think they tried to implement the entire Project management Body of Knowledge. If you try to have every ceremony from Scrum, you’re not likely to even have half a day left over to write any code. But you also don’t want to be like the person on the elevator, weaponizing only small parts of a larger body of work, just to get your way. And more importantly, to admit that none of us have all the right answers and be ready to, as they say in Extreme Programming: Fix XP when it breaks - which is similar to Boyd’s Destruction and Creation, or the sustenance and destruction in Lean Six-Sigma. Many of us forget that last part: be willing to walk away from the dogma and start over. Thomas Jefferson called for a revolution every 20 years. We have two years to come up with a replacement! And until you replace me, thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Craigslist 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 the computer that was the history of craigslist. It’s 1995. The web is 4 years old. By the end of the year, there would be over 23,000 websites. Netscape released JavaScript, Microsoft released Internet Explorer, Sony released the Playstation, Coolio Released Gangsta’s Paradise, and probably while singing along to “This is How We Do It” veteran software programmer Craig Newmark made a list. And Craig Alexander Newmark hails from Morristown, New Jersey and after being a nerdy kid with thick black glasses and a pocket protector in high school went off to Case Western, getting a bachelors in 1975 and a masters in 77. This is where he was first given access to the arpanet, which would later evolve into the internet as we know it today. He then spent 17 years at IBM during some of the most formative years of the young computer industry. This was when the hacker ethos formed and anyone that went to college in the 70s would be well acquainted with Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and yes, even employees of IBM would potentially have been steeped in the ethos of the counterculture that helped contribute to that early hacker ethos. And as with many of us, Gibson’s Neuromancer got him thinking about the potential of the web. Anyone working at that time would have also seen the rise of the Internet, the advent of email, and a lot of people were experimenting with side projects here and there. And people from all around the country that still believed in the ideals of that 60s counterculture still gravitated towards San Francisco, where Newmark moved to take a gig at Charles Schwab in 1993 where he was an early proponent of the web, exploring uses with a series of brown bag lunches. If you’re going to San Francisco make sure to wear flowers in your hair. Newmark got to see some of the best of the WELL and Usenet and as with a lot of people when they first move to a new place, old Craig was in his early 40s with way too much free time on his hands. I’ve known lots of people these days that move to new cities and jump headfirst into Eventbrite, Meetup, or more recently, Facebook events, as a way of meeting new people. But nothing like that really existed in 1993. The rest of the country had been glued to their televisions, waiting for the OJ Simpson verdict while flipping back and forth between Seinfeld, Frasier, and Roseanne. Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood won Best Picture. I’ve never seen Seinfeld. I’ve seen a couple episodes of Frasier. I lived Roseanne so was never interested. So a lot of us missed all that early 90s pop culture. Instead of getting embroiled in Friends from 93 to 95, Craig took a stab at connecting people. He started simple, with an email list and ten or so friends. Things like getting dinner at Joe’s digital diner. And arts events. Things he was interested in personally. People started to ask Craig to be added to the list. The list, which he just called craigslist, was originally for finding things to do but quickly grew into a wanted ad in a way - with people asking him to post their events or occasionally asking for him to mention an apartment or car, and of course, early email aficionados were a bit hackery so there was plenty of computer parts needed or available. It’s even hard for me to remember what things were like back then. If you wanted to list a job, sell a car, sell furniture, or even put an ad to host a group meetup, you’d spend $5 to $50 for a two or three line blurb. You had to pick up the phone. And chances are you had a home phone. Cordless phones were all the rage then. And you had to dial a phone number. And you had to talk to a real life human being. All of this sounds terrible, right?!?! So it was time to build a website. When he first launched craigslist, you could rent apartments, post small business ads, sell cars, buy computers, and organize events. Similar to the email list but on the web. This is a natural progression. Anyone who’s managed a list serve will eventually find the groups to become unwieldy and if you don’t build ways for people to narrow down what they want out of it, the groups and lists will split themselves into factions organically. Not that Craig had a vision for increasing page view times or bringing in advertisers, or getting more people to come to the site. But at first, there weren’t that many categories. And the URL was www.craigslist.org. It was simple and the text, like most hyperlinks at the time, was mostly blue. By end of 1997 he was up to a million page views a month and a few people were volunteering to help out with the site. Through 1998 the site started to lag behind with timely postings and not pruning old stuff quickly enough. It was clear that it needed more. In 1999 he made Craigslist into a business. Being based in San Francisco of course, venture capitalist friends were telling him to do much, much more, like banner ads and selling ads. It was time to hire people. He didn’t feel like he did great at interviewing people, he couldn’t fire people. But in 99 he got a resume from Jim Buckmaster. He hired him as the lead tech. Craigslist first expanded into different geographies by allowing users to basically filter to different parts of the Bay Area. San Francisco, South Bay, East Bay, North Bay, and Peninsula. Craig turned over operations of the company to Jim in 2000 and Craigslist expanded to Boston in y2k, and once tests worked well, added Chicago, DC, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and Seattle. I had friends in San Francisco and had used Craigslist - I lived in LA at the time and this was my first time being able to use it regularly at home. Craig stayed with customer service, enjoying a connection with the organization. They added Sacramento and in 2001 saw the addition of Atlanta, Austin, Vancouver and Denver added. Every time I logged in there were new cities, and new categories, even one to allow for “erotic services”. Then in 2004 we saw Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, Bangalore, and Sao Paulo. As organizations grow they need capital. Craigslist wasn’t necessarily aggressive about growth, but once they became a multi-million dollar company, there was risk of running out of cash. In 2004, eBay purchased 28.4 percent of the company. They expanded into Sydney and Melbourne. Craigslist also added new categories to make it easier to find specific things, like toys or things for babies, different types of living arrangements, ridesharing, etc. Was it the ridesharing category that inspired Travis Kalanick? Was it posts to rent a room for a weekend that inspired AirBNB? Was it the events page that inspired Eventbrite? In 2005, eBay launched Kijiji, an online classifieds service organized by cities. It’s a similar business model to Craigslist. By May they’d purchased Gumtree, a similar site serving the UK, South Africa and a number of other countries, and then purchased LoQuo, OpusForum.org. They were firmly getting in the same market as Craigslist. Craigslist continued to grow. And by 2008, eBay sued Craigslist claiming they were diluting the eBay stock. Craigslist countered that Kijiji stoke trade secrets. By 2008 over 40 million Americans used Craigslist every month and they had helped people in more than 500 cities spread across more than 50 countries. Much larger than the other service. They didn’t settle that suit for 7 years, with eBay finally selling its shares back to Craigslist in 2015. Over the years, there have been a number of other legal hurdles for Craigslist. In 2008, Craigslist added phone verification to the erotic services category and saw a drastic reduction in the number of ads. They also teamed up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as 43 US Attorneys General and saw over 90% reduced ads for erotic services over the next year and donated all revenue from ads to post erotic services to charities. Craigslist later removed the category outright. The net effect was that many of those services got posted to the personals section. At the time, craigslist was the most used personals site in the US. Therefore, unable to police those, in 2010, Craiglist took the personals down as well. Craigslist was obviously making people ask a lot of questions. Newspaper revenue from classifieds advertisements went down from 14 to 20 percent in 2007 while online classified traffic shot up 23%. Again, disruption makes people ask question. I am not a political person and don’t like talking about politics. I had friends in prosecutors offices at the time and they would ask me about how an ad could get posted for an illegal activity and really looked at it from the perspective that Craigslist was facilitating sex work. But it’s worth noting that a social change that resulted in that erotic services section was that a number of sex workers moved inside apartments rather than working on the street. They could screen potential customers and those clients knew they would be leaving behind a trail of bits and bytes that might get them caught. As a result, homicide rates against females went down by 17 percent and since the Erotic Services section of the site has been shut down, those rates have risen back to the same levels. Other sites did spring up to facilitate the same services, such as Backpage. And each has been taken down or prosecuted as they spring up. To make it easier to do so, the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficers Act and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act was launch in 2018. We know that the advent of the online world is changing a lot in society. If I need some help around the house, I can just go to Craigslist and post an ad and within an hour usually have 50 messages. I don’t love washing windows on the 2nd floor of the house - and now I don’t have to. I did that work myself 20 years ago. Cars sold person to person sell for more than to dealerships. And out of great changes comes people looking to exploit them. I don’t post things to sell as much as I used to. The last few times I posted I got at least 2 or 3 messages asking if I am willing to ship items and offering to pay me after the items arrive. Obvious scams. Not that I haven’t seen similar from eBay or Amazon, but at least there you would have recourse. Angie got a list in 1995 too. You can use angieslist to check up on people offering to do services. But in my experience few who respond to a craigslist ad are there and most are gainfully employed elsewhere and just gigging on the side. Today Craigslist runs with around 50 people, and with revenue over 700 million. Classified advertising at large newspaper chains has dropped drastically. Alexa ranks craigslist as the 120th ranked global sites and 28th ranked in the US - with people spending 9 minutes on the site on average. The top searches are cheap furniture, estate sales, and lawn mowers. And what’s beautiful is that the site looks almost exactly like it looked when launched in the 90s. Still no banners. Still blue hyperlinks. Still some black text. Nothing fancy. Out of Craigslist we’ve gotten CL blob service, CL image service, and memcache cluster proxy. They contribute code to Haraka, Redis, and Sphinx. The craigslist Charitable fund helps support the Apache Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Gnome Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Open Source Initiative, OpenStreetMap.us, Perl Foundation, PostgreSQL, Python Software Foundation, and Software in the Public Interest. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who want to “disrupt” an industry. When I hear the self proclaimed serial entrepreneurs who think they’re all about the ideas but don’t know how to actually make any of the ideas work talk about disruptive technologies, I have never heard one mention craigslist. There’s a misnomer that a lot of engineers don’t have the ideas and that every Bill Gates needs a Paul Allen or that every Steve Jobs needs a Woz. Or I hear that starting companies is for young entrepreneurs, like those four were when starting Microsoft and Apple. Craig Newmark, a 20 year software veteran in his 40s inspired Yelp!, Uber, Next-door and thousands of other sites. And unlike many of those other organizations he didn’t have to go blow things up and build a huge company. They did something that their brethren from the early days on the WELL would be proud of, they diverted much of their revenues to the Craigslist Charitable Fund. Here, they sponsor four main categories of grant partners: * Environment and Transportation * Education, Rights, Justice, Reason * Non-Violence, Veterans, Peace * Journalism, Open Source, Internet You can find more on this at https://www.craigslist.org/about/charitable According to Forbes, Craig is a billionaire. But he’s said that his “minimal profit” business model allows him to “give away tremendous amounts of money to the nonprofits I believe in” including Wikipedia, a similar minded site. The stories of the history of computing are often full of people becoming “the richest person in the world” and organizations judged based on market share. But not only with the impact that the site has had but also with those inspired by how he runs it, Craig Newmark shatters all of those misconceptions of how the world should work. These days you’re probably most likely gonna’ find him on craigconnects.org - “helping people do good work that matters.” So think about this, my lovely listeners. No matter how old you are, nor how bad your design skills, nor how disruptive it will be or not be, anyone can parlay an idea that helps a few people into something that changes not only their life, but changes the lives of others, disrupts multiple industries, and doesn’t have to create all the stress of trying to keep up with the tech joneses. You can do great things if you want. Or you can listen to me babble. Thanks for doing that. We’re lucky to have you join us.

The Microchip 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! Todays episode is on the history of the microchip, or microprocessor. This was a hard episode, because it was the culmination of so many technologies. You don’t know where to stop telling the story - and you find yourself writing a chronological story in reverse chronological order. But few advancements have impacted humanity the way the introduction of the microprocessor has. Given that most technological advances are a convergence of otherwise disparate technologies, we’ll start the story of the microchip with the obvious choice: the light bulb. Thomas Edison first demonstrated the carbon filament light bulb in 1879. William Joseph Hammer, an inventor working with Edison, then noted that if he added another electrode to a heated filament bulb that it would glow around the positive pole in the vacuum of the bulb and blacken the wire and the bulb around the negative pole. 25 years later, John Ambrose Fleming demonstrated that if that extra electrode is made more positive than the filament the current flows through the vacuum and that the current could only flow from the filament to the electrode and not the other direction. This converted AC signals to DC and represented a boolean gate. In the 1904 Fleming was granted Great Britain’s patent number 24850 for the vacuum tube, ushering in the era of electronics. Over the next few decades, researchers continued to work with these tubes. Eccles and Jordan invented the flip-flop circuit at London’s City and Guilds Technical College in 1918, receiving a patent for what they called the Eccles-Jordan Trigger Circuit in 1920. Now, English mathematician George Boole back in the earlier part of the 1800s had developed Boolean algebra. Here he created a system where logical statements could be made in mathematical terms. Those could then be performed using math on the symbols. Only a 0 or a 1 could be used. It took awhile, John Vincent Atanasoff and grad student Clifford Berry harnessed the circuits in the Atanasoff-Berry computer in 1938 at Iowa State University and using Boolean algebra, successfully solved linear equations but never finished the device due to World War II, when a number of other technological advancements happened, including the development of the ENIAC by John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert from the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the US Army Ordinance Corps, starting in 1943. By the time it was taken out of operation, the ENIAC had 20,000 of these tubes. Each digit in an algorithm required 36 tubes. Ten digit numbers could be multiplied at 357 per second, showing the first true use of a computer. John Von Neumann was the first to actually use the ENIAC when they used one million punch cards to run the computations that helped propel the development of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The creators would leave the University and found the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Out of that later would come the Univac and the ancestor of todays Unisys Corporation. These early computers used vacuum tubes to replace gears that were in previous counting machines and represented the First Generation. But the tubes for the flip-flop circuits were expensive and had to be replaced way too often. The second generation of computers used transistors instead of vacuum tubes for logic circuits. The integrated circuit is basically a wire set into silicon or germanium that can be set to on or off based on the properties of the material. These replaced vacuum tubes in computers to provide the foundation of the boolean logic. You know, the zeros and ones that computers are famous for. As with most modern technologies the integrated circuit owes its origin to a number of different technologies that came before it was able to be useful in computers. This includes the three primary components of the circuit: the transistor, resistor, and capacitor. The silicon that chips are so famous for was actually discovered by Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1824. He heated potassium chips in a silica container and washed away the residue and viola - an element! The transistor is a semiconducting device that has three connections that amplify data. One is the source, which is connected to the negative terminal on a battery. The second is the drain, and is a positive terminal that, when touched to the gate (the third connection), the transistor allows electricity through. Transistors then acts as an on/off switch. The fact they can be on or off is the foundation for Boolean logic in modern computing. The resistor controls the flow of electricity and is used to control the levels and terminate lines. An integrated circuit is also built using silicon but you print the pattern into the circuit using lithography rather than painstakingly putting little wires where they need to go like radio operators did with the Cats Whisker all those years ago. The idea of the transistor goes back to the mid-30s when William Shockley took the idea of a cat’s wicker, or fine wire touching a galena crystal. The radio operator moved the wire to different parts of the crystal to pick up different radio signals. Solid state physics was born when Shockley, who first studied at Cal Tech and then got his PhD in Physics, started working on a way to make these useable in every day electronics. After a decade in the trenches, Bell gave him John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who successfully finished the invention in 1947. Shockley went on to design a new and better transistor, known as a bipolar transistor and helped move us from vacuum tubes, which were bulky and needed a lot of power, to first gernanium, which they used initially and then to silicon. Shockley got a Nobel Prize in physics for his work and was able to recruit a team of extremely talented young PhDs to help work on new semiconductor devices. He became increasingly frustrated with Bell and took a leave of absence. Shockley moved back to his hometown of Palo Alto, California and started a new company called the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He had some ideas that were way before his time and wasn’t exactly easy to work with. He pushed the chip industry forward but in the process spawned a mass exodus of employees that went to Fairchild in 1957. He called them the “Traitorous 8” to create what would be Fairchild Semiconductors. The alumni of Shockley Labs ended up spawning 65 companies over the next 20 years that laid foundation of the microchip industry to this day, including Intel. . If he were easier to work with, we might not have had the innovation that we’ve seen if not for Shockley’s abbrasiveness! All of these silicon chip makers being in a small area of California then led to that area getting the Silicon Valley moniker, given all the chip makers located there. At this point, people were starting to experiment with computers using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The University of Manchester created the Transistor Computer in 1953. The first fully transistorized computer came in 1955 with the Harwell CADET, MIT started work on the TX-0 in 1956, and the THOR guidance computer for ICBMs came in 1957. But the IBM 608 was the first commercial all-transistor solid-state computer. The RCA 501, Philco Transac S-1000, and IBM 7070 took us through the age of transistors which continued to get smaller and more compact. At this point, we were really just replacing tubes with transistors. But the integrated circuit would bring us into the third generation of computers. The integrated circuit is an electronic device that has all of the functional blocks put on the same piece of silicon. So the transistor, or multiple transistors, is printed into one block. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments patented the first miniaturized electronic circuit in 1959, which used germanium and external wires and was really more of a hybrid integrated Circuit. Later in 1959, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first truly monolithic integrated circuit, which he received a patent for. While doing so independently, they are considered the creators of the integrated circuit. The third generation of computers was from 1964 to 1971, and saw the introduction of metal-oxide-silicon and printing circuits with photolithography. In 1965 Gordon Moore, also of Fairchild at the time, observed that the number of transistors, resistors, diodes, capacitors, and other components that could be shoved into a chip was doubling about every year and published an article with this observation in Electronics Magazine, forecasting what’s now known as Moore’s Law. The integrated circuit gave us the DEC PDP and later the IBM S/360 series of computers, making computers smaller, and brought us into a world where we could write code in COBOL and FORTRAN. A microprocessor is one type of integrated circuit. They’re also used in audio amplifiers, analog integrated circuits, clocks, interfaces, etc. But in the early 60s, the Minuteman missal program and the US Navy contracts were practically the only ones using these chips, at this point numbering in the hundreds, bringing us into the world of the MSI, or medium-scale integration chip. Moore and Noyce left Fairchild and founded NM Electronics in 1968, later renaming the company to Intel, short for Integrated Electronics. Federico Faggin came over in 1970 to lead the MCS-4 family of chips. These along with other chips that were economical to produce started to result in chips finding their way into various consumer products. In fact, the MCS-4 chips, which split RAM , ROM, CPU, and I/O, were designed for the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation and Intel bought the rights back, announcing the chip in Electronic News with an article called “Announcing A New Era In Integrated Electronics.” Together, they built the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor that fit on a single chip. They buried the contacts in multiple layers and introduced 2-phase clocks. Silicon oxide was used to layer integrated circuits onto a single chip. Here, the microprocessor, or CPU, splits the arithmetic and logic unit, or ALU, the bus, the clock, the control unit, and registers up so each can do what they’re good at, but live on the same chip. The 1st generation of the microprocessor was from 1971, when these 4-bit chips were mostly used in guidance systems. This boosted the speed by five times. The forming of Intel and the introduction of the 4004 chip can be seen as one of the primary events that propelled us into the evolution of the microprocessor and the fourth generation of computers, which lasted from 1972 to 2010. The Intel 4004 had 2,300 transistors. The Intel 4040 came in 1974, giving us 3,000 transistors. It was still a 4-bit data bus but jumped to 12-bit ROM. The architecture was also from Faggin but the design was carried out by Tom Innes. We were firmly in the era of LSI, or Large Scale Integration chips. These chips were also used in the Busicom calculator, and even in the first pinball game controlled by a microprocessor. But getting a true computer to fit on a chip, or a modern CPU, remained an elusive goal. Texas Instruments ran an ad in Electronics with a caption that the 8008 was a “CPU on a Chip” and attempted to patent the chip, but couldn’t make it work. Faggin went to Intel and they did actually make it work, giving us the first 8-bit microprocessor. It was then redesigned in 1972 as the 8080. A year later, the chip was fabricated and then put on the market in 1972. Intel made the R&D money back in 5 months and sparked the idea for Ed Roberts to build The Altair 8800. Motorola and Zilog brought competition in the 6900 and Z-80, which was used in the Tandy TRS-80, one of the first mass produced computers. N-MOSs transistors on chips allowed for new and faster paths and MOS Technology soon joined the fray with the 6501 and 6502 chips in 1975. The 6502 ended up being the chip used in the Apple I, Apple II, NES, Atari 2600, BBC Micro, Commodore PET and Commodore VIC-20. The MOS 6510 variant was then used in the Commodore 64. The 8086 was released in 1978 with 3,000 transistors and marked the transition to Intel’s x86 line of chips, setting what would become the standard in future chips. But the IBM wasn’t the only place you could find chips. The Motorola 68000 was used in the Sun-1 from Sun Microsystems, the HP 9000, the DEC VAXstation, the Comodore Amiga, the Apple Lisa, the Sinclair QL, the Sega Genesis, and the Mac. The chips were also used in the first HP LaserJet and the Apple LaserWriter and used in a number of embedded systems for years to come. As we rounded the corner into the 80s it was clear that the computer revolution was upon us. A number of computer companies were looking to do more than what they could do with he existing Intel, MOS, and Motorola chips. And ARPA was pushing the boundaries yet again. Carver Mead of Caltech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC saw the density of transistors in chips starting to plateau. So with DARPA funding they went out looking for ways to push the world into the VLSI era, or Very Large Scale Integration. The VLSI project resulted in the concept of fabless design houses, such as Broadcom, 32-bit graphics, BSD Unix, and RISC processors, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer Processor. Out of the RISC work done at UC Berkely came a number of new options for chips as well. One of these designers, Acorn Computers evaluated a number of chips and decided to develop their own, using VLSI Technology, a company founded by more Fairchild Semiconductor alumni) to manufacture the chip in their foundry. Sophie Wilson, then Roger, worked on an instruction set for the RISC. Out of this came the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM chip. Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced, well over 10 for every human on the planet. You know that fancy new A13 that Apple announced. It uses a licensed ARM core. Another chip that came out of the RISC family was the SUN Sparc. Sun being short for Stanford University Network, co-founder Andy Bchtolsheim, they were close to the action and released the SPARC in 1986. I still have a SPARC 20 I use for this and that at home. Not that SPARC has gone anywhere. They’re just made by Oracle now. The Intel 80386 chip was a 32 bit microprocessor released in 1985. The first chip had 275,000 transistors, taking plenty of pages from the lessons learned in the VLSI projects. Compaq built a machine on it, but really the IBM PC/AT made it an accepted standard, although this was the beginning of the end of IBMs hold on the burgeoning computer industry. And AMD, yet another company founded by Fairchild defectors, created the Am386 in 1991, ending Intel’s nearly 5 year monopoly on the PC clone industry and ending an era where AMD was a second source of Intel parts but instead was competing with Intel directly. We can thank AMD’s aggressive competition with Intel for helping to keep the CPU industry going along Moore’s law! At this point transistors were only 1.5 microns in size. Much, much smaller than a cats whisker. The Intel 80486 came in 1989 and again tracking against Moore’s Law we hit the first 1 million transistor chip. Remember how Compaq helped end IBM’s hold on the PC market? When the Intel 486 came along they went with AMD. This chip was also important because we got L1 caches, meaning that chips didn’t need to send instructions to other parts of the motherboard but could do caching internally. From then on, the L1 and later L2 caches would be listed on all chips. We’d finally broken 100MHz! Motorola released the 68050 in 1990, hitting 1.2 Million transistors, and giving Apple the chip that would define the Quadra and also that L1 cache. The DEC Alpha came along in 1992, also a RISC chip, but really kicking off the 64-bit era. While the most technically advanced chip of the day, it never took off and after DEC was acquired by Compaq and Compaq by HP, the IP for the Alpha was sold to Intel in 2001, with the PC industry having just decided they could have all their money. But back to the 90s, ‘cause life was better back when grunge was new. At this point, hobbyists knew what the CPU was but most normal people didn’t. The concept that there was a whole Univac on one of these never occurred to most people. But then came the Pentium. Turns out that giving a chip a name and some marketing dollars not only made Intel a household name but solidified their hold on the chip market for decades to come. While the Intel Inside campaign started in 1991, after the Pentium was released in 1993, the case of most computers would have a sticker that said Intel Inside. Intel really one upped everyone. The first Pentium, the P5 or 586 or 80501 had 3.1 million transistors that were 16.7 micrometers. Computers kept getting smaller and cheaper and faster. Apple answered by moving to the PowerPC chip from IBM, which owed much of its design to the RISC. Exactly 10 years after the famous 1984 Super Bowl Commercial, Apple was using a CPU from IBM. Another advance came in 1996 when IBM developed the Power4 chip and gave the world multi-core processors, or a CPU that had multiple CPU cores inside the CPU. Once parallel processing caught up to being able to have processes that consumed the resources on all those cores, we saw Intel's Pentium D, and AMD's Athlon 64 x2 released in May 2005 bringing multi-core architecture to the consumer. This led to even more parallel processing and an explosion in the number of cores helped us continue on with Moore’s Law. There are now custom chips that reach into the thousands of cores today, although most laptops have maybe 4 cores in them. Setting multi-core architectures aside for a moment, back to Y2K when Justin Timberlake was still a part of NSYNC. Then came the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, Pentium III, Xeon, Pentium M, Xeon LV, Pentium 4. On the IBM/Apple side, we got the G3 with 6.3 million transistors, G4 with 10.5 million transistors, and the G5 with 58 million transistors and 1,131 feet of copper interconnects, running at 3GHz in 2002 - so much copper that NSYNC broke up that year. The Pentium 4 that year ran at 2.4 GHz and sported 50 million transistors. This is about 1 transistor per dollar made off Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002. I guess Attack of the Clones was better because it grossed over 300 Million that year. Remember how we broke the million transistor mark in 1989? In 2005, Intel started testing Montecito with certain customers. The Titanium-2 64-bit CPU with 1.72 billion transistors, shattering the billion mark and hitting a billion two years earlier than projected. Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple would be moving to the Intel processor that year. NeXTSTEP had been happy as a clam on Intel, SPARC or HP RISC so given the rapid advancements from Intel, this seemed like a safe bet and allowed Apple to tell directors in IT departments “see, we play nice now.” And the innovations kept flowing for the next decade and a half. We packed more transistors in, more cache, cleaner clean rooms, faster bus speeds, with Intel owning the computer CPU market and AMD slowly growing from the ashes of Acorn computer into the power-house that AMD cores are today, when embedded in other chips designs. I’d say not much interesting has happened, but it’s ALL interesting, except the numbers just sound stupid they’re so big. And we had more advances along the way of course, but it started to feel like we were just miniaturizing more and more, allowing us to do much more advanced computing in general. The fifth generation of computing is all about technologies that we today consider advanced. Artificial Intelligence, Parallel Computing, Very High Level Computer Languages, the migration away from desktops to laptops and even smaller devices like smartphones. ULSI, or Ultra Large Scale Integration chips not only tells us that chip designers really have no creativity outside of chip architecture, but also means millions up to tens of billions of transistors on silicon. At the time of this recording, the AMD Epic Rome is the single chip package with the most transistors, at 32 billion. Silicon is the seventh most abundant element in the universe and the second most in the crust of the planet earth. Given that there’s more chips than people by a huge percentage, we’re lucky we don’t have to worry about running out any time soon! We skipped RAM in this episode. But it kinda’ deserves its own, since RAM is still following Moore’s Law, while the CPU is kinda’ lagging again. Maybe it’s time for our friends at DARPA to get the kids from Berkley working at VERYUltra Large Scale chips or VULSIs! Or they could sign on to sponsor this podcast! And now I’m going to go take a VERYUltra Large Scale nap. Gentle listeners I hope you can do that as well. Unless you’re driving while listening to this. Don’t nap while driving. But do have a lovely day. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re so lucky to have you!