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! Todays episode is on the History of Symantec. This is really more part one of a part two series. Broadcom announced they were acquiring Symantec in August of 2019, the day before we recorded this episode. Who is this Symantec and what do they do - and why does Broadcom want to buy them for 10.7 Billion dollars? For starters, by themselves Symantec is a Fortune 500 company with over $4 billion dollars in annual revenues so $10.7 Billion is a steal for an enterprise software company. Except they’re just selling the Enterprise software division and keeping Norton in the family. With just shy of 12,000 employees, Symantec has twisted and turned and bought and sold companies for a long time. But how did they become a Fortune 500 company? It all started with Eisenhower. ARPA or the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which would later add the word Defense to their name, become DARPA and build a series of tubes call the interweb. While originally commissioned so Ike could counter Sputnik, ARPA continued working to fund projects in computers and in the 1970s, this kid out of the University of Texas named Gary Hendrix saw that they were funding natural language understanding projects. This went back to Turing and DARPA wanted to give some AI-complete a leap forward, trying to make computers as intelligent as people. This was obviously before Terminator told us that was a bad idea (pro-tip, it’s a good idea). Our intrepid hero Gary saw that sweet, sweet grant money and got his PhD from the UT Austin Computational Linguistics Lab. He wrote some papers on robotics and the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI for short. Yes, that’s the same SRI that invented the hosts.txt file and is responsible for keeping DNS for the first decade or so of the internet. So our pal Hendrix joins SRI and chases that grant money, leaving SRI in 1980 with about 15 other Stanford researchers to start a company they called Machine Intelligence Corporation. That went bust and so he started Symantec Corporation in 1982 got a grant from the National Science foundation to build natural language processing software; it turns out syntax and semantics make for a pretty good mashup. So the new company Symantec built out a database and some advanced natural language code, but by 1984 the PC revolution was on and that code had been built for a DEC PDP so could not be run on the emerging PCs in the industry. Symantec was then acquired by C&E Software short for the names of its founders, Dennis Coleman and Gordon Eubanks. The Symantec name stayed and Eubanks became the chairman of the board for the new company. C&E had been working on PC software called Q&A, which the new team finished and then added natural language processing to make using the tools easier to use. They called that “The Intelligent Assistant” and they now had a tool that would take them through the 80s. People swapped rolls, and due to a sharp focus on sales they did well. During the early days of the PC, dealers - or small computer stores that were popping up all over the country, were critical to selling hardware and software. Every Symantec employee would go on the road for six days a week, visiting 6 dealers a day. It was grueling but kept them growing and building. They became what we now call a “portfolio” company in 1985 when they introduced NoteIt, a natural language processing tool used to annotate docs in Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus was in the midst of eating the lunch of previous tools. They added another devision and made SQZ a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet tool. This is important, they were a 3 product company with divisions when in 1987 they got even more aggressive and purchased Breakthrough Software who made an early project management tool called TimeLine. And this is when they did something unique for a PC software company: they split each product into groups that leveraged a shared pool of resources. Each product had a GM that was responsible for the P&L. The GM ran the development, Quality Assurance, Tech Support, and Product Market - those teams reported directly to the GM, who reported to then CEO Eubanks. But there was a shared sales, finance, and operations team. This laid the framework for massive growth, increased sales, and took Symantec to their IPO in 1989. Symantec purchased what was at the time the most popular CRM app called ACT! In 1993 Meanwhile, Peter Norton had a great suite of tools for working with DOS. Things that, well, maybe should have been built into operating systems (and mostly now are). Norton could compress files, do file recovery, etc. The cash Symantec raised allowed them to acquire The Peter Norton Company in 1999 which would completely change the face of the company. This gave them development tools for PC and Mac as Norton had been building those. This lead to the introduction of Symantec Antivirus for the Macintosh and called the anti-virus for PC Norton Antivirus because people already trusted that name. Within two years, with the added sales and marketing air cover that the Symantec sales machine provided, the Norton group was responsible for 82% of Symantecs total revenues. So much so that Symantec dropped building Q&A because Microsoft was winning in their market. I remember this moment pretty poignantly. Sure, there were other apps for the Mac like Virex, and other apps for Windows, like McAfee. But the Norton tools were the gold standard. At least until they later got bloated. The next decade was fast, from the outside looking in, except when Symantec acquired Veritas in 2004. This made sense as Symantec had become a solid player in the security space and before the cloud, backup seemed somewhat related. I’d used Backup Exec for a long time and watched Veritas products go from awesome to, well, not as awesome. John Thompson was the CEO through that decade and Symantec grew rapidly - purchasing systems management solution Altiris in 2007 and got a Data Loss Prevention solution that year in Vontu. Application Performance Management, or APM wasn’t very security focused so that business until was picked up by Vector Capital in 2008. They also picked up MessageLabs and AppStream in 2008. Enrique Salem replaced Thompson and Symantec bought Versign’s CA business in 2010. If you remember from our encryption episode, that was already spun off of RSA. Certificates are security-focused. Email encryption tool PGP and GuardianEdge were also picked up in 2010 providing key management tools for all those, um, keys the CA was issuing. These tools were never integrated properly though. They also picked up Rulespace in 2010 to get what’s now their content filtering solution. Symantec acquired LiveOffice in 2012 to get enterprise vault and instant messaging security - continuing to solidify the line of security products. They also acquired Odyssey Software for SCCM plugins to get better at managing embedded, mobile, and rugged devices. Then came Nukona to get a MAM product, also in 2012. During this time, Steve Bennett was hired as CEO and fired in 2014. Then Michael Brown, although in the interim Veritas was demerged in 2014 and as their products started getting better they were sold to The Carlyle Group in 2016 for $8B. Then Greg Clark became CEO in 2016, when Symantec purchased Blue Coat. Greg Clark then orchestrated the LifeLock acquisition for $2.3B of that $8B. Thoma Bravo then bought CA business to merge with DigiCert in 2017. Then in 2019 Rick Hill became CEO. Does this seem like a lot of buying and selling? It is. But it also isn’t. If you look at what Symantec has done, they have a lot of things they can sell customers for various needs in the information security space. At times, they’ve felt like a holding company. But ever since the Norton acquisition, they’ve had very specific moves that continue to solidify them as one of the top security vendors in the space. Their sales teams don’t spend six days a week on the road and go to six customers a day, but they have a sales machine. And the’ve managed to leverage that to get inside what we call the buying tornado of many emergent technologies and then sell the company before the tornado ends. They still have Norton, of course. Even though practically every other product in the portfolio has come and gone over the years. What does all of this mean? The Broadcom acquisition of the enterprise security division maybe tells us that Symantec is about to leverage that $10+ billion dollars to buy more software companies. And sell more companies after a little integration and incubation, then getting out of it before the ocean gets too red, the tech too stale, or before Microsoft sherlocks them. Because that’s what they do. And they do it profitably every single time. We often think of how an acquiring company gets a new product - but next time you see a company buying another one, think about this: that company probably had multiple offers. What did the team at the company being acquired get out of this deal? And we’ll work on that in the next episode, when we explore the history of Broadcom. Thank you for sticking with us through this episode of the History of Computing Podcast and 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! Todays episode is about the IBM System/360. System/360 was a family of mainframes. IBM has done a great job over the decades following innovations rather than leading them, but there might not be another single innovation that was as influential on computing as the System/360. But it’s certainly hard to think of one. IBM had been building mainframes with the 700 and 7000 series of systems since 1952, so they weren’t new to the concept in 1964 when the S360 was announced (also when Disney released Mary Poppins and ). But they wanted to do something different. They were swimming in a red ocean of vendors who had been leading the technology and while they had a 70 percent market share, they were looking to cement a long-term leadership position in the emerging IT industry. So IBM decided to take a huge leap forward and brought the entire industry with them. This was a risky endeavor. Thomas Watson Jr, son of the great IBM business executive Thomas Watson Sr, bet the proverbial farm on this. And won that bet. In all, IBM spent 5 billion dollars in mid-1960s money, which would be $41B today with a cumulative 726.3% rate of inflation. To put things in context around the impact of the mainframe business, IBM revenues were at $3.23 B in 1964 and more than doubled to $7.19 B by 1970 when the next edition, the 370, was released. To further that context, the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the first atomic bomb, cost $2 B. IBM did not have a project this large before the introduction of the S360 and has not had one in the more than 50 years since then. Further context, the total value of all computers deployed at the start of the project was only $10B. These were huge. They often occupied a dedicated room. The front panel had 12 switches, just to control the electricity that flowed through them. They had over 250 lights. It was called “System” 360 because it was a system, meaning you could hook disk drives, printers, and other peripherals up to them. It had 16 32 bit registers and four 64 bit floating point registers for the crazy math stuffs. The results were fast, with over 1000 orders in the first month and another 1000 by years end. IBM sales skyrocketed and computers suddenly showing up in businesses large and small. The total inventory of computers in the world jumped to a $24B value in just 5 years. A great example of the impact they had can be found in the computer the show Mad Men featured, where the firm got an S360 and it served as a metaphor for how the times were about to change - the computer was analytical, where Don worked through inspiration. Just think, an interactive graphics display that let business nerds do what only computer nerds could do before. This was the real start to “data driven” decision making. By 1970 IBM had deployed 35k mainframes throughout the US. They spawned enough huge competitors that the big mainframe players were referred to as Snow White and the 7 dwarfs and later just “The Bunch” which consisted of Burroughs, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, and the Univac Division of Sperry Rand. If you remember the earlier episode on Grace Hopper, she spent some time there. Thomas Watson Jr. retired the following year in 1971 after suffering a heart attack, leaving behind one of the greatest legacies of anyone in business. He would serve as an ambassador to Russia from 79 to 81, and remain an avid pilot in retirement. He passed away in 1993. A lot of things sell well. But sales and revenue aren’t the definition that shapes a legacy. The S360 created so many standards and pushed technology forward that the business legacy is almost a derivative of the technical legacy. What standards did the S360 set? Well, the bus was huge. Stndardizing I/O would allow vendors to build expansion and would ultimately become the standard later. The 8-bit byte is still used today and bucked the trend of accessing variable sized arbitrary bit addressing. To speed up larger and larger transactions, the S360 also gave us Byte-addressable memory with 24 bit addressing and 32-bit words. The memory was small and fast with control code stored there permanently, known as microcode memory. This meant you didn’t have to hand wire each memory module into the processor. The control store also lead to emulators, as you could emulate a previous IBM model, the 1401, in the control store. IBM spent $13 M on the patent for the tech that came out of MIT to get access to the best memory on the market. The S360 made permanent store a main-stay. IBM had been using tape storage since 1952. 14 inch disk drives were smaller than 24 inch disk drives used in previous models, had 100x the storage capacity and accessed data 10 times faster. The S360 also brought with it new programming paradigms. We got hexadecimal Floating Point Architectures. These would be important to New Drug Applications to the FDA, weather predicting, geophysics, and graphics databases. We also got Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code or EBCDIC for short is character encoding in the 8th bit. This came from moving punch cards to persistent storage on the computers. That 8th bit was from two zone and number punches on cards which made up two bits and another to indicate a small s or a large S. EBCDIC was not embraced by the rest of the computer hacker culture. One example was: "So the American government went to IBM to come up with an encryption standard, and they came up with… EBCDIC!" ASCII has mostly been accepted as the standard for encoding characters (before and after EBCDIC). Solid Logic Technology (or SLT) also came with the S360. These flip chip-mounted packages contained transistors, diodes and resistors in a ceramic substrate that had sockets on one edge and could be plugged into the backplane of a computer. Think of these as a precursor to the microchip and the death of vacuum tubes. The central processor could run machine language programs. It ran OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System. You could load programs written in COBOL and FORTRAN with many organizations still running code written way back then. The way we saw computers and they way they were made also changed. Architecture vs implementation was another substantial innovation. Before the S360, computers were built for specific use cases. They were good at business and they were good at business or they were good at science. But one system wasn’t typically good at both tasks. In fact, IBM had 7 mainframe lines at this point, sometimes competing with each other. The S360 allowed them to unify that into the size and capacity of a machine rather than the specific use case. We went from: “here’s your scientific mainframe” or “here’s your payroll mainframe” to “here’s your computer”. But the Model 30 was Introduced in 1965, along with 5 other initial models, the 40, 50, 60, 62, and 70. The tasks were not specific to each model and a customer could grow into additional models, or if the needs weren’t growing, could downgrade to a lower model in the planned 5 year obscelence cycle that computers seem to have. Given all of this, the project was huge. So big that it led to Thomas Watson forcing his own brother Dick Watson out of IBM and moving the project to be managed by Fred Brooks, who worked with Chief Architect Gene Amdahl. John Opel managed the launch in 1964. In large part due to his work on the S360 project, Brooks would go on to write a book called The Mythical Man Month, which brought us what’s now referred to as Brooks’ Law, which states that adding additional developers does not speed up a software project, but instead makes it take longer. Amdahl would go on to found his own computer company. In all, there were twenty models of the S360, although only 14 shipped - and IBM had sold 35,000 by 1970. While the 60 in S360 would go on to refer to the decade and the follow-on S370 would define computing in the 70s, the S360 was sold until 1978. With a two-thirds market share came anti-trust cases, which saw software suddenly being sold separately and leasing companies extending that 5 year obscelecence - thus IBM leassors becoming the number one competition. Given just how much happened in the 13 year life of the System/360, even the code endures in some cases. The System Z servers are still compatible with many applications written for the 360. The S360 is iconic. The S360 was bold. It set IBM on a course that would shape their future and the future of the world. But most importantly, before the S360 computers were one thing used for really big jobs - after the S360, they were everywhere and people started to think about business in terms of a new lexicon like “data” and “automation.” It lead to no one ever getting fired for buying IBM and set the IT industry on a course to become what it is today. The revolution was coming no matter what. But not being afraid to refactor everything in such a big, bold demonstration of market dominance made IBM the powerhouse it is even today. So next time you have to refactor something, think of the move you’re making - and ask yourself What Would Watson Do? Or just ask Watson.

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 scraping the surface of cryptography. Cryptography is derived from the Greek words kryptos, which stands for hidden and grafein, which stands for to write. Through history, cryptography has meant the process of concealing the contents of a message from all except those who know the key. Dating back to 1900 BC in Egypt and Julius Caesar using substitution cyphers, encryption used similar techniques for thousands of years, until a little before World War II. Vigenere designed the first known cipher thatused an encryption key in the 16th century. Since then with most encryption, you convert the contents, known as plaintext, into encrypted information that’s otherwise unintelligible, known as cipher text. The cypher is a pair of algorithms - one to encrypt, the other to decrypt. Those processes are done by use of a key. Encryption has been used throughout the ages to hide messages. Thomas Jefferson built a wheel cypher. The order of the disks you put in the wheel was the key and you would provide a message, line the wheels up and it would convert the message into cypher text. You would tell the key to the person on the other end, they would put in the cypher text and out would pop the message. That was 1795 era encryption and is synonymous with what we call symmetrical key cryptography, which was independently invented by Etienne Bazeries and used well into the 1900s by the US Army. The Hebern rotor machine in the 19th century gave us an electro-mechanical version of the wheel cypher and then everything changed in encryption with the introduction of the Enigma Machine, which used different rotors placed into a machine and turned at different speeds based on the settings of those rotors. The innovations that came out of breaking that code and hiding the messages being sent by the Allies kickstarted the modern age of encryption. Most cryptographic techniques rely heavily on the exchange of cryptographic keys. Symmetric-key cryptography refers to encryption methods where both senders and receivers of data share the same key and data is encrypted and decrypted with algorithms based on those keys. The modern study of symmetric-key ciphers revolves around block ciphers and stream ciphers and how these ciphers are applied. Block ciphers take a block of plaintext and a key, then output a block of ciphertext of the same size. DES and AES are block ciphers. AES, also called Rijndael, is a designated cryptographic standard by the US government. AES usually uses a key size of 128, 192 or 256 bits. DES is no longer an approved method of encryption triple-DES, its variant, remains popular. Triple-DES uses three 56-bit DES keys and is used across a wide range of applications from ATM encryption to e-mail privacy and secure remote access. Many other block ciphers have been designed and released, with considerable variation in quality. Stream ciphers create an arbitrarily long stream of key material, which is combined with a plaintext bit by bit or character by character, somewhat like the one-time pad encryption technique. In a stream cipher, the output stream is based on an internal state, which changes as the cipher operates. That state’s change is controlled by the key, and, in some stream ciphers, by the plaintext stream as well. RC4 is an example of a well-known stream cipher. Cryptographic hash functions do not use keys but take data and output a short, fixed length hash in a one-way function. For good hashing algorithms, collisions (two plaintexts which produce the same hash) are extremely difficult to find, although they do happen. Symmetric-key cryptosystems typically use the same key for encryption and decryption. A disadvantage of symmetric ciphers is that a complicated key management system is necessary to use them securely. Each distinct pair of communicating parties must share a different key. The number of keys required increases with the number of network members. This requires very complex key management schemes in large networks. It is also difficult to establish a secret key exchange between two communicating parties when a secure channel doesn’t already exist between them. You can think of modern cryptography in computers as beginning with DES, or the Data Encryption Standard, us a 56-bit symmetric-key algorithm developed by IBM and published in 1975, with some tweaks here and there from the US National Security Agency. In 1977, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman claimed they could build a machine for $20 million dollars that could find a DES key in one day. As computers get faster, the price goes down as does the time to crack the key. Diffie and Hellman are considered the inventors of public-key cryptography, or asymmetric key cryptography, which they proposed in 1976. With public key encryption, two different but mathematically related keys are used: a public key and a private key. A public key system is constructed so that calculation of the private key is computationally infeasible from knowledge of the public key, even though they are necessarily related. Instead, both keys are generated secretly, as an interrelated pair. In public-key cryptosystems, the public key may be freely distributed, while its paired private key must remain secret. The public key is typically used for encryption, while the private or secret key is used for decryption. Diffie and Hellman showed that public-key cryptography was possible by presenting the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. The next year, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman developed the RSA encryption algorithm at MIT and founded RSA Data Security a few years later in 1982. Later, it became publicly known that asymmetric cryptography had been invented by James H. Ellis at GCHQ, a British intelligence organization and that both the Diffie-Hellman and RSA algorithms had been previously developed in 1970 and were initially called “non-secret encryption.” Apparently Ellis got the idea reading a bell labs paper about encrypting voice communication from World War II. Just to connect some dots here, Alan Turing, who broke the Enigma encryption, visited the proposed author of that paper, Shannon, in 1943. This shouldn’t take anything away from Shannon, who was a brilliant mathematical genius in his own right, and got to see Gödel, Einstein, and others at Princeton. Random note: he invented wearables to help people cheat at roulette. Computer nerds have been trying leverage their mad skills to cheat at gambling for a long time. By the way, he also tried to cheat at, er, I mean, program chess very early on, noting that 10 to the 120th power was the game-tree complexity of chess and wrote a paper on it. Of course someone who does those things as a hobby would be widely recognized as the father of informational theory. RSA grew throughout the 80s and 90s and in 1995, they spun off a company called VeriSign, who handled patent agreements for the RSA technology until the patents wore out, er, I mean expired. RSA Security was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2006 for $2.1 billion and was a division of EMC until EMC was acquired by Dell in 2016. They also served as a CA - that business unit was sold in 2010 to Symantec for $1.28B. RSA has made a number of acquisitions and spun other businesses off over the years, helping them get into more biometric encryption options and other businesses. Over time the 56 bit key size of DES was too small and it was followed up by Triple-DES in 1998. And Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, also in 1998. Diffie-Hellman and RSA, in addition to being the first public examples of high quality public-key cryptosystems have been amongst the most widely used. In addition to encryption, public-key cryptography can be used to implement digital signature schemes. A digital signature is somewhat like an ordinary signature; they have the characteristic that they are easy for a user to produce, but difficult for anyone else to forge. Digital signatures can also be permanently tied to the content of the message being signed as they cannot be moved from one document to another as any attempt will be detectable. In digital signature schemes, there are two algorithms: one for signing, in which a secret key is used to process the message (or a hash of the message or both), and one for verification, in which the matching public key is used with the message to check the validity of the signature. RSA and DSA are two of the most popular digital signature schemes. Digital signatures are central to the operation of public key infrastructures and to many network security schemes (SSL/TLS, many VPNs, etc). Digital signatures provide users with the ability to verify the integrity of the message, thus allowing for non-repudiation of the communication. Public-key algorithms are most often based on the computational complexity of hard problems, often from number theory. The hardness of RSA is related to the integer factorization problem, while Diffie-Hellman and DSA are related to the discrete logarithm problem. More recently, elliptic curve cryptography has developed in which security is based on number theoretic problems involving elliptic curves. Because of the complexity of the underlying problems, most public-key algorithms involve operations such as modular multiplication and exponentiation, which are much more computationally expensive than the techniques used in most block ciphers, especially with typical key sizes. As a result, public-key cryptosystems are commonly hybrid systems, in which a fast symmetric-key encryption algorithm is used for the message itself, while the relevant symmetric key is sent with the message, but encrypted using a public-key algorithm. Hybrid signature schemes are often used, in which a cryptographic hash function is computed, and only the resulting hash is digitally signed. OpenSSL is a software library that most applications use to access the various encryption mechanisms supported by the operating systems. OpenSSL supports Diffie-Hellman and various versions of RSA, MD5, AES, Base, sha, DES, cast and rc. OpenSSL allows you to create ciphers, decrypt information and set the various parameters required to encrypt and decrypt data. There are so many of these algorithms because people break them and then a new person has to come along and invent one and then version it, then add more bits to it, etc. At this point, I personally assume that all encryption systems can be broken. This might mean that the system is broken while encrypting, or the algorithm itself is broken once encrypted. A great example would be an accidental programming mistake allowing a password to be put into the password hint rather than in the password. Most flaws aren’t as simple as that. Although Kerckhoffs's principle teaches us that the secrecy of your message should depend on the secrecy of the key, and not on the secrecy of the system used to encrypt the message. Some flaws are with the algorithms themselves, though. At this point most of those are public and security without a password or private key they just take too long to decrypt to be worth anything once decrypted. This doesn’t mean we don’t encrypt things, it just means that in addition to encryption we now add another factor to that security. But we’ll leave the history of two-factor security to another episode. Finally, RSA made a lot of money because they used ciphers that were publicly reviewed and established as a standard. Public review of various technological innovations allows for commentary and making it better. Today, you can trust most encryption systems because due to that process, it costs more to decrypt what you’re sending over the wire than what is being sent is worth. In other words, collaboration trumps secrecy.

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 about the Xerox Alto. Close your eyes and… Wait, don’t close your eyes if you’re driving. Or on a bike. Or boating. Or… Nevermind, don’t close your eyes But do use your imagination, and think of what it would be like if you opened your phone… Also don’t open your phone while driving. But imagine opening your phone and ordering a pizza using a black screen with green text and no pictures. If that were the case, you probably wouldn’t use an app to order a pizza. Without a graphical interface, or GUI, games wouldn’t have such wide appeal. Without a GUI you wouldn’t probably use a computer nearly as much. You might be happier, but we’ll leave that topic to another podcast. Let’s jump in our time machine and head back to 1973. The Allman Brothers stopped drinking mushroom tea long enough to release Ramblin’ Man, Elton John put out Crocodile Rock, both Carpenters were still alive, and Free Bird was released by Lynard Skynyrd. Nixon was the president of the United States, and suspends offensive actions in North Vietnam, 5 days before being sworn into his second term as president. He wouldn’t make it all four years of course because not long after, Watergate broke, and by the end of the year Nixon claimed “I’m not a crook”. The first handheld cell call is made by Martin Cooper, the World Trade Center opens, Secretariat wins the Belmont Stakes, Skylab 3 is launched, OJ was a running back instead of running from the police, being gay was removed from the DSM, and the Endangered Species Act was passed in the US. But many a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox Parc, probably didn’t notice much of this as they were hard at work at doing something many people in Palo Alto talk about these days but rarely do: changing the world. In 1973, Xerox released the Alto, which had the first computer operating system designed from the ground up to support a GUI. It was inspired by the oN-Line System (or NLS for short), which had been designed by Douglas Engelbert of the Stanford Research Institute in the 60s on a DARPA grant. They’d spent a year developing it and that was the day to shine for Doublers Steward, John Ellenby, Bob Nishimura, and Abbey Silverstone. The Alto ran the Alto Executive operating system, had a 2.5 megabyte hard drive, ran with four 74181 MSI chips that ran at a 5.88 MHz clock speed and came with between 96 and 512 kiloBytes of memory. It came with a mouse, which had been designed by Engelbert for NLS. The Alto I ran a pilot of 30 and then an additional 90 were produced and sold before the Alto II was released. Over the course of 10 years, Xerox would sell 2000 more. Some of the programming concepts were borrowed from the Data General Nova, designed by Edson de Castro, a former DEC product manager responsible for the PDP-8. The Alto could run 16 cooperative, prioritized tasks. It was about the size of a mini refrigerator and had a CRTO on a swivel. It also came with an Ethernet connection, a keyboard, a three-button mouse a disk drive, and first a wheel mouse, later followed up with a ball mouse. That monitor was in portrait rather than the common landscape of later computers. You wrote software in BCPL and Mesa. It used raster graphics, came with a document editor, the Laurel email app, and gave us an actual multi-player video game. Oh, and a early graphics editor. And the first versions of Smalltalk - a language we’ll do an upcoming episode on, ran on the Alto. 50 of these were donated to universities around the world in 1978, including Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, inspiring a whole generation of computer scientists. One ended up in the White House. But perhaps the most important of the people that were inspired, was Steve Jobs, when he saw one at Xerox Parc, the inspiration for the first Mac. The sales numbers weren’t off the charts though. Byte magazine said: It is unlikely that a person outside of the computer-science research community will ever be able to buy an Alto. They are not intended for commercial sale, but rather as development tools for Xerox, and so will not be mass-produced. What makes them worthy of mention is the fact that a large number of the personal computers of tomorrow will be designed with knowledge gained from the development of the Alto. The Alto was sold for $32,000 in 1979 money, or well over $100,000 today. So they were correct. $220,000,000 over 10 years is nothing. The Alto then begat the Xerox Star, which in 1981 killed the Alto and sold at half the price. But Xerox was once-bitten, twice shy. They’d introduced a machine to rival the DEC PDP-10 and didn’t want to jump into this weird new PC business too far. If they had wanted to they might have released something somewhere between the Star and the Commodore VIC-20, which ran for about $300. Even after the success of the Apple II, which still paled in comparison to the business Xerox is most famous for: copiers. Imagine what they thought of the IBM PCs and Apple II, when they were a decade ahead of that? I’ve heard may say that with all of this technology being invented at Xerox, that they could have owned the IT industry. Sure, Apple went from $774,000 in 1977 to $118 million in 1980 but then CEO Peter McColough was more concerned about the loss of market share for copiers, which dipped from 65 to 46 percent at the time. Xerox revenues had gone from $1.6 billion dollars to $8 billion in the 70s. And there were 100,000 people working in that group! And in the 90s Xerox stock would later skyrocket up to $250/share! They invented Laser Printing, WYSIWYGs, the GUI, Ethernet, Object Oriented Programming, Ubiquitous computing with the PARCtab, networking over optical cables, data storage, and so so so much more. The interconnected world of today likely wouldn’t be what it is without other people iterating on their contributions, but more specifically likely wouldn’t be what it is if they had hoarded them. They made a modicum of money off most of these - and that money helped to fund further research, like hosting the first live streamed concert. Xerox still rakes in over $10 billion in a year in revenue and unlike many companies that went all-in on PCs or other innovations during the incredible 112 year run of Xerox, they’re still doing pretty well. Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, 10 years after Dell was founded. Computing was changing so fast, who can blame Xerox? IBM was reinvented in the 80s because of the PC boom - but it also almost put them out of business. We’ll certainly cover that in a future episode. I’m glad Xerox is still in business, still making solid products, and still researching all the things! So thank you to everyone at every level of Xerox, for all your organization has contributed over the years, including the Alto, which shaped how computers are used today. And thank YOU patient listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History Of Computing Podcast. We hope 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! Todays episode is about Alan Turing. Turing was an English mathematician, cryptanalyst, logician, and the reason he’s so famous today is probably his work in computer science, being the father of what’s often called artificial intelligence. He built the first true working general-purpose computer, although the first Turning-Complete computer would be the Z3 from Konrad Zuse in 1941. Turning was born in 1912. From a young age, he was kinda’ weird, but really good at numbers and science. This started before he went to school and made for an interesting upbringing. Back then, science wasn’t considered as important as it might be today and he didn’t do well in many subjects in school. But in 1931 he went to King’s college in Cambridge, where by 1935 he was elected a fellow. While there, he reimagined Kurt Gödel's limits of proof and computation to develop a model of computation now common known as the Turning machine, which uses an abstract machine to put symbols on a strip of tape based on some rules. This was the first example of a CPU, or Central Processing Unit. The model was simple and he would improve upon it throughout his career. Turning went off to Princeton from 1936 to 1938, where he was awarded a PhD in math, after having studied lambda calculus with Alonzo Church, cryptanalysis, and built built three of the four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier, or a circuit built using binary adders that could multiply two binary numbers and tinkered with most everything he could get his hands on. To quote Turing: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” He returned to Cambridge in 1939 and then went to Bletchley Park to do his part in the World War II effort. Here, he made five major cryptanalytical advances throughout the war, providing Ultra Intelligence. While at what was called Hut 8 he pwned the Enigma with the bombe, an electro-mechanical device used by the British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages. The bombe discovered the daily settings of the Enigma machines used by the germans, including which set of rotors was used, their starting positions and the message key. This work saved over 10 million lives. Many of his cryptographic breakthroughs are used in modern algorithms today. Turing also went to the US during this time to help the Navy with encryption and while in the states, he went to Bell Labs to help develop secure speech devices. After the war, he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, what is now known as a Universal Turing machine.This computer used stored programs. He couldn’t tell anyone that he’d already done a lot of this because of the Official Secrets Act and the classified nature of his previous work at Bletchley. The computer he designed had a 25 kilobytes of memory and a 1Megahertz processor and cost around 11,000 pounds at the time. In 1952, Turning was rewarded for all of his efforts by being prosecuted for homosexual acts. He chose chemical castration over prison and died two years later in 1954, of suicide. Alan Turing is one of the great minds of computing. Over 50 years later the British government apologized and he was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth. But one of the great minds of the computer era was lost. He gave us the Turing Pattern, Turning Reduction, Turing test, Turing machine and most importantly 10 million souls were not lost. People who had children and grandchildren. Maybe people like my grandfather, or yours. The Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery since 1966 for technical or theoretical contributions in computing. He has more prizes, colleges, and building and even institutes named after him as well. And there’s a movie, called The Imitation Game. And dozens of books detailing his life have been released since the records of his accomplishments during the war were unsealed. Every now and then a great mind comes along. This one was awkward and disheveled most of the time. But he had as big an impact on the advent of the computer age as any other single human. Next time you’re in the elevator at work or talking to your neighbor and they seem a little bit… weird - just think… do they have a similar story. To quote Turing: “Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We hope you can find the cryptographic message in the pod. And if not, maybe it’s time to build your own bo