The History of Computing

Before Facebook, there was MySpace. People logged into a web page every day to write to friends, show off photos, and play music. Some of the things we still do on social networks. The world had been shifting to personal use of computers since the early days when time sharing systems were used in universities. Then came the Bulletin Board Systems of the 80s. But those were somewhat difficult to use and prone to be taken over by people like the ones who went on to found DefCon and hacking collectives. 

Then in the 1990s computers and networks started to get easier to use. We got tools like AOL Instant Messenger and a Microsoft knockoff called Messenger. It’s different ‘cause it doesn’t say Instant. The rise of the World Wide Web meant that people could build their own websites in online communities. We got these online communities like Geocities in 1994, where users could build their own little web page. Some were notes from classes at universities; others how to be better at dressing goth. They tried to sort people by communities they called cities, and then each member got an address number in their community. They grew fast and even went public before being acquired by Yahoo! in 1999. Tripod showed up the year after Geocities came out and got acquired by Yahoo! competitor Lycos in 1998, signaling that portal services in a pre-modern search engine world would be getting into more content to show ads to eyeballs. Angelfire was another that started in 1996 and ended up in the Lycos portfolio as well. More people had more pages and that meant more eyeballs to show ads to. No knowledge of HTML was really required but it did help to know some.

The GeoCities idea about communities was a good one. Turns out people liked hanging out with others like themselves online. People liked reading thoughts and ideas and seeing photos if they ever bothered to finish downloading. But forget to bookmark a page and it could be lost in the cyberbits or whatever happened to pages when we weren’t looking at them. 

The concept of six agrees of Kevin Bacon had been rolling around a bit, so Andrew Weinreich got the idea to do something similar to Angelfire and the next year created SixDegrees.com. It was easy to evolve the concept to bookmark pages by making connections on the site. Except to get people into the site and signing up the model appeared to be the flip side: enter real world friends and family and they were invited to join up. Accepted contacts could then post on each others bulletin boards or send messages to one another. We could also see who our connections were connected to, thus allowing us to say “oh I met that person at a party.” Within a few years the web of contacts model was so successful that it had a few million users and was sold for over $100 million. By 2000 it was shut down but had proven there was a model there that could work.

Xanga came along the next year as a weblog and social networking site but never made it  to the level of success. Classmates.com is still out there as well, having been founded in 1995 to build a web of contacts for finding those friends from high school we lost contact with. Then came Friendster and MySpace in 2003. Friendster came out of the gate faster but faded away quicker. These took the concepts of SixDegrees.com where users invited friends and family but went a little further, allowing people to post on one another boards. 

MySpace went a little further. They used some of the same concepts Geocities used and allowed people to customize their own web pages. When some people learned HTML to edit their pages, they got the bug to create. And so a new generation of web developers was created as people learned to layout pages and do basic web programming in order to embed files, flash content, change backgrounds, and insert little DHTML or even JavaScript snippets.

MySpace was co-founded by Chris DeWolfe, Uber Whitcomb, Josh Berman, and Tom Anderson while working at an incubator or software holding company called eUniverse, which was later renamed to Intermix Media. Brad Greenspan founded that after going to UCLA and then jumping headfirst into the startup universe. He created Entertainment Universe, then raised $2M in capital from Lehman Brothers, another $5M from others and bought a young site called CD Universe, which was selling Compact Disks online. He reverse merged that into an empty public shell company, like a modern SPAC works, and was suddenly the CEO of a public company, expanding into online DVD sales. Remember, these were the days leading up to the dot com bubble. There was a lot of money floating around.

They expanded into dating sites and other membership programs. We’d think of monthly member fees as Monthly Recurring Revenue now, but at the time there was so much free stuff on the internet that those most sites just gave it away and built revenue streams on advertising revenues.

CDs and DVDs have data on them. Data can be shared. Napster proved how lucrative that could be by then. Maybe that was something eUniverse should get into. DeWolfe created a tool called Sitegeist, which was a site with a little dating, a little instant messaging, and a little hyper localized search. It was just a school project but got him thinking. Then, like millions of us were about to do, he met Tom.

Tom was a kid from the valley who’d been tinkering with computers for years, as “Lord Flathead” who’d been busted hacking as a kid before going off to the University of California at Berkeley before coming home to LA to do software QA for an online storage company. The company he worked for got acquired as a depressed asset by eUniverse in 2002, along with Josh Berman. They got matched up with DeWolfe, and saw this crazy Friendster coming out of nowhere and decided to build something like it.

They had a domain they weren’t using called MySpace.com, which they were going to use for another online storage project. So they grabbed Aber Whitcomb, fired up a ColdFusion IDE and given the other properties eUniverse was sitting on had the expertise to get everything up and running fairly quickly. So they launched MySpace internally first and then had little contests to see who could get the most people to sign up. eUniverse had tens of millions of users on the other properties so they emailed them too. Within two years they had 20 million users and were the centerpiece of the eUniverse portfolio. Wanting in on what the young kids were doing these days, Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, or NewsCorp for short, picked up the company for $580 Million in cash. It’s like an episode of Succession, right?

After the acquisition of Myspace by news corporation, Myspace continued its exponential growth. Later in the year, the site started signing up 200,000 new users every day. About a year later, it was registering approx. 320,000 users each day. They localized into different languages and became the biggest website in the US. So they turned on the advertising machine, paying back their purchase price by doing $800 million in revenue back to NewsCorp. 

MySpace had become the first big social media platform that was always free that allowed users to freely express their minds and thoughts with millions of other users, provided they were 13 years or older. They restricted access to profiles of people younger than 16 years in such a way that they couldn’t be viewed by people over 18 years old. That was to keep sexual predators from accessing the profile of a minor. Kids turned out to be a challenge. In 2006, during extensive research the company began detecting and deleting profiles of registered sex offenders which had started showing up on the platform. 

Myspace partnered with Sentinel Tech Holdings Corporation to build a searchable, national database containing names, physical descriptions, and other identity details known as the Sentinel Safe which allowed them to keep track of over half a million registered sex offenders from  U.S. government records. This way they developed the first national database of convicted sex offenders to protect kids on the platform, which they then provided to state attorney generals when the sex offenders tried to use MySpace. 

Facebook was created in 2004 and Twitter was created in 2006. They picked up market share, but MySpace continued to do well in 2007 then not as well in 2008. By 2009, Facebook surpassed Myspace in the number of unique U.S. visitors. Myspace began a rapid decline and lost members fast. Network effects can disappear as quickly as they are created. They kept the site simple and basic; people would log in, make new friends, and share music, photos, and chat with people. Facebook and Twitter constantly introduced new features for users to explore; this kept the existing users on the site and attracted more users. Then social media companies like twitter began to target users on Myspace. 

New and more complicated issues kept coming up. Pages were vandalized, there were phishing attacks, malware got posted to the site, and there were outages as the ColdFusion code had been easy to implement but proved harder to hyperscale. In fact, few had needed to scale a site like MySpace had in that era. Not only were users abandoning the platform, but employees at Myspace started to leave. The changes to MySpace’s executive ranks went down quicky in June 2009 by a layoff of 37.5% of its workforce reducing, the employees went down from 1,600 to 1,000.

Myspace attempted to rebrand itself as primarily a music site to try and gain the audience they lost. They changed the layout to make it look more attractive but continued a quick decline just as Facebook and Twitter were in the midst of a meteoric rise. In 2011 News Corporation sold Myspace to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for around $35 million. Timberlake wanted to make a platform where fans could go and communicate with their favorite entertainers, listen to new music, watch videos, share music, and connect with others who liked the same things. Like Geocities but for music lovers. They never really managed to turn things around.

In 2016, Myspace and its parent company were acquired by Time Inc. and later Time inc. was in turn purchased by the Meredith Corporation. A few months later the news cycle on and about the platform became less positive. A hacker retrieved 427 million Myspace passwords and tried to sell them for $2,800. In 2019, Myspace accidentally deleted over 50 million digital files including photos, songs, and videos during a server migration. Everything up to 2015 was erased. In some ways that’s not the worst thing, considering some of the history left on older profiles.

MySpace continues to push music today, with shows that include original content, like interviews with artists. It’s more of a way for artists to project their craft than a social network. It’s featured content, either sponsored by a label or artist, or from artists so popular or with such an intriguing story their label doesn’t need to promote them. There are elements of a social network left, but nothing like the other social networks of the day. And there’s some beauty in that simplicity.

MySpace was always more than just a social networking website; it was the social network that kickstarted the web 2.0 experience we know today. Tom was everyone who joined the networks first friend. So he became the first major social media star. MySpace became the most visited social networking site in the world, often surpassing Google in number of visitors. Then the network effect moved elsewhere, and those who inherited the users analyzed what caused them to move away from MySpace and either through copying features, out innovating, or acquisition, have managed to remain dominant for over a decade. But there’s always something else right around the corner.

One of the major reasons people abandoned MySpace was to be with those who thought just like them. When Facebook was only available to college kids it had a young appeal. It slowly leaked into the mainstream and my grandmother started typing the word like when I posted pictures of my kid. Because we grew up. They didn’t attempt to monetize too early. They remained stable. They didn’t spend more than they needed to keep the site going, so never lost control to investors. Meanwhile, MySpace grew to well over a thousand people to support a web property that would take a dozen to support today. Facebook may move fast and break things. But they do so because they saw what happens when we don’t.

Theophile Bruguier was a fur trader who moved south out of Monreal after a stint as an attorney in Quebec before his fiancé died. He became friends with Chief War Eagle of the Yankton Sioux. We call him Chief, but he left the Santee rather than have a bloody fight over who would be the next chief. The Santee were being pushed down from the Great Lakes area of Minnesota and Wisconsin by the growing Ojibwe and were pushing further and further south.

There are two main divisions of the Sioux people: the Dakota and the Lakota. There are two main ethnic groups of the Dakota, the Eastern, sometimes called the Santee and the Western, or the Yankton. After the issues with the his native Santee, he was welcomed by the Yankton, where he had two wives and seven children. 

Chief War Eagle then spent time with the white people moving into the area in greater and greater numbers. They even went to war and he acted as a messenger for them in the War of 1812 and then became a messenger for the American Fur Company and a guide along the Missouri. After the war, he was elected a chief and helped negotiate peace treaties. He married two of his daughters off to Theophile Bruguier, who he sailed the Missouri with on trips between St Louis and Fort Pierre in the Dakota territory. 

The place where Theophile settled was where the Big Sioux and Missouri rivers meet. Two water ways for trade made his cabin a perfect place to trade, and the chief died a couple of years later and was buried in what we now call War Eagle Park, a beautiful hike above Sioux City. His city. Around the same time, the Sioux throughout the Minnesota River were moved to South Dakota to live on reservations, having lost their lands and war broke out in the 1860s. 

Back at the Bruguier land, more French moved into the area after Bruguier opened a trading post and was one of the 17 white people that voted in the first Woodbury County election, once Wahkaw County was changed to Woodbury to honor Levi Woodbury, a former Supreme Court Justice. 

Bruguier sold some of his land to Joseph Leonais in 1852. He sold it to a land surveyor, Dr. John Cook, who founded Sioux City in 1854. By 1860, with the westward expansion of the US, the population had already risen to 400. Steamboats, railroads, livestock yards, and by 1880 they were over 7,000 souls, growing to 6 times that by the time Bruguier died in 1896. Seemingly more comfortable with those of the First Nations, his body is interred with Chief War Eagle and his first two wives on the bluffs overlooking Sioux City, totally unrecognizable by then.

The goods this new industry brought had to cross the rivers. Before there were bridges to cross the sometimes angry rivers, ranchers had to ferry cattle across. Sometimes cattle fell off the barges and once they were moving, they couldn’t stop for a single head of cattle. Ted Waitt’s ancestors rescued cattle and sold them, eventually homesteading their own ranch. And that ranch is where Ted started Gateway Computers in 1985 with his friend Mike Hammond. 

Michael Dell started Dell computers in 1984 and grew the company on the backs of a strong mail order business. He went from selling repair services and upgrades to selling full systems. He wasn’t the only one to build a company based on a mail and phone order business model in the 1980s and 1990s. Before the internet that was the most modern way to transact business. 

Ted Waitt went to the University of Iowa in Iowa City a couple of years before Michael Dell went to the University of Texas. He started out in marketing and then spent a couple of years working for a reseller and repair store in Des Moines before he decided to start his own company.

Gateway began life in 1985 as the Texas Instruments PC Network, or TIPC Network for short. They sold stuff for Texas Instruments computers like modems, printers, and other peripherals. The TI-99/4A had been released in 1979 and was discontinued a year before. It was a niche hobbyist market even by then, but the Texas Instruments Personal Computer had shipped in 1983 and came with an 8088 CPU. It was similar to an IBM PC and came with a DOS. But Texas Instruments wasn’t a clone maker and the machines weren’t fully Personal Computer compatible. Instead, there were differences. 

They found some success and made more than $100,000 in just a few months, so brought in Tedd’s brother Norm. Compaq, Dell, and a bunch of other companies were springing up to build computers. Anyone who had sold parts for an 8088 and used DOS on it knew how to build a computer. And after a few years of supplying parts, they had a good idea how to find inexpensive components to build their own computers. They could rescue parts and sell them to meatpacking plants as full-blown computers. They just needed some Intel chips, some boards, which were pretty common by then, some RAM, which was dirt cheap due to a number of foreign companies dumping RAM into the US market.

They built some computers and got up to $1 million in revenue in 1986. Then they became an IBM-compatible personal computer when they found the right mix of parts. It was close to what Texas Instruments sold, but came with a color monitor and two floppy disk drives, which were important in that era before all the computers came with spinning hard drives. Their first computer sold for just under $2,000, which made it half what a Texas Instruments computer cost. They found the same thing that Dell had found: the R&D and marketing overhead at big companies meant they could be more cost-competitive. They couldn’t call the computers a TIPC Network though. Sioux City, Iowa became the Gateway to the Dakotas, and beyond, so they changed their name to Gateway 2000. 

Gateway 2000 then released an 80286, which we lovingly called the 286, in 1988 and finally left the ranch to move into the city. They also put Waitt’s marketing classes to use and slapped a photo of the cows from the ranch in a magazine that said “Computers from Iowa?” and one of the better tactics for long-term loyalty, they gave cash bonuses to employees based on their profits. Within a year, they jumped to $12 million in sales. Then $70 million in 1989, and moved to South Dakota in 1990 to avoid paying state income tax. The cow turned out to be popular, so they kept Holstein cows in their ads and even added them to the box. Everyone knew what those Gateway boxes looked like.

Like Dell, they hired great tech support who seemed to love their jobs at Gateway and would help with any problems people found. They brought in the adults in 1990. Executives from big firms. They had been the first to Mae color monitors standard and now, with the release of Windows they became the first big computer seller to standardize on the platform. 

They released a notebook computer in 1992. The HandBook was their first computer that didn’t do well. It could have been the timing, but in the midst of a recession in a time when most households were getting computers, a low cost computer sold well and sales hit $1 billion. Yet they had trouble scaling to their ship hundreds of computers a day. They opened an office in Ireland and ramped up sales overseas. Then they went public in 1993, raising $150 million. The Wiatt’s hung on to 85% of the company and used the capital raised in the IPO to branch into other areas to complete the Gateway offering: modems, networking equipment, printers, and more support representatives. 

Sales in 1994 hit $2.7 billion a year. They added another support center a few hours down the Missouri River in Kansas City. They opened showrooms. They added a manufacturing plant in Malaysia. They bought Osborne Computer. They opened showrooms and by 1996 Gateway spent tens of millions a year in advertising. The ads worked and they became a household name. They became a top ten company in computing with $5 billion in sales. Dell was the only direct personal computer supplier who was bigger. 

They opened a new sales channel: the World Wide Web. Many still called after they looked up prices at first but by 1997 they did hundreds of millions in sales on the web. By then, Ethernet had become the standard network protocol so they introduced the E-Series, which came with networks. They bought Advanced Logic Research to expand into servers. They launched a dialup provider called gateway.net. 

By the late 1990s, the ocean of companies who sold personal computers was red. Anyone could head down to the local shop, buy some parts, and build their own personal computer. Dell, HP, Compaq, and others dropped their prices and Gateway was left needing a new approach. Three years before Apple opened their first store, Gateway launched Gateway Country, retail stores that sold the computer, the dialup service, and they went big fast, launching 58 stores in 26 states in a short period of time. With 2000 right around the corner, they also changed their name to Gateway, Inc. Price pressure continued to hammer away at them and they couldn’t find talent so they moved to San Diego. 

1999 proved a pivotal year for many in technology. The run-up to the dot com bubble meant new web properties popped up constantly. AOL had more capital than they could spend and invested heavily into Gateway to take over the ISP business, which had grown to over half a million subscribers. They threw in free Internet access with the computers, opened more channels into different sectors, and expanded the retail stores to over 200. Some thought Waitt needed to let go and let someone with more executive experience come in. So long-time AT&T exec Jeff Weitzen, who had joined the company in 1998 took over as CEO. By then Waitt was worth billions and it made sense that maybe he could go run a cattle ranch. By then his former partner Mike Hammond had a little business fixing up cars so why not explore something new. 

Waitt stayed on as chairman as Weitzen reorganized the company. But the prices of computers continued to fall. To keep up, Gateway released the Astro computer in 2000. This was an affordable, small desktop that had a built-in monitor, CPU, and speakers. It ran a 400 MHz Intel Celeron, had a CD-ROM, and a 4.3 GB hard drive, with 64 Megabytes of memory, a floppy, a modem, Windows 98 Second Edition, Norton Anti-Virus, USB ports, and the Microsoft Works Suite. All this came in at $799. Gateway had led the market with Windows and other firsts they jumped on board with. They had been aggressive. The first iMac had been released in 1998 and this seemed like they were following that with a cheaper computer.

Gateway Country stores grew over 400+ stores. But the margins had gotten razor thin. That meant profits were down. Waitt came back to run the company, the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges for fraud against Weitzen, the former controller, and the former CFO, and that raged on for years. In that time, Gateway got into TVs, cameras, MP3 players, and in 2004 acquired eMachines, a rapidly growing economy PC manufacturer. Their CEO, Wayne Inouye then came in to run Gateway. He had been an executive at The Good Guys! and Best Buy before taking the helm of eMachines in 2001, helping them open sales channels in retail stores. But Gateway didn’t get as much a foothold in retail.

That laptop failure from the 1980s stuck with Gateway. They never managed to ship a game-changing laptop. Then the market started to shift to laptops. Other companies left on that market but Gateway never seemed able to ship the right device. They instead branched into consumer electronics. The dot com bubble burst and they never recovered. The financial woes with the SEC hurt trust in the brand. The outsourcing hurt the trust in the brand. The acquisition of a budget manufacturer hurt the brand. Apple managed to open retail stores to great success, while preserving relationships with big box retailers. But Gateway lost that route to market when they opened their own stores. Then Acer acquired Gateway in 2007. They can now be found at Walmart, having been relaunched as a budget brand of Acer, a company who the big American firms once outsourced to, but who now stands on their own two feed as a maker of personal computers.

Microsoft had confusion in the Windows 2000 marketing and disappointment with Millennium Edition, which was built on a kernel that had run its course. It was time to phase out the older 95, 98, and Millennium code. So in 2001, Microsoft introduced Windows NT 5.1, known as Windows XP (eXperience). XP came in a Home or Professional edition. 

Microsoft built a new interface they called Whistler for XP. It was sleeker and took more use of the graphics processors of the day. Jim Allchin was the Vice President in charge of the software group by then and helped spearhead development. XP had even more security options, which were simplified in the home edition. They did a lot of work to improve the compatibility between hardware and software and added the option for fast user switching so users didn’t have to log off completely and close all of their applications when someone else needed to use the computer. They also improved on the digital media experience and added new libraries to incorporate DirectX for various games. 

Professional edition also added options that were more business focused. This included the ability to join a network and Remote Desktop without the need of a third party product to take control of the keyboard, video, and mouse of a remote computer. Users could use their XP Home Edition computer to log into work, if the network administrator could forward the port necessary. XP Professional also came with the ability to support multiple processors, send faxes, an encrypted file system, more granular control of files and other objects (including GPOs), roaming profiles (centrally managed through Active Directory using those GPOs), multiple language support, IntelliMirror (an oft forgotten centralized management solution that included RIS and sysprep for mass deployments), an option to do an Automated System Recovery, or ASR restore of a computer. Professional also came with the ability to act as a web server, not that anyone should run one on a home operating system. XP Professional was also 64-bit given the right processor.

XP Home Edition could be upgraded to from Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Millineum, and XP Professional could be upgraded to from any operating system since Windows 98 was released., including NT 4 and Windows 2000 Professional. And users could upgrade from Home to Professional for an additional $100.  

Microsoft also fixed a few features. One that had plagued users was that they had to gracefully unmount a drive before removing it; Microsoft got in front of this when they removed the warning that a drive was disconnected improperly and had the software take care of that preemptively. They removed some features users didn’t really use like NetMeeting and Phone Dialer and removed some of the themes options. The 3D Maze was also sadly removed. Other options just cleaned up the interface or merged technologies that had become similar, like Deluxe CD player and DVD player were removed in lieu of just using Windows Media Player. And chatty network protocols that caused problems like NetBEUI and AppleTalk were removed from the defaults, as was the legacy Microsoft OS/2 subsystem.

In general, Microsoft moved from two operating system code bases to one. Although with the introduction of Windows CE, they arguably had no net-savings. However, to the consumer and enterprise buyer, it was a simpler licensing scheme. Those enterprise buyers were more and more important to Microsoft. Larger and larger fleets gave them buying power and the line items with resellers showed it with an explosion in the number of options for licensing packs and tiers. But feature-wise Microsoft had spent the Microsoft NT and Windows 2000-era training thousands of engineers on how to manage large fleets of Windows machines as Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSE) and other credentials. Deployments grew and by the time XP was released, Microsoft had the lions’ share of the market for desktop operating systems and productivity apps. XP would only cement that lead and create a generation of systems administrators equipped to manage the platform, who never knew a way other than the Microsoft way.

One step along the path to the MCSE was through servers. For the first couple of years, XP connected to Windows 2000 Servers. Windows Server 2003, which was built on the Windows NT 5.2 kernel, was then released in 2003. Here, we saw Active Directory cement a lead created in 2000 over servers from Novell and other vendors. Server 2003 became the de facto platform for centralized file, print, web, ftp, software  time, DHCP, DNS, event, messeging, and terminal services (or shared Remote Desktop services through Terminal Server). Server 2003 could also be purchased with Exchange 2003. Given the integration with Microsoft Outlook and a number of desktop services, Microsoft Exchange. 

The groupware market in 2003 and the years that followed were dominated by Lotus Notes, Novell’s GroupWise, and Exchange. Microsoft was aggressive. They were aggressive on pricing. They released tools to migrate from Notes to Exchange the week before IBM’s conference. We saw some of the same tactics and some of the same faces that were involved in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer anti-trust suit from the 1990s. The competition to Change never recovered and while Microsoft gained ground in the groupware space through the Exchange Server 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016 eras, by Exchange 2019 over half the mailboxes formerly hosted by on premises Exchange servers had moved to the cloud and predominantly Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud service. Some still used legacy Unix mail services like sendmail or those hosted by third party providers like GoDaddy with their domain or website - but many of those ran on Exchange as well. The only company to put up true competition in the space has been Google.

Other companies had released tools to manage Windows devices en masse. Companies like Altiris sprang out of needs for companies who did third party software testing to manage the state of Windows computers. Microsoft had a product called Systems Management Server but Altiris built a better product, so Microsoft built an even more robust solution called System Center Configuration Management server, or SCCM for short, and within a few years Altiris lost so much business they were acquired by Symantec. Other similar stories played out across other areas where each product competed with other vendors and sometimes market segments - and usually won.

To a large degree this was because of the tight hold Windows had on the market. Microsoft had taken the desktop metaphor and seemed to own the entire stack by the end of the Windows XP era. However, the technology we used was a couple of years after the product management and product development teams started to build it. And by the end of the XP era, Bill Gates had been gone long enough, and many of the early stars that almost by pure will pushed products through development cycles were as well. Microsoft continued to release new versions of the operating systems but XP became one of the biggest competitors to later operating systems rather than other companies. This reluctance to move to Vista and other technologies was the main reason extended support for XP through to 2012, around 11 years after it was released. 

Microsoft Windows 2000 was the successor to Windows NT 4.0, which had been released in 1997. Windows 2000 didn’t have a code name (supposedly because Jim Allchin didn’t like codenames), although its service packs did; Service Pack 1 and Windows 2000 64-bit were codenamed "Asteroid" and "Janus," respectively. 2000 began as NT 5.0 but Microsoft announced the name change in 1998, in a signal with when customer might expect the OS. 

Some of the enhancements were just to match the look and feel of the consumer Windows 98 counterpart. For example, the logo in the boot screens was cleaned up and they added new icons.  Some found Windows 2000 to be more reliable, others claimed it didn’t have enough new features. But what it might have lacked in features from a cursory glance, Windows 2000 made up for in stability, scalability, and reliability. 

This time around, Microsoft had input from some of their larger partners. They released the operating system to partners in 1999, after releasing three release candidates or developer previews earlier that year. They needed to, if only so third parties could understand what items needed to be sold to customers. There were enough editions now, that it wasn’t uncommon for resellers to have to call the licensing desk at a distributor (similar to a wholesaler for packaged goods) in order to figure out what line items the reseller needed to put on a bid, or estimate. 

Reporters hailed it as the most stable product ever produced by Microsoft. It was also the most secure version. 2000 brought Group Policies forward from NT and enhanced what could be controlled from a central system. The old single line domain concept for managing domains was enhanced to become what Microsoft called Active Directory, a modern directory service that located resources in a database and allowed for finely grained controls of those resources. Windows 2000 also introduced NTFS 3, an Encrypted File System that was built on top of layers of APIs, each with their own controls. 

Still, Windows 98 was the most popular operating system in the world by then and it was harder to move people to it than initially expected. Microsoft released Windows 98 Second Edition in 1999 and then Windows Millennium Edition, or Me, in 2000. Millennium was a flop and helped move more people into 2000, even though 2000 was marketed as a business or enterprise operating system. 

Windows 2000 Professional was the workstation workhorse. Active Directory and other server services ran on Windows 2000 Server Edition. They also released Advanced Server and Datacenter Server for even more advanced environments, with Datacenter able to support up to 32 CPUs. Professional borrowed many features from both NT and 98 Second Edition, including the Outlook Express email client, expanded file system support, WebDAV support, Windows Media Player, WDM (Windows Driver Model), the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) for making it easier to manage those GPOs, support for new mass storage devices like Firewire, hibernation and passwords to wake up from hibernation, the System File Checker, new debugging options, better event logs, Windows Desktop Update (which gave us “Patch Tuesday”), a new Windows Installer, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Plug and Play hardware (installing new hardware in Windows NT was a bit more like doing so in Unix than Windows 95), and all the transitions and animations of the Windows shell like an Explorer integrated with Internet Explorer. 

Some of these features were abused. We got Code Red, Nimbda, and other malware that became high profile attacks against vulnerable binaries. These were unprecedented in terms of how quickly a flaw in the code could get abused en masse. Hundreds of thousands of computers could be infected in a matter of days with a well crafted exploit. Even some of the server services were exploited such as the IIS, or Internet Information Services server. Microsoft responded with security bulletins but buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities allows mass infections. So much so that the US and other governments got involved. This wasn’t made any easier by the fact that the source code for parts of 2000 was leaked on the Internet and had been used to help find new exploits.

Yet Windows 2000 was still the most secure operating system Microsoft had put out. Imagine how many viruses and exploits would have appeared on all those computers if it hadn’t of been. And within Microsoft, Windows 2000 was a critical step toward mass adoption of the far more stable, technically sophisticated Windows NT platform. It demonstrated that a technologically powerful Windows operating system could also have a user-friendly interface and multimedia capabilities.

R is the 18th level of the Latin alphabet. It represents the rhotic consonant, or the r sound. It goes back to the Greek Rho, the Phoenician Resh before that and the Egyptian rêš, which is the same name the Egyptians had for head, before that. R appears in about 7 and a half percent of the words in the English dictionary. 

And R is probably the best language out there for programming around various statistical and machine learning tasks. We may use tools like Tensorflow imported to languages like python to prototype but R is incredibly performant for all the maths. And so it has become an essential piece of software for data scientists. 

The R programming language was created in 1993 by two statisticians Robert Gentleman, and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. It has since been ported to practically every operating system and is available at r-project.org. Initially called "S," the name changed to "R" to avoid a trademark issue with a commercial software package that we’ll discuss in a bit. R was primarily written in C but used Fortran and since even R itself. 

And there have been statistical packages since the very first computers were used for math. 

IBM in fact packaged up BMDP when they first started working on the idea at UCLA Health Computing Facility. That was 1957. Then came SPSS out of the University of Chicago in 1968. And the same year, John Sall and others gave us SAS, or Statistical Analysis System) out of North Carolina State University. And those evolved from those early days through into the 80s with the advent of object oriented everything and thus got not only windowing interfaces but also extensibility, code sharing, and as we moved into the 90s, acquisition’s. BMDP was acquired by SPSS who was then acquired by IBM and the products were getting more expensive but not getting a ton of key updates for the same scientific and medical communities.

And so we saw the upstarts in the 80s, Data Desk and JMP and others. Tools built for windowing operating systems and in object oriented languages. We got the ability to interactively manipulate data, zoom in and spin three dimensional representations of data, and all kinds of pretty aspects. But they were not a programmers tool.

S was begun in the seventies at Bell Labs and was supposed to be a statistical MATLAB, a language specifically designed for number crunching. And the statistical techniques were far beyond where SPSS and SAS had stopped. And with the breakup of Ma Bell, parts of Bell became Lucent, which sold S to Insightful Corporation who released S-PLUS and would later get bought by TIBCO. Keep in mind, Bell was testing line quality and statistics and going back to World War II employed some of the top scientists in those fields, ones who would later create large chunks of the quality movement and implementations like Six Sigma. Once S went to a standalone software company basically, it became less about the statistics and more about porting to different computers to make more money. 

Private equity and portfolio conglomerates are, by nature, after improving the multiples on a line of business. But sometimes more statisticians in various feels might feel left behind. And this is where R comes into the picture. R gained popularity among statisticians because it made it easier to write complicated statistical algorithms without learning an entire programming language. Its popularity has grown significantly since then. R has been described as a cross between MATLAB and SPSS, but much faster.

R was initially designed to be a language that could handle statistical analysis and other types of data mining, an offshoot of which we now call machine learning. R is also an open-source language and as with a number of other languages has plenty of packages available through a package repository - which they call CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network). This allows R to be used in fields outside of statistics and data science or to just get new methods to do math that doesn’t belong in the main language. 

There are over 18,000 packages for R. One of the more popular is ggplot2, an open-source data visualization package. data.table is another that performs programmatic data manipulation operations. dplyr provides functions designed to enable data frame manipulation in an intuitive manner. tidyr helps create tidier data. Shiny generates interactive web apps. And there are plenty of packages to make R easier, faster, and more extensible.

By 2015, more than 10 million people used R every month and it’s now the 13th most popular language in use. And the needs have expanded. We can drop r scripts into other programs and tools for processing. And some of the workloads are huge. This led to the development of parallel computing, specifically using MPI (Message Passing Interface). 

R programming is one of the most popular languages used for statistical analysis, statistical graphics generation, and data science projects. There are other languages or tools for specific uses but it’s even started being used in those. 

The latest version, R 4.1.2, was released on 21/11/01. R development, as with most thriving open source solutions, is guided by a group of core developers supported by contributions from the broader community. It became popular because it provides all essential features for data mining and graphics needed for academic research and industry applications and because of the pluggable and robust and versatile nature.

And projects like tensorflow and numpy and sci-kit have evolved for other languages. And there are services from companies like Amazon that can host and process assets from both, both using unstructured databases like NoSQL or using Jupyter notebooks.

A Jupyter Notebook is a JSON document, following a versioned schema that contains an ordered list of input/output cells which can contain code, text (using Markdown), formulas, algorithms, plots and even media like audio or video. Project Jupyter was a spin-off of iPython but the goal was to create a language-agnostic tool where we could execute aspects in Ruby or Haskel or Python or even R. This gives us so many ways to get our data into the notebook, in batches or deep learning environments or whatever pipeline needs to be built based on an organization’s stack. Especially if the notebook has a frontend based on Amazon SageMaker Notebooks, Google's Colaboratory and Microsoft's Azure Notebook.

Think about this. 25% of the languages lack a rhotic consonant. Sometimes it seems like we’ve got languages that do everything or that we’ve built products that do everything. But I bet no matter the industry or focus or sub-specialty, there’s still 25% more automation or instigation into our own data to be done. Because there always will be.

The first operating systems as we might think of them today (or at least anything beyond a basic task manager) shipped in the form of Multics in 1969. Some of the people who worked on that then helped created Unix at Bell Labs in 1971. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Unix flowed to education, research, and corporate environments through minicomputers and many in those environments thought a flavor of BSD, or Berkeley Software Distribution, might become the operating system of choice on microcomputers. But the microcomputer movement had a while other plan if only in spite of the elder minicomputers.

Apple DOS was created in 1978 in a time when most companies who made computers had to mail their own DOS as well, if only so software developers could built disks capable of booting the machines. Microsoft created their Disk Operating System, or MS-DOS, in 1981. They proceeded to Windows 1 to sit on top of MS-DOS in 1985, which was built in Intel’s 8086 assembler and called operating system services via interrupts. That led to poor programmers locking down points in order to access memory addresses and written assuming a single-user operating system.

Then came Windows 2 in 1987, Windows 3 in 1992, and released one of the most anticipated operating systems of all time in 1995 with Windows 95. 95 turned into 98, and then Millineum in 2000. But in the meantime, Microsoft began work on another generation of operating systems based on a fusion of ideas between work they were doing with IBM, work architects had done at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and rethinking all of it with modern foundations of APIs and layers of security sitting atop a kernel.

Microsoft worked on OS/2 with IBM from 1985 to 1989. This was to be the IBM-blessed successor of the personal computer. But IBM was losing control of the PC market with the rise of cloned IBM architectures. IBM was also big, corporate, and the small, fledgeling Microsoft was able to move quicker. Really small companies that find success often don’t mesh well with really big companies that have layers of bureaucracy. The people Microsoft originally worked with were nimble and moved quickly. The ones presiding over the massive sales and go to market efforts and the explosion in engineering team size was back to the old IBM.

OS/2 had APIs for most everything the computer could do. This meant that programmers weren’t just calling assembly any time they wanted and invading whatever memory addresses they wanted. They also wanted preemptive multitasking and threading. And a file system since by then computers had internal hard drives. The Microsoft and IBM relationship fell apart and Microsoft decided to go their own way.

Microsoft realized that DOS was old and building on top of DOS was going to some day be a big, big problem. Windows 3 was closer, as was 95, so they continued on with that plan. But they started something similar to what we’d call a fork of OS/2 today. So Gates went out to recruit the best in the industry. He hired Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment to take on the architecture of the new operating system.

Cutler had worked on the VMS operating system and helped lead efforts for next-generation operating system at DEC that they called MICA. And that moment began the march towards a new operating system called NT, which borrowed much of the best from VMS, Microsoft Windows, and OS/2 - and had little baggage. Microsoft was supposed to make version 3 of OS/2 but NT OS/2 3.0 would become just Windows NT when Microsoft stopped developing on OS/2. It took 12 years, because um, they had a loooooot of customers after the wild success of first Windows 3 and then Windows 95, but eventually Cutler and team’s NT would replace all other operating systems in the family with the release of Windows 2000.

Cutler wanted to escape the confines of what was by then the second largest computing company in the world. Cutler worked on VMS and RSX-12 before he got to Microsoft. There were constant turf battles and arguments about microkernels and system architecture and meetings weren’t always conducive with actually shipping code. So Cutler went somewhere he could. At least, so long as they kept IBM at bay. Cutler brought some of the team from Digital with him and they got to work on that next generation of operating systems in 1988.

They sat down to decide what they wanted to build, using the NS OS/2 operating system they had a starting point. Microsoft had sold Xenix and the team knew about most every operating system on the market at the time. They wanted a multi-user environment like a Unix. They wanted programming APIs, especially for networking, but different than what BSD had. In fact, many of the paths and structures of networking commands in Windows still harken back to emulating those structures.

The system would be slow on the 8086 processor, but ever since the days of Xerox PARC, everyone knew Moore’s Law was real and that the processors would double in speed every other year. Especially since Moore was still at Intel and could make his law remain true with the 286 and 386 chips in the pipeline. They also wanted the operating system to be portable since IBM selected the Intel CPU but there were plenty of other CPU architectures out there as well.

The original name for NT was to be OS/2 3.0. But the IBM and Microsoft relationship fell apart and the two companies took their operating systems in different directions. OS/2 became went the direction of Warp and IBM never recovered. NT went in a direction where some ideas came over from Windows 95 or 3.1 but mostly the team just added layers of APIs and focused on making NT a fully 32-bit version of Windows that could that could be ported to other platforms including ARM, PowerPC, and the DEC Alpha that Cutler had exposure to from his days at Digital.

The name became Windows NT and NT began with version 3, as it was in fact the third installment of OS/2. The team began with Cutler and a few others, grew to eight and by the time it finally shipped as NT 3.1 in 1993 there were a few hundred people working on the project. Where Windows 95 became the mass marketed operating system, NT took lessons learned from the Unix, IBM mainframe, and VMS worlds and packed them into an operating system that could run on a corporate desktop computer, as microcomputers were called by then.

The project cost $150 million, about the same as the first iPhone. It was a rough start. But that core team and those who followed did what Apple couldn’t in a time when a missing modern operating system nearly put Apple out of business. Cutler inspired, good managers drove teams forward, some bad managers left, other bad managers stayed, and in an almost agile development environment they managed to break through the conflicts and ship an operating system that didn’t actually seem like it was built by a committee. Bill Gates knew the market and was patient enough to let NT 3 mature.

They took the parts of OS/2 like LAN Manager. They took parts of Unix like ping. But those were at the application level. The microkernel was the most important part. And that was a small core team, like it always is.

The first version they shipped to the public was Windows NT 3.1. The sales people found it easiest to often say that NT was the business-oriented operating system. Over time, the Windows NT series was slowly enlarged to become the company’s general-purpose OS product line for all PCs, and thus Microsoft abandoned the Windows 9x family, which might or might not have a lot to do with the poor reviews Millennium Edition had.

Other aspects of the application layer the original team didn’t do much with included the GUI, which was much more similar to Windows 3.x. But based on great APIs they were able to move faster than most, especially in that era where Unix was in weird legal territory, changing hands from Bell to Novell, and BSD was also in dubious legal territory. The Linux kernel had been written in 1991 but wasn’t yet a desktop-class operating system. So the remaining choices most business considered were really Mac, which had serious operating system issues at the time and seemed to lack a vision since Steve Jobs left the company, or Windows.

Windows NT 3.5 was introduced in 1994, followed by 3.51 a year later. During those releases they shored up access control lists for files, functions, and services. Services being similar in nearly every way to a process in Unix. It sported a TCP/IP network stack but also NetBIOS for locating computers to establish a share and a file sharing stack in LAN Manager based on the Server Message Block, or SMB protocol that Barry Feigenbaum wrote at IBM in 1983 to turn a DOS computer into a file server. Over the years, Microsoft and 3COM add additional functionality and Microsoft added the full Samba with LDAP out of the University of Michigan as a backend and Kerberos (out of MIT) to provide single sign-on services.

3.51 also brought a lot of user-mode components from Windows 95. That included the Windows 95 common control library, which included the rich edit control, and a number of tools for developers. NT could run DOS software, now they were getting it to run Windows 95 software without sacrificing the security of the operating system where possible. It kinda’ looked like a slightly more boring version of 95. And some of the features were a little harder to use, like configuring a SCSI driver to get a tape drive to work. But they got the ability to run Office 95 and it was the last version that ran the old Program Manager graphical interface.

Cutler had been joined by Moshe Dunie, who led the management side of NT 3.1, through NT 4 and became the VP of the Windows Operating System Division so also had responsibility for Windows 98 and 2000. For perspective, that operating system group grew to include 3,000 badged Microsoft employees and about half that number of contractors. Mark Luovsky and Lou Perazzoli joined from Digital. Jim Alchin came in from Banyan Vines.

Windows NT 4.0 was released in 1996, with a GUI very similar to Windows 95. NT 4 became the workhorse of the field that emerged for large deployments of computers we now refer to as enterprise computing. It didn’t have all the animation-type bells and whistles of 95 but did perform about as well as any operating system could. It had the NT Explorer to browse files, a Start menu, for which many of us just clicked run and types cmd. It had a Windows Desktop Update and a task scheduler. They released a number of features that would take years for other vendors to catch up with. The DCOM, or Distributed Component Object Modeling and Object Linking & Embedding (or OLE) was a core aspect any developer had to learn. The Telephony API (or TAPI) allowed access to the modem. The Microsoft Transaction Server allowed developers to build network applications on their own sockets. The Crypto API allowed developers to encrypt information in their applications. The Microsoft Message Queuing service allowed queuing data transfer between services.

They also built in DirectX support and already had OpenGL support. The Task Manager in NT 4 was like an awesome graphical version of the top command on Unix. And it came with Internet Explorer 2 built in. NT 4 would be followed by a series of service packs for 4 years before the next generation of operating system was ready. That was Windows 5, or more colloquially called Windows 2000.

In those years NT became known as NT Workstation, the server became known as NT Server, they built out Terminal Server Edition in collaboration with Citrix. And across 6 service packs, NT became the standard in enterprise computing. IBM released OS/2 Warp version 4.52 in 2001, but never had even a fraction of the sales Microsoft did. By contrast, NT 5.1 became Windows XP and 6 became Vista in while OS/2 was cancelled in 2005.

Qualcomm is the world's largest fabless semiconductor designer. The name Qualcomm is a mashup of  Quality and Communications and communications has been a hallmark of the company since its founding. They began in satellite communications and today most every smartphone has a Qualcomm chip. The ubiquity of communications in our devices and everyday lives has allowed them a $182 billion market cap as of the time of this writing. 

Qualcomm began with far humbler beginnings. They emerged out of a company called Linkabit in 1985. Linkabit was started by Irwin Jacobs, Leonard Kleinrock, and Andrew Viterbi - all three former graduate students at MIT. 

Viterbi moved to California to take a job with JPL in Pasadena, where he worked on satellites. He then went off to UCLA where he developed what we now call the Viterti algorithm, for encoding and decoding digital communications. Jacobs worked on a book called Principles of Communication Engineering after getting his doctorate at MIT. Jacobs then took a year of leave to work at JPL after he met Viterbi in the early 1960s and the two hit it off. By 1966, Jacobs was a professor at the University of California, San Diego. Kleinrock was at UCLA by then and the three realized they had too many consulting efforts between them, but if they consolidated the request they could pool their resources. Eventually Jacobs and Viterbi left and Kleinrock got busy working on the first ARPANET node when it was installed at UCLA.

Jerry Heller, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, and James Dunn eventually moved into the area to work at Linkabit and by the 1970s Jacobs was back to help design telecommunications for satellites. They’d been working to refine the theories from Claude Shannon’s time at MIT and Bell Labs and were some of the top names in the industry on the work. And the space race needed a lot of this type of work. They did their work on Scientific Data Systems computers in an era before that company was acquired by Xerox. Much as Claude Shannon got started thinking of data loss as it pertains to information theory while trying to send telegraphs over barbed wire, they refined that work thinking about sending images from mars to earth. 

Others from MIT worked on other space projects as a part of missions. Many of those early employees were Viterbi’s PhD students and they were joined by Joseph Odenwalder, who took Viterbi’s decoding work and combined it with a previous dissertation out of MIT when he joined Linkabit. That got used in the Voyager space probes and put Linkabit on the map. They were hiring some of the top talent in digital communications and were able to promote not only being able to work with some of the top minds in the industry but also the fact that they were in beautiful San Diego, which appealed to many in the Boston or MIT communities during harsh winters.

As solid state electronics got cheaper and the number of transistors more densely packed into those wafers, they were able to exploit the ability to make hardware and software for military applications by packing digital signal processors that had previously taken a Sigma from SDS into smaller and smaller form factors, like the Linkabit Microprocessor, which got Viterbi’s algorithm for encoding data into a breadboard and a chip. 

The work continued with defense contractors and suppliers. They built modulation and demodulation for UHF signals for military communications. That evolved into a Command Post Modem/Processor they sold, or CPM/P for short. They made modems for the military in the 1970s, some of which remained in production until the 1990s. And as they turned their way into the 1980s, they had more than $10 million in revenue. 

The UC San Diego program grew in those years, and the Linkabit founders had more and more local talent to choose from. Linkabit developed tools to facilitate encoded communications over commercial satellites as well. They partnered with companies like IBM and developed smaller business units they were able to sell off. They also developed a tool they called VideoCipher to encode video, which HBO and others used to do what we later called scrambling on satellite signals. As we rounded the corner into the 1990s, though, they turned their attention to cellular services with TDMA (Time-Division Multiple Access), an early alternative to CDMA.

Along the way, Linkabit got acquired by a company called MACOM in 1980 for $25 million. The founders liked that the acquirer was a fellow PhD from MIT and Linkabit stayed separate but grew quickly with the products they were introducing. As with most acquisitions, the culture changed and by 1985 the founders were gone. The VideoCipher and other units were sold off, spun off, or people just left and started new companies. Information theory was decades old at this point, plenty of academic papers had been published, and everyone who understood the industry knew that digital telecommunications was about to explode; a perfect storm for defections.

Qualcomm Over the course of the next few years over two dozen companies were born as the alumni left and by 2003, 76 companies were founded by Linkabit alumni, including four who went public. One of the companies that emerged included the Linkabit founders Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi, Begun in 1985, Qualcomm is also based in San Diego. The founders had put information theory into practice at Linkabit and seen that the managers who were great at finance just weren’t inspiring to scientists. 

Qualcomm began with consulting and research, but this time looked for products to take to market. They merged with a company called Omninet and the two released the OmniTRACS satellite communication system for trucking and logistical companies. They landed Schneider National and a few other large customers and grew to over 600 employees in those first five years. It remained a Qualcomm subsidiary until recently. Even with tens of millions in revenue, they operated at a loss while researching what they knew would be the next big thing. 

Code-Division Multiple Acces, or CDMA, is a technology that allows for sending information over multiple channels so users can share not just a single frequency of the radio band, but multiple frequencies without a lot of interference. The original research began all the way back in the 1930s when Dmitry Ageyev in the Soviet Union researched the theory of code division of signals at Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute of Communications. That work and was furthered during World War II by German researchers like Karl Küpfmüller and Americans like Claude Shannon, who focused more on the information theory of communication channels. 

People like Lee Yuk-wing then took the cybernetics work from pioneers like Norbert Weiner and helped connect those with others like Qualcomm’s Jacobs, a student of Yuk-wing’s when he was a professor at MIT. They were already working on CDMA jamming in the early 1950s at MIT’s Lincoln Lab. Another Russian named Leonid Kupriyanovich put the concept of CMDA into practice in the later 1950s so the Soviets could track people using a service they called Altai. That made it perfect for  perfect for tracking trucks and within a few years was released in 1965 as a pre-cellular radiotelephone network that got bridged to standard phone lines.

The Linkabit and then Qualcomm engineers had worked closely with satellite engineers at JPL then Hughes and other defense then commercial contractors. They’d come in contact with work and built their own intellectual property for decades. Bell was working on mobile, or cellular technologies. Ameritech Mobile Communications, or Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) as they were known at the time, launched the first 1G network in 1983 and Vodaphone launched their first service in the UK in 1984. Qualcomm filed their first patent for CDMA the next year. 

That patent is one of the most cited documents in all of technology. Qualcomm worked closely with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US and with industry consortiums, such as the CTIA, or Cellular Telephone Industries Association. Meanwhile Ericsson promoted the TDMA standard as they claimed it was more standard; however, Qualcomm worked on additional patents and got to the point that they licensed their technology to early cell phone providers like Ameritech, who was one of the first to switch from the TDMA standard Ericsson promoted to CDMA. Other carriers switched to CDMA as well, which gave them data to prove their technology worked.

The OmniTRACS service helped with revenue, but they needed more. So they filed for an initial public offering in 1991 and raised over $500 billion in funding between then and 1995 when they sold another round of shares. By then, they had done the work to get CDMA encoding on a chip and it was time to go to the mass market. They made double what they raised back in just the first two years, reaching over $800 million in revenue in 1996. 

Qualcomm and Cell Phones One of the reasons Qualcomm was able to raise so much money in two substantial rounds of public funding is that the test demonstrations were going so well. They deployed CDMA in San Diego, New York, Honk Kong, Los Angeles, and within just a few years had over a dozen carriers running substantial tests. The CTIA supported CDMA as a standard in 1993 and by 1995 they went from tests to commercial networks. 

The standard grew in adoption from there. South Korea standardized on CDMA between 1993 to 116. The CDMA standard was embraced by Primeco in 1995, who used the 1900 MHz PCS band. This was a joint venture between a number of vendors including two former regional AT&T spin-offs from before the breakup of AT&T and represented interests from Cox Communications, Sprint, and turned out to be a large undertaking. It was also the largest cellular launch with services going live in 19 cities and the first phones were from a joint venture between Qualcomm and Sony. Most of PrimeCo’s assets were later merged with AirTouch Cellular and the Bell Atlantic Mobile to form what we now know as Verizon Wireless. 

Along the way, there were a few barriers to mass proliferation of the Qualcomm CDMA standards. One is that they made phones. The Qualcomm Q cost them a lot to manufacture and it was a market with a lot of competition who had cheaper manufacturing ecosystems. So Qualcomm sold the manufacturing business to Kyocera, who continued to license Qualcomm chips. Now they could shift all of their focus on encoding bits of data to be carried over multiple radio channels to do their part in paving the way for 2G and 3G networks with the chips that went into most phones of the era. 

Qualcomm couldn’t have built out a mass manufacturing ecosystem to supply the world with every phone needed in the 2G and 3G era. Nor could they make the chips that went in those phones. The mid and late 1990s saw them outsource then just license their patents and know-how to other companies. A quarter of a billion 3G subscribers across over a hundred carriers in dozens of countries. They got in front of what came after CDMA and worked on multiple other standards, including OFDMA, or Orthogonal frequency-Division Multiple Access. For those they developed the Qualcomm Flarion Flash-OFDM and 3GPP 5G NR, or New Radio. And of course a boatload of other innovative technologies and chips. Thus paving the way to have made Qualcomm instrumental in 5G and beyond. 

This was really made possible by this hyper-specialization. Many of the same people who developed the encoding technology for the Voyager satellite decades prior helped pave the way for the mobile revolution. They ventured into manufacturing but as with many of the designers of technology and chips, chose to license the technology in massive cross-licensing deals. These deals are so big Apple sued Qualcomm recently for a billion in missed rebates. But there were changes happening in the technology industry that would shake up those licensing deals. 

Broadcom was growing into a behemoth. Many of their designs sent from stand-alone chips to being a small part of a SoC, or system on a chip. Suddenly, cross-licensing the ARM gave Qualcomm the ability to make full SoCs.  Snapdragon has been the moniker of the current line of SoCs since 2007. Qualcomm has an ARM Architectural License and uses the ARM instruction set to create their own CPUs. The most recent incarnation is known as Krait. They also create their own Graphics Processor (GPU) and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) known as Adreno and Hexagon. They recently acquired Arteris' technology and engineering group, and they used Arteris' Network on Chip (NoC) technology.

Snapdragon chips can be found in the Samsung Galaxy, Vivo, Asus, and Xiaomi phones. Apple designs their own chips that are based on the ARM architecture, so in some ways compete with the Snapdragon, but still use Qualcomm modems like every other SoC. Qualcomm also bought a new patent portfolio from HP, including the Palm patents and others, so who knows what we’ll find in the next chips - maybe a chip in a stylus. 

Their slogan is "enabling the wireless industry," and they’ve certainly done that. From satellite communications that required a computer the size of a few refrigerators to battlefield communications to shipping trucks with tracking systems to cell towers, and now the full processor on a cell phone. They’ve been with us since the beginning of the mobile era and one has to wonder if the next few generations of mobile technology will involve satellites, so if Qualcomm will end up right back where they began: encoding bits of information theory into silicon.

The Go Programming Language

Go is an open-source programming language with influences from Limbo, C, APL, Modular, Oberon, Pascal, Alex, Erlang, and most importantly, C. While relatively young compared to many languages, there are over 365,000 repositories of Go projects on Github alone. There are a few reason it gained popularity so quickly: it’s fast and efficient in the right hands, simple to pick up, doesn’t have some of the baggage of some more mature languages, and the name Ken Thompson.

The seamless way we can make calls from Go into C and the fact that Ken Thompson was one of the parties responsible for C, makes it seem in part like a modern web enabled language that can stretch between the tasks C is still used for all the way to playing fart sounds in an app. And it didn’t hurt that co-author Rob Pike had whelped write books, co-created UTF-8, and was part of the distributed operating system Plan 9  team at Bell Labs and had worked on the Limbo programming language there. 

And Robert Griesemer was another co-author. He’d begun his career studying under Niklaus Wirth, the greater of Pascal, Modula, and Oberon. So it’s no surprise that he’d go on to write compilers and design languages. Before go, he’d worked on the V8 JavaScript engine at Google and a compiler for the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine.

So our intrepid heroes assembled (pun intended) at Google in 2009. But why? Friends don’t let friends write in C. Thompson had done something amazing for the world with C. But that was going on 50 years ago. And others had picked up the mantle with C++. But there were shortcomings the team wanted to address. And so Go has the ability to concatenate string variables without using a preprocessor, has many similarities to languages like BASIC from the Limbo influences, but the most impressive feature about this programming language is its support for concurrent execution. And probably the best garbage collection facility I’ve ever seen. 

The first version of the language wasn't released to the public and wouldn’t be for a few years. The initial compiler was written in C but over time they got to where it can be self-hosted, which is to say that Go is compiled in Go. 

Go is a compiled language that can run on a command line, in a browser, on the server, or even be used to compile itself. Go compiles fast and has no global variables to clutter memory. This simplicity makes it easy to read through Go code line by line without consulting any parsing tools or syntax charts. Let’s look at a quick Hello World:

// A basic Go program that demonstrates "Hello World!"
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello World!")
}

The output would be a simple Hello World!

Fairly straight forward but the power gets into more of the scripting structures - especially given that a micro service is just a lot of little functional scripts. The language itself has no connection to any other functional programming languages and does not include support for object orientation or reflection. The language consists of two parts: a parser (which processes an input file) and a bytecode interpreter, which translates all source code into machine code. Consequently, Go programs tend to compile quickly and run very efficiently because they are mainly independent of the runtime environment and can execute directly on the hardware without being interpreted by some sort of virtual machine first. Additionally, there is no need for a separate interpreter during execution since everything runs natively.

The libraries and sources built using the Go programming language provide developers with a straightforward, safe, and extensibility system to build on. We have things like Go Kit, GORM, cli, Vegeta, fuzzy, Authboss, Image, Time, gg, and mgo. These can basically provide pre-built functions and APIs to hook into any old type of service or give a number of things for free.

Go was well designed from the outset and while it’s evolved over the years, it hasn’t changed as much as many other languages. with the latest release being Go 1.17. 1.1 came just a couple of months after the initial release to increase how much memory could be used on 64 bit chips by about 10-fold, add detection for race conditions, added the uint for 64 bit integers. Oh and fixed a couple of issues in the compiler. 1.2 also came in 2013 and tweaked how slicing of arrays worked in a really elegant way (almost ruby-like) and allowed developers to call the runtime scheduler for non-inline calls. And added a thread limit, like the ulimit a bash would have, for 10,000 threads. And they doubled the grouting minimum size of the stack. 

Then the changes got smaller. This happens as every language gets more popular. The more people use it, the more havoc the developers cause when they make breaking changes. Bigger changes are contiguous models of grouting stacks in 1.3, the addition of internal packages in 1.4, a redesigned garbage collector in 1.5 when Go was moved away from C and implemented solely in Go and assembler. And 17 releases later, it’s more popular than ever. While C remains the most popular language today, Go is hovering in the top 10. Imagine, one day saying let’s build a better language for concurrent programming. And then viola; hundreds of thousands of people are using it. 

Programming was once all about math. And life was good. Then came strings, or those icky non-numbery things. Then we had to process those strings. And much of that is looking for patterns that wouldn’t be a need with integers, or numbers. For example, a space in a string of text. Let’s say we want to print hello world to the screen in bash. That would be the echo command, followed by “Hello World!” Now let’s say we ran that without the quotes then it would simply echo out the word Hello to the screen, given that the interpreter saw the space and ended the command, or looked for the next operator or verb according to which command is being used.

Unix was started in 1969 at Bell Labs. Part of that work was The Thompson shell, the first Unix shell, which shipped in 1971. And C was written in 1972. These make up the ancestral underpinnings of the modern Linux, BSD, Android, Chrome, iPhone, and Mac operating systems.

A lot of the work the team at Bell Labs was doing was shifting from pure statistical and mathematical operations to connect phones and do R&D faster to more general computing applications. Those meant going from math to those annoying stringy things. Unix was an early operating system and that shell gave them new abilities to interact with the computer. People called files funny things. There was text in those files. And so text manipulation became a thing.

Lee McMahon developed sed in 1974, which was great for finding patterns and doing basic substitutions. Another team  at Bell Labs that included Finnish programmer Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan had more advanced needs. Take their last name initials and we get awk. Awk is a programming language they developed in 1977 for data processing, or more specifically for text manipulation. Marc Rochkind had been working on a version management tool for code at Bell and that involved some text manipulation, as well as a good starting point for awk. 

It’s meant to be concise and given some input, produce the desired output. Nice, short, and efficient scripting language to help people that didn’t need to go out and learn C to do some basic tasks. AWK is a programming language with its own interpreter, so no need to compile to run AWK scripts as executable programs. 

Sed and awk are both written to be used as one0line programs, or more if needed. But building in an implicit loops and implicit variables made it simple to build short but power regular expressions. Think of awk as a pair of objects. The first is a pattern followed by an action to take in curly brackets. It can be dangerous to call if the pattern is too wide open.; especially when piping information For example,  ls -al at the root of a volume and piping that to awk $1 or some other position and then piping that into xargs to rm and a systems administrator could have a really rough day. Those $1, $2, and so-on represent the positions of words. So could be directories. 

Think about this, though. In a world before relational databases, when we were looking to query the 3rd column in a file with information separated by some delimiter, piping those positions represented a simple way to effectively join tables of information into a text file or screen output. Or to find files on a computer that match a pattern for whatever reason. 

Awk began powerful. Over time, improvements have enabled it to be used in increasingly  complicated scenarios. Especially when it comes to pattern matching with regular expressions. Various coding styles for input and output have been added as well, which can be changed depending on the need at hand. 

Awk is also important because it influenced other languages. After becoming part of the IEEE Standard 1003.1, it is now a part of the POSIX standard. And after a few years, Larry Wall came up with some improvements, and along came Perl. But the awk syntax has always been the most succinct and useable regular expression engines. Part of that is the wildcard, piping, and file redirection techniques borrowed from the original shells.

The AWK creators wrote a book called The AWK Programming Language for Addison-Wesley in 1988. Aho would go on to develop influential algorithms, write compilers, and write books (some of which were about compilers). Weinberger continued to do work at Bell before becoming the Chief Technology Officer of Hedge Fund Renaissance Technologies with former code breaker and mathematician James Simon and Robert Mercer. His face led to much love from his coworkers at Bell during the advent of digital photography and hopefully some day we’ll see it on the Google Search page, given he now works there. 

Brian Kernighan was a contributor to the early Multics then Unix work, as well as C. In fact, an important C implementation, K&R C, stands for Kernighan and Ritchie C. He coauthored The C Programming Language ands written a number of other books, most recently on the Go Programming Language. He also wrote a number of influential algorithms, as well as some other programming languages, including AMPL. His 1978 description of how to manage memory when working with those pesky strings we discussed earlier went on to give us the Hello World example we use for pretty much all introductions to programming languages today. He worked on ARPA projects at Stanford, helped with emacs, and now teaches computer science at Princeton, where he can help to shape the minds of future generations of programming languages and their creators.