The History of Computing

One of my first jobs out of college was ripping Banyan VINES out of a company and replacing it with LAN Manager. Banyan VINES was a network operating system for Unix systems. It came along in 1984. This was a time when minicomputers running Unix were running at most every University and when Unix offered far more features that the alternatives.

Sharing files was as old as the Internet. Telnet was created in 1969. FTP came along in 1971. SMB in 1983. Networking computers together had evolved from just the ARPANET to local protocols like ALOHAnet, which inspired Bob Metcalfe to start work on the PARC Universal Packet protocol with David Boggs, which evolved into the Xerox Network Systems, or XNS, suite of networking protocols that were developed to network the Xerox Alto. Along the way the two of them co-invented Ethernet. But there were developments happening in various locations in silos. For example, TCP was more of an ARPANET then NSFNET project so wasn’t used for computers on their own networks to communicate yet.

Data General was founded in 1968 when Edson de Castro, the project manager for the PDP-8 at Digital Equipment Corporation, grew frustrated that the PDP wasn’t evolving fast enough. He, Henry Burkhardt, and Richard Sogge of Digital would be joined by Herbert Richman, who did sales for Fairchild Semiconductor. They were proud of the PDP-8. It was a beautiful machine. But they wanted to go even further. And they didn’t feel like they could do so at Digital. A few computers later,

Within a year, they shipped the next generation machine, which they called the Nova. They released more computers but then came the explosion of computers that was the personal computing market. Microcomputers showed up in offices around the world and on multiple desks. And it didn’t take long before people started wondering if it wouldn’t be faster to run a cable between computers than it was to save a file to a floppy and get on an elevator.

By the 1970s, Data General had been writing software for customers, mostly for the rising tide of UNIX System V implementations. But just giving customers a TCP/IP stack or an application that could open a socket over an X.25 network, which was later replaced with Frame Relay networks run by phone systems and for legacy support on those X.25 was streamed over TCP/IP. Some of the people from those projects at Data General saw an opportunity to build a company that focused on a common need, moving files back and forth between the microcomputers that were also being connected to these networks.

David Mahoney was a manager at Data General who saw what customers were asking for. And he saw an increasing under of those microcomputers needed a few common services to connect to. So he left to form Banyan Systems in 1983, bringing Anand Jagannathan and Larry Floryan with him. They built Banyan VINES (Virtual Integrated NEtwork Service) in 1984, releasing version 1. Their client software could run on DOS and connect to X.25, Token Ring (which IBM introduced in 1984), or the Ethernet networks Bob Metcalfe from Xerox and then 3Com was a proponent of. After all, much of their work resembled the Xerox Network Systems protocols, which Metcalfe had helped develop.

They used a 32-bit address. They developed an Address Resolution Protocol (or ARP) and Routing Table Protocol (RTP) that used tables on a server. And they created a file services application, print services application, and directory service they called StreetTalk. To help, they brought in Jim Allchin, who eventually did much of the heavy lifting. It was similar enough to TCP/IP, but different. Yet as TCP/IP became the standard, they added that at a cost.

The whole thing came in at $17,000 and ran on less bandwidth than other services, and so they won a few contracts with the US State Deparment, US Marine Corps, and other government agencies. Many embassies used 300 baud phone lines with older modems and the new VINES service allowed them to do file sharing, print sharing, and even instant messaging throughout the late 80s and early 90s. The Marine Corp used it during the Gulf War and in an early form of a buying tornado, they went public in 1992, raising $28 million through NASDAQ.

They grew to 410 employees and peaked at around $75 million in sales, spread across 7000 customers. They’d grown through word of mouth and other companies with strong marketing and sales arms were waiting in the wings. Novel was founded in 1983 in Utah and they developed the IPX network protocol. Netware would eventually become one of the most dominant network operating systems for Windows 3 and then Windows 95 computers.

Yet, with incumbents like Banyan VINES and Novel Netware, this is another one of those times when Microsoft saw an opening for something better and just willed it into existence. And the story is similar to that of dozens of other companies including Novell, Lotus, VisiCalc, Netscape, Digital Research, and the list goes on and on and on.

This kept happening because of a number of reasons. The field of computing had been comprised of former academics, many of whom weren’t aggressive in business. Microsoft ended up owning the operating system and so had selling power when it came to cornering adjacent markets because they could provide the cleanest possible user experience. People seemed to underestimate Microsoft until it was too late. Inertia. Oh, and Microsoft could outspend on top talent and offer them the biggest impact for their work. Whatever the motivators, Microsoft won in nearly every nook and cranny in the IT field that they pursued for decades.

The damaging part for Banyan was when they teamed up with IBM to ship LAN Manager, which ultimately shipped under the name of each company. Microsoft ended up recruiting Jim Allchin away and with network interface cards falling below $1,000 it became clear that the local area network was really just in its infancy. He inherited LAN Manager and then NT from Dave Cutler and the next thing we knew, Windows NT Server was born, complete with file services, print services, and a domain, which wasn’t a fully qualified domain name until the release of Active Directory. Microsoft added Windsock in 1993 and released their own protocols. They supported protocols like IPX/SPX and DECnet but slowly moved customers to their own protocols.

Banyan released the last version of Banyan VINES, 7.0, in 1997. StreetTalk eventually became an NT to LDAP bridge before being cancelled in the end. The dot com bubble was firmly here, though, so all was not lost. They changed their name in 1999 to ePresence, shifting their focus to identity management and security, officially pulling out of the VINES market. But the dot com bubble burst, so they were acquired in 2003 by Unisys.

There were other companies in different networking niches along the way. Phil Karn wrote KA9Q NOS to connect CP/M and then DOS to TCP/IP in 1985. He wrote it on a Xerox 820, but by then Xerox was putting Zilog chips in computers and running CP/M, seemingly with little of the flair the Alto could have had. But with KA9Q NOS any of the personal computers on the market could get on the Internet and that software helped host many a commercial dialup connection and would go on to be used for years in small embedded devices that needed IP connectivity. Those turned out to be markets overtaken by Banyan who was overtaken by Novel, who was overtaken by Microsoft when they added WinSock.

There are a few things to take away from this journey. The first is that when IBM and Microsoft team up to develop a competing product, it’s time to pivot when there’s plenty of money left in the bank. The second is that there was an era of closed systems that was short lived when vendors wanted to increasingly embrace open standards. Open standards like TCP/IP. We also want to keep our most talented team in place. Jim Allchin was responsible for those initial Windows Server implementations. Then SQL Server. He was the kind of person who’s a game changer on a team. We also don’t want to pivot to the new hotness because it’s the new hotness. Customers pay vendors to solve problems. Putting an e in front of the name of a company seemed really cool in 1998. But surveying customers and thinking more deeply about problems they face - that’s where magic can happen. Provided we have the right talent to make it happen.

Our last episode was on Project MAC, a Cold War-era project sponsored by ARPA. That led to many questions like what led to the Cold War and just what was the Cold War. We'll dig into that today.

The Cold War was a period between 1946, in the days after World War II, and 1991, when the United States and western allies were engaged in a technical time of peace that was actually an aggressive time of arms buildup and proxy wars. Technology often moves quickly when nations or empires are at war. In many ways, the Cold War gave us the very thought of interactive computing and networking, so is responsible for the acceleration towards our modern digital lives.

And while I’ve never seen it references as such, this was more of a continuation of wars between the former British empire and the Imperialistic Russian empires. These make up two or the three largest empires the world has ever seen and a rare pair of empires that were active at the same time. 

And the third, well, we’ll get to the Mongols in this story as well. These were larger than the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, or any of the Chinese dynasties. In fact, the British Empire that reached its peak in 1920 was 7 times larger than the land controlled by the Romans, clocking in at 13.7 million square miles. The Russian Empire was 8.8 million square miles. Combined the two held nearly half the world. And their legacies live on in trade empires, in some cases run by the same families that helped fun the previous expansions. 

But the Russians and British were on a collision course going back to a time when their roots were not as different as one might think. They were both known to the Romans. But yet they both became feudal powers with lineages of rulers going back to Vikings.

We know the Romans battled the Celts, but they also knew of a place that Ptolemy called Sarmatia Europea in around 150AD, where a man named Rurik settle far later. He was a Varangian prince, which is the name Romans gave to Vikings from the area we now call Sweden. The 9th to 11th century saw a number o these warrior chiefs flow down rivers throughout the Baltics and modern Russia in search of riches from the dwindling Roman vestiges of empire. Some returned home to Sweden; others conquered and settled. They rowed down the rivers: the Volga, the Volkhov, the Dvina, and the networks of rivers that flow between one another, all the way down the Dnieper river, through the Slavic tripes Ptolemy described which by then had developed into city-states, such as Kiev, past the Romanians and Bulgers and to the second Rome, or Constantinople. 

The Viking ships rowed down these rivers. They pillaged, conquered, and sometimes settled. The term for rowers was Rus. Some Viking chiefs set up their own city-states in and around the lands. Some when their lands back home were taken while they were off on long campaigns. Charlemagne conquered modern day France and much of Germany, from The Atlantic all the way down into the Italian peninsula, north into Jutland, and east to the border with the Slavic tribes. He weakened many, upsetting the balance of power in the area. Or perhaps there was never a balance of power. 

Empires such as the Scythians and Sarmatians and various Turkic or Iranian powers had come and gone and each in their wake crossing the vast and harsh lands found only what Homer said of the area all the way back in the 8th century BCE, that the land was deprived of sunshine. The Romans never pushed up so far into the interior of the steppes as the were busy with more fertile farming grounds. But as the Roman Empire fell and the Byzantines flourished, the Vikings traded with them and even took their turn trying to loot Constantinople. And Frankish Paris. And again, settled in the Slavic lands, marrying into cultures and DNA. 

The Rus Rome retreated from lands as her generals were defeated. The Merovingian dynasty rose in the 5th century with the defeat of Syagrius, the last Roman general Gaul and lasted until a family of advisors slowly took control of running the country, transitioning to the Carolingian Empire, of which Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, as he was crowned, was the most famous. He conquered and grew the empire. 

Charlemagne knew the empire had outgrown what one person could rule with the technology of the era, so it was split into three, which his son passed to his grandsons. And so the Carolingian empire had made the Eastern Slavs into tributaries of the Franks. There were hostilities but by the Treaty of Mersen in 870 the split of the empire generally looked like the borders of northern Italy, France, and Germany - although Germany also included Austria but not yet Bohemia. It split and re-merged and smaller boundary changes happened but that left the Slavs aware of these larger empires.

The Slavic peoples grew and mixed with people from the Steppes and Vikings. The Viking chiefs were always looking for new extensions to their trade networks. Trade was good. Looting was good. Looting and getting trade concessions to stop looting those already looted was better. The networks grew. One of those Vikings was Rurik. Possibly Danish Rorik, a well documented ally who tended to play all sides of the Carolingians and a well respected raider and military mind. 

Rurik was brought in as the first Viking, or rower, or Rus, ruler of the important trade city that would be known as New City, or Novgorod. Humans had settled in Kiev since the Stone Age and then by Polans before another prince Kyi took over and then Rurik’s successor Oleg took Smolensk and Lyubech. Oleg extended the land of Rus down the trading routes, and conquered Kiev. Now, they had a larger capital and were the Kievan Rus. 

Rurik’s son Igor took over after Oleg and centralized power in Kiev. He took tribute from Constantinople after he attacked, plunder Arab lands off the Caspian Sea, and was killed overtaxing vassal states in his territory. His son Sviatoslav the Brave then conquered the Alans and through other raiding helped cause the collapse of the Kazaria and Bulgarian empires. They expanded throughout the Volga River valley, then to the Balkans, and up the Pontic Steppe, and quickly became the largest empire in Europe of the day. His son Vladimir the Great expanded again, with he empire extending from the Baltics to Belarus to the Baltics and converted to Christianity, thus Christianizing the lands he ruled. 

He began marrying and integrating into the Christian monarchies, which his son continued. Yaroslov the Wise married the daughter of the King of Sweden who gave him the area around modern-day Leningrad. He then captured Estonia in 1030, and as with others in the Rurikid dynasty as they were now known, made treaties with others and then  pillaged more Byzantine treasures. He married one daughter to the King of Norway, another to the King of Hungary, another to the King of the Franks, and another to Edward the Exile of England, and thus was the grandfather of Edgar the Aetheling, who later became a king of England. 

The Mongols The next couple of centuries saw the rise of Feudalism and the descendants of Rurik fight amongst each other. The various principalities were, as with much of Europe during the Middle Ages, semi-independent duchies, similar to city-states. Kiev became one of the many and around the mid 1100s Yaroslav the Wise’s great-grandson, Yuri Dolgoruki built a number of new villages and principalities, including one along the Moskva river they called Moscow. They built a keep there, which the Rus called kremlins. 

The walls of those keeps didn’t keep the Mongols out. They arrived in 1237. They moved the capital to Moscow and Yaroslav II, Yuri’s grandson, was poisoned in the court of Ghengis Khan’s grandson Batu. The Mongols ruled, sometimes through the descendants of Rurik, sometimes disposing of them and picking a new one, for 200 years. This is known as the time of the “Mongol yoke.” 

One of those princes the Mongols let rule was Ivan I of Moscow, who helped them put down a revolt in a rival area in the 1300s. The Mongols trusted Moscow after that, and so we see a migration of rulers of the land up into Moscow. The Golden Horde, like the Viking  Danes and Swedes settled in some lands. Kublai Khan made himself ruler of China. Khanates splintered off to form the ruling factions of weaker lands, such as modern India and Iran - who were once the cradle of civilization. Those became the Mughals dynasties as they Muslimized and moved south. And so the Golden Horde became the Great Horde.

Ivan the Great expanded the Muscovite sphere of influence, taking Novgorod, Rostov, Tver, Vyatka, and up into the land of the Finns. They were finally strong enough to stand up to the Tatars as they called their Mongol overlords and made a Great Stand on the Ugra River. And summoning a great army simply frightened the Mongol Tatars off. Turns out they were going through their own power struggles between princes of their realm and Akhmed was assassinated the next year, with his successor becoming Sheikh instead of Khan.

Ivan’s grandson, Ivan the Terrible expanded the country even further. He made deals with various Khans and then conquered others, pushing east to conquer the Khanate of Sibiu and so conquered Siberia in the 1580s. The empire then stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. 

He had a son who didn’t have any heirs and so was the last in the Rurikid dynasty. But Ivan the Terrible had married Anastasia Romanov, who when he crowned himself Caesar, or Tsar as they called it, made her Tsaritsa. And so the Romanov’s came to power in 1596 and following the rule of Peter the Great from 1672 to 1725, brought the Enlightenment to Russia. He started the process of industrialization, built a new capital he called St Petersburg, built a navy, made peace with the Polish king, then Ottoman king, and so took control of the Baltics, where the Swedes had taken control of on and off since the time of Rurik. 

Russian Empire Thus began the expansion as the Russian Empire. They used an alliance with Denmark-Norway and chased the Swedes through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, unseating the Polish king along the way. He probably should not have allied with them. They moved back into Finland, took the Baltics so modern Latvia and Estonia, and pushed all the way across the Eurasian content across the frozen tundra and into Alaska. 

Catherine the Great took power in 1762 and ignited a golden age. She took Belarus, parts of Mongolia, parts of modern day Georgia, overtook the Crimean Khanate, and modern day Azerbaijan. and during her reign founded Odessa, Sevastopol and other cities. She modernized the country like Peter and oversaw nearly constant rebellions in the empire. And her three or four children went on to fill the courts of Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and the Netherlands. She set up a national network of schools, with teachings from Russian and western philosophers like John Locke. She collected vast amounts of art, including many from China. She set up a banking system and issued paper money. She also started the process to bring about the end of serfdom. Even though between her and the country she owned 3.3 million herself. 

She planned on invading the Khanate of Persia, but passed away before her army got there. Her son Paul halted expansion. And probably just in time. Her grandson Alexander I supported other imperial powers against Napoleon and so had to deal with the biggest invasion Russia had seen. Napoleon moved in with his grand army of half a million troops. The Russians used a tactic that Peter the Great used and mostly refused to engage Napoleon’s troops instead burning the supply lines. Napoleon lost 300,000 troops during that campaign. Soon after the Napoleanic wars ended, the railways began to appear. The country was industrializing and with guns and cannons, growing stronger than ever. 

The Opium Wars, between China and the UK then the UK and France were not good to China. Even though Russia didn’t really help they needed up with a piece of the Chinese empire and so in the last half of the 1800s the Russian Empire grew by another 300,000 square miles on the backs of a series of unequal treaties as they came to be known in China following World War I. 

And so by 1895, the Romanovs had expanded past their native Moscow, driven back the Mongols, followed some of the former Mongol Khanates to their lands and taken them, took Siberia, parts of the Chinese empire, the Baltics, Alaska, and were sitting on the third largest empire the world had ever seen, which covered nearly 17 percent of the world. Some 8.8 million square miles. And yet, still just a little smaller than the British empire. They had small skirmishes with the British but by and large looked to smaller foes or proxy wars, with the exception of the Crimean War. 

Revolution The population was expanding and industrializing. Workers flocked to factories on those train lines. And more people in more concentrated urban areas meant more ideas. Rurik came in 862 and his descendants ruled until the Romanovs took power in 1613. They ruled until 1917. That’s over 1,000 years of kings, queens, Tsars, and Emperors. The ideas of Marx slowly spread. While the ruling family was busy with treaties and wars and empire, they forgot to pay attention to the wars at home. 

People like Vladimir Lenin discovered books by people like Karl Marx. Revolution was in the air around the world. France had shown monarchies could be toppled. Some of the revolutionaries were killed, others put to work in labor camps, others exiled, and still others continued on. Still, the empire was caught up in global empire intrigues. The German empire had been growing and the Russians had the Ottomans and Bulgarians on their southern boarders. They allied with France to take Germany, just as they’d allied with Germany to take down Poland. And so after over 1.8 million dead Russians and another 3.2 million wounded or captured and food shortages back home and in the trenches, the people finally had enough of their Tsar. They went on strike but Tsar Nicholas ordered the troops to fire. The troops refused. The Duma stepped in and forced Nicholas to abdicate. Russia had revolted in 1917, sued Germany for peace, and gave up more territory than they wanted in the process. Finland, the Baltics, their share of Poland, parts of the Ukraine. It was too much. But the Germans took a lot of time and focus to occupy and so it helped to weaken them in the overall war effort. 

Back home, Lenin took a train home and his Bolshevik party took control of the country. After the war Poland was again independent. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Serbs became independent nations. In the wake of the war the Ottoman Empire was toppled and modern Turkey was born. The German Kaiser abdicated. And socialism and communism were on the rise. In some cases, that was really just a new way to refer to a dictator that pretended to care about the people. Revolution had come to China in 1911 and Mao took power in the 1940s. 

Meanwhile, Lenin passed in 1924 and Rykov, then Molotov, who helped spur a new wave of industrialization. Then Stalin, who led purges of the Russian people in a number of Show Trials before getting the Soviet Union, as Russian Empire was now called, into World War II. Stalin encouraged Hitler to attack Poland in 1939. Let’s sit on that for a second. He tried to build a pact with the Western powers and after that broke down, he launched excursions annexing parts of Poland, Finland, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia. Many of the lands were parts of the former Russian Empire. The USSR had chunks of Belarus and the Ukraine before but as of the 1950s annexed Poland, Easter Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria as part of the Warsaw Pact, a block of nations we later called the Soviet Bloc. They even built a wall between East and West Germany.

During and after the war, the Americans whisked German scientists off to the United States. The Soviets were in no real danger from an invasion by the US and the weakened French, Austrians, and military-less Germans were in no place to attack the Soviets. The UK had to rebuild and British empire quickly fell apart. Even the traditional homes of the vikings who’d rowed down the rivers would cease to become global powers. And thus there were two superpowers remaining in the world, the Soviets and the United States. 

The Cold War The Soviets took back much of the former Russian Empire, claiming they needed buffer zones or through subterfuge. At its peak, the Soviet Union cover 8.6 million square miles; just a couple hundred thousand shy of the Russian Empire. On the way there, they grew to a nation of over 290 million people with dozens of nationalities. And they expanded the sphere of influence even further, waging proxy wars in places like Vietnam and Korea. They never actually went to war with the United States, in much the same way they mostly avoided the direct big war with the Mongols and the British - and how Rorik of Dorestad played both sides of Frankish conflicts. We now call this period the Cold War.

The Cold War was an arms race. This manifested itself first in nuclear weapons. The US is still the only country to detonate a nuclear weapon in war time, from the bombings that caused the surrender of Japan at the end of the war. The Soviets weren’t that far behind and detonated a bomb in 1949. That was the same year NATO was founded as a treaty organization between Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States. 

The US upped the ante with the hydrogen bomb in 1952. The Soviets got the hydrogen bomb in 1955. And then came the Space Race. Sputnik launched in 1957. The Russians were winning the space race. They further proved that when they put Yuri Gagarin up in 1961. By 1969 the US put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

Each side developed military coalitions, provided economic aid to allies, built large arsenals of weapons, practiced espionage against one another, deployed massive amounts of propaganda, and spreading their ideology. Or at least that’s what the modern interpretation of history tells us. There were certainly ideological differences, but the Cold War saw the spread of communism as a replacement for conquest. That started with Lenin trying to lead a revolt throughout Europe but shifted over the decades into again, pure conquest. 

Truman saw the rapid expansion of the Soviets and without context that they were mostly reclaiming lands conquered by the Russian imperial forces, won support for the Truman Doctrine. There, he contained Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe. First, they supported Greece and Turkey. But the support extended throughout areas adjacent to Soviet interests. Eisenhower saw how swiftly Russians were putting science in action with satellites and space missions and nuclear weapons - and responded with an emphasis in American science. 

The post-war advancements in computing were vast in the US. The industry moved from tubes and punch cards to interactive computing after the Whirlwind computer was developed at MIT first to help train pilots and then to intercept soviet nuclear weapons. Packet switching, and so the foundations of the Internet were laid to build a computer network that could withstand nuclear attack. Graphical interfaces got their start when Ivan Sutherland was working at MIT on the grandchild of Whirlwind, the TX-2 - which would evolve into the Digital Equipment PDP once privatized. Drum memory, which became the foundation of storage was developed to help break Russian codes and intercept messages. There isn’t a part of the computing industry that isn’t touched by the research farmed out by various branches of the military and by ARPA.  

Before the Cold War, Russia and then the Soviet Union were about half for and half against various countries when it came to proxy wars. They tended to play both sides. After the Cold War it was pretty much always the US or UK vs the Soviet Union. Algeria, Kenya, Taiwan, the Sudan, Lebanon, Central America, the Congo, Eritrea, Yemen, Dhofar, Algeria, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic, Chad, Iran, Iraq, Thailand, Bolivia, South Africa, Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, Angolia, Ethiopia, the Sahara, Indonesia, Somalia, Mozambique, Libya, and Sri Lanka. And the big ones were Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Many of these are still raging on today. 

The Soviet empire grew to over 5 million soldiers. The US started with 2 nuclear weapons in 1945 and had nearly 300 by 1950 when the Soviets had just 5. The US stockpile grew to over 18,000 in 1960 and peaked at over 31,000 in 1965. The Soviets had 6,129 by then but kept building until they got close to 40,000 by 1980. By then the Chinese, France, and the UK each had over 200 and India and Israel had developed nuclear weapons. Since then only Pakistan and North Korea have added warheads, although there are US warheads located in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, and the Netherlands. 

Modern Russia The buildup was expensive. Research, development, feeding troops, supporting asymmetrical warfare in proxy states, and trade sanctions put a strain on the government and nearly bankrupted Russia. They fell behind in science, after Stalin had been anti-computers. Meanwhile, the US was able to parlay all that research spending into true productivity gains. The venture capital system also fueled increasingly wealthy companies who paid taxes. Banking, supply chains, refrigeration, miniaturization, radio, television, and everywhere else we could think of. By the 1980s, the US had Apple and Microsoft and Commodore. The Russians were trading blat, or an informal black market currency, to gain access to knock-offs of ZX Spectrums when the graphical interfaces systems were born.

The system of government in the Soviet Union had become outdated. There were some who had thought to modernize it into more of a technocracy in an era when the US was just starting to build ARPANET - but those ideas never came to fruition. Instead it became almost feudalistic with high-ranking party members replacing the boyars, or aristocrats of the old Kievan Rus days. The standard of living suffered. So many cultures and tribes under one roof, but only the Slavs had much say.  As the empire over-extended there were food shortages. If there are independent companies then the finger can be pointed in their direction but when food is rationed by the Politburo then the decline in agricultural production became dependent on bringing food in from the outside. That meant paying for it. Pair that with uneven distribution and overspending on the military. 

The Marxist-Leninist doctrine had been a one party state. The Communist Party. Michael Gorbachev allowed countries in the Bloc to move into a democratic direction with multiple parties. The Soviet Union simply became unmanageable. And while Gorbachev took the blame for much of the downfall of the empire, there was already a deep decay - they were an oligarchy pretending to be a communist state. The countries outside of Russia quickly voted in non-communist governments and by 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and the Eastern European countries began to seek independence, most moving towards democratic governments. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in 15 separate countries and left the United States standing alone as the global superpower. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in 1999. 2004 saw Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia join. 2009 brought in Albania and Croatia. 2017 led to Montenegro and then North Macedonia. Then came the subject of adding Ukraine. The country that the Kievan Rus had migrated throughout the lands from. The stem from which the name  and possibly soul of the country had sprouted from. How could Vladimir Putin allow that to happen? Why would it come up?

As the Soviets pulled out of the Bloc countries , they left remnants of their empire behind. Belarus, Kazakstan, and the Ukraine were left plenty of weapons that couldn’t be moved quickly. Ukraine alone had 1,700 nuclear weapons, which included 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Add to that nearly 2,000 biological and chemical weapons. Those went to Russia or were disassembled once the Ukrainians were assured of their sovereignty. The Crimea, which had been fought over in multiple bloody wars was added to Ukraine. At least until 2014, when Putin wanted the port of Sevastopol, founded by Catherine the Great. Now there was a gateway from Russia to the Mediterranean yet again.

So Kievan Rus under Rurik is really the modern Ukraine and the Russian Empire then Romanov Dynasty flowed from that following the Mongol invasions. The Russian Empire freed other nations from the yolk of Mongolian rule but became something entirely different once they over-extended. Those countries in the empire often traded the Mongol yolk for the Soviet yolk. And entirely different from the Soviet Union that fought the Cold War and the modern Russia we know today. 

Meanwhile, the states of Europe had been profoundly changed since the days of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and Marx. Many moved left of center and became socialized parts of their economy. No one ever need go hungry in a Scandanavian country. Health care, education, even child care became free in many countries. Many of those same ideals that helped lift the standard of living for all in developed countries then spread, including in Canada and some in the US. And so we see socialism to capitalism as more of a spectrum than a boolean choice now. And totalitarianism, oligarchy, and democracy as a spectrum as well. Many could argue reforms in democratic countries are paid for by lobbyists who are paid for by companies and thus an effective oligarchy. Others might argue the elections in many countries are rigged and so they aren’t even oligarchs, they’re monarchies. 

Putin took office in 1999 and while Dmitry Medvedev was the president for a time, but he effectively ruled in a tandemocracy with Putin until Putin decided to get back in power. That’s 23 years and counting and just a few months behind when King Abdullah took over in Jordan and King Mohammed VI took over in Morocco. And so while democratic in name, they’re not all quite so democratic.

Yet they do benefit from technology that began in Western countries and spread throughout the world. Countries like semi-conductor manufacturer Sitronics even went public on the London stock exchange. Hard line communists might (and do) counter that the US has an empire and that western countries conspire for the downfall of Russia or want to turn Russians into slaves to the capitalist machine. As mentioned earlier, there has always been plenty of propaganda in this relationship. Or gaslighting. Or fake news. Or disinformation. 

One of those American advancements that ties the Russians to the capitalist yoke is interactive computing. That could have been developed in Glushkov’s or Kitov’s labs in Russia, as they had the ideas and talent. But because the oligarchy that formed around communism, the ideas were sidelined and it came out of MIT - and that led to Project MAC, which did as much to democratize computing as Gorbachev did to democratize the Russian Federation.

Welcome to the history of computing podcast. Today we’re going to cover a cold war-era project called Project MAC that bridged MIT with GE and Bell Labs.

The Russians beat the US to space when they launched Sputnik in 1958. Many in the US felt the nation was falling behind and so later that year president Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed then president of MIT James Killian as the Presidential Assistant for Science and created ARPA. The office was lean and funded a few projects without much oversight. One was Project MAC at MIT, which helped cement the university as one of the top in the field of computing as it grew.

Project MAC, short for Project on Mathematics and Computation, was a 1960s collaborative endeavor to develop a workable timesharing system. The concept of timesharing initially emerged during the late 1950s. Scientists and Researchers finally went beyond batch processing with Whirlwind and its spiritual predecessors, the TX-0 through TX-2 computers at MIT. We had computer memory now and so had interactive computing. That meant we could explore different ways to connect directly with the machine.

In 1959, British mathematician Christopher Strachey presented the first public presentation on timesharing at a UNESCO meeting, and John McCarthy distributed an internal letter regarding timesharing at MIT. Timesharing was initially demonstrated at the MIT Computational Center in November 1961, under the supervision of Fernando Corbato, an MIT professor. J.C.R. Licklider at ARPA had been involved with MIT for most of his career in one way or another and helped provide vision and funding along with contacts and guidance, including getting the team to work with Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN).

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin went to space in 1961. The Russians were still lapping us. Money. Governments spend money. Let’s do that.

Licklider assisted in the development of Project MAC, machine-assisted cognition, led by Professor Robert M. Fano. He then funded the project with $3 million per year. That would become the most prominent initiative in timesharing. In 1967, the Information Processing Techniques Office invested more than $12 million in over a dozen timesharing programs at colleges and research institutions. Timesharing then enabled the development of new software and hardware separate from that used for batch processing. Thus, one of the most important innovations to come out of the project was an operating system capable of supporting multiple parallel users - all of whom could have complete control of the machine.

The operating system they created would be known as Multics, short for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service. It was created for a GE 645 computer but modular in nature and could be ported to other computers. The project was a collaborative effort between MIT, GE, and Bell Labs. Multics was the first time we really split files away from objects read in memory and wrote them into memory for processing then back to disk. They developed the concepts of dynamic linking, daemons, procedural calls, hierarchical file systems, process stacks, a split between user land and the system, and much more.

By the end of six months after Project MAC was created, 200 users in 10 different MIT departments had secured access to the system. The Project MAC laboratory was apart from its former Department of Electrical Engineering by 1967 and evolved into its interdepartmental laboratory.

Multics progressed from computer timesharing to a networked computer system, integrating file sharing and administration capabilities and security mechanisms into its architecture. The sophisticated design, which could serve 300 daily active users on 1,000 MIT terminal computers within a couple more years, inspired engineers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie to create their own at Bell Labs, which evolved into the C programming language and the Unix operating system.

See, all the stakeholders with all the things they wanted in the operating system had built something slow and fragile. Solo developers don’t tend to build amazing systems, but neither do large intracompany bureaucracies.

GE never did commercialize Multics because they ended their computer hardware business in 1970. Bell Labs dropped out of the project as well. So Honeywell acquired the General Electric computer division and so rights to the Multics project. In addition, Honeywell possessed several other operating systems, each supported by its internal organizations.

In 1976, Project MAC was renamed the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT, broadening its scope. Michael L. Dertouzos, the lab's director, advocated developing intelligent computer programs. To increase computer use, the laboratory analyzed how to construct cost-effective, user-friendly systems and the theoretical underpinnings of computer science to recognize space and time constraints. Some of their project ran for decades afterwards. In 2000, several Multics sites were shut down.

The concept of buying corporate “computer utilities” was a large area of research in the late 60s to 70s. Scientists bought time on computers that universities purchased. Companies did the same. The pace of research at both increased dramatically. Companies like Tymeshare and IBM made money selling time or processing credits, and then after an anti-trust case, IBM handed that business over to Control Data Corporation, who developed training centers to teach people how to lease time. These helped prepare a generation of programmers when the microcomputers came along, often taking people who had spent their whole careers on CDC Cybers or Burroughs mainframes by surprise. That seems to happen with the rapid changes in computing. But it was good to those who invested in the concept early. And the lessons learned about scalable architectures were skills that transitioned nicely into a microcomputer world. In fact, many environments still run on applications built in this era.

The Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) accomplished other ground-breaking work, including playing a critical role in advancing the Internet. It was often larger but less opulent than the AI lab at MIT. And their role in developing applications that would facilitate online processing and evaluation across various academic fields, such as engineering, medical, and library sciences led to advances in each. In 2004, LCS merged with MIT's AI laboratory to establish the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), one of the flagship research labs at MIT. And in the meantime countless computer scientists who contributed at every level of the field flowed through MIT - some because of the name made in those early days. And the royalties from patents have certainly helped the universities endowment.

The Cold War thawed. The US reduced ARPA spending after the Mansfield Amendment was passed in 1969. The MIT hackers flowed out to the world, changing not only how people thought of automating business processes, but how they thought of work and collaboration. And those hackers were happy to circumvent all the security precautions put on Multics, and so cultural movements evolved from there. And the legacy of Multics lived on in Unix, which evolved to influence Linux and is in some way now a part of iOS, Mac OS, Android, and Chrome OS.

Dell is one of the largest technology companies in the world, and it all started with a small startup that sold personal computers out of Michael Dell's dorm room at the University of Texas. From there, Dell grew into a multi-billion dollar company, bought and sold other companies, went public, and now manufactures a wide range of electronics including laptops, desktops, servers, and more. 

After graduating high school, Michael Dell enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin with the idea that he would some day start his own company. Maybe even in computers. He had an Apple II in school and Apple and other companies had done pretty well by then in the new microcomputer space. He took it apart and these computers were just a few parts that were quickly becoming standardized. Parts that could be bought off the shelf at computer stores. So he opened a little business that he ran out of his dorm room fixing computers and selling little upgrades. Many a student around the world still does the exact same thing.

He also started buying up parts and building new computers. Texas Instruments was right up the road in Dallas. And there was a price war in the early 80s between Commodore and Texas Instruments. Computers could be big business. And it seemed clear that this IBM PC that was introduced in 1981 was going to be more of a thing, especially in offices. Especially since there were several companies making clones of the PC, including Compaq who was all over the news as Silicon Cowboys, having gotten to $100 million in sales within just two years. 

So from his dorm room in 1984, Dell started a little computer company he called PCs Limited. He built PCs using parts and experimented with different combinations. One customer led to another and he realized that a company like IBM bought a few hundred dollars worth of parts, put them in a big case and sold it for thousands of dollars. Any time a company makes too much margin, smaller and more disruptive companies will take the market away. Small orders turned into bigger and ones and he was able to parlay each into being able to build bigger orders. 

They released the Turbo PC in 1985. A case, a mother board, a CPU, a keyboard, a mouse, some memory, and a CPU chip. Those first computers he built came with an 8088 chip. Low overhead meant he could be competitive on price: $795. No retail store front and no dealers, who often took 25 to 50 percent of the money spent on computers, let the company run out of a condo. He’d sold newspapers as a kid so he was comfortable picking up the phone and dialing for dollars. He managed to make $200,000 in sales in that first year. So he dropped out of school to build the company. 

To keep costs low, he sold through direct mail and over the phone. No high-paid sellers in blue suits like IBM, even if the computers could run the same versions of DOS. He incorporated as Dell Computer Company in 1987, started to expand internationally, and on the back of rapid revenue growth and good margins. They hit $159 million in sales that year. So they took the company public in 1988. The market capitalization when they went public was $30 million and quickly rose to $80 million. By then we’d moved past the 8088 chips and the industry was standardizing on the 80386 chip, following the IBM PS/2. By the end of 1989 sales hit $250 million. 

They needed more Research and Development firepower, so they brought in Glenn Henry. He’d been at IBM for over 20 years and managed multiple generations of mid-range mainframes then servers and then RISC-based personal computers. He helped grow the R&D team into the hundreds and quality of computer went up, which paired well with costs of computers remaining affordable compared to the rest of the market. 

Dell was, and to a large degree still is, a direct to consumer company. They experimented with the channel in the early 1990s, which is to say 3rd parties that were authorized to sell their computers. They signed deals to sell through distributors, computer stores, warehouse clubs, and retail chains. But the margins didn’t work, so within just a few years they cancelled many of those relationships. Instead they went from selling to companies to the adjacent home market. 

It seems like that’s the last time in recent memory that direct mailing as a massive campaign worked. Dell was able to undercut most other companies who sold laptops at the time by going direct to consumers. They brought in marketing execs from other companies, like Tandy. The London office was a huge success, bringing in tens of millions in revenue, so they brought on a Munich office and then slowly expanded into tother countries. They were one of the best sales and marketing machines in that direct to consumer and business market. Customers could customize orders, so maybe add a faster CPU, some extra memory, or even a scanner, modem, or other peripheral. They got the manufacturing to the point where they could turn computers around in five days. Just a decade earlier people waited months for computers.

They released their first laptop in 1989, which they called the 316LT. Just a few years earlier, Michael Dell was in a dorm room. If he’d completed a pre-med degree and gotten into medical school, he’d likely be in his first or second year. He was now a millionaire; and just getting started.

With the help of their new R&D chief, they were able to get into the server market where the margins were higher, and that helped get more corporate customers. By the end of 1990, they were the sixth largest personal computer company in the US. To help sales in the rapidly growing European and Middle Eastern offices, they opened another manufacturing location in Ireland. And by 1992, they became a one of the top 500 companies in the world. Michael Dell, instead of being on an internship in medical school and staring down the barrel of school loans, was the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

The story is almost boring. They just grow and grow. Especially when rivals like IBM, HP, Digital Equipment, and Compaq make questionable finance and management choices that don’t allow those companies to remain competitive. They all had better technology at many times, but none managed to capitalize on the markets. Instead of becoming the best computer maker they could be, they played corporate development games and wandered away from their core businesses. Or like IBM they decided that they didn’t want to compete with the likes of Dell and just sold off their PC line to Lenovo. But Dell didn’t make crappy computers. 

They weren’t physically inspiring like some computers at the time, but they got the job done and offices that needed dozens or hundreds of machines often liked working with Dell. They continued the global expansion through the 90s and added servers in 1996. By now there were customers buying their second or third generation of computer, going from DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. And they did something else really important in 1996: they began to sell through the web at dell.com. Within a few months they were doing a million a day in sales and the next year hit 10 million PCs sold. 

Little Dell magazines showed up in offices around the world. Web banners appeared on web pages. Revenues responded and went from $2.9 billion in 1994 to $3.5 billion in 1995. And they were running at margins over 20 percent. Revenue hit $5.3 billion in 1996, 7.8 in 1997, 12.3 in 1998, 18.2 in 1999, and $25.3 in 2000. The 1990s had been good to Dell. Their stock split 7 times. It wouldn’t double every other year again, but would double again by 2009.

In the meantime, the market was changing. The Dell OptiPlex is one of the best selling lines of computers of all time and offers a glimpse into what was changing. Keep in mind, this was the corporate enterprise machine. Home machines can be better or less, according to the vendor. The processors ranged from a Celeron up to a Pentium i9 at this point. 

Again, we needed a mother board, usually an ATX or a derivative. They started with that standard ATX mother board form factor but later grew to be a line that came in the tower, the micro, and everything in between. Including an All-in-one. That Series 1 was beige and just the right size to put a big CRT monitor on top of it. It sported a 100 MHz 486 chip and could take up to 64 megabytes of memory across a pair of SIMM slots. The Series 2 was about half the size and by now we saw those small early LCD flat panel screens. They were still beige though.

As computers went from beige to black with the Series 3 we started to see the iconic metallic accents we’re accustomed to now. They followed along the Intel replacement for the ATX motherboard, the BTX, and we saw those early PCI form factors be traded for PCIe. By the end of the Series 3 in 2010, the Optiplex 780 could have up to 16 gigs of memory as a max, although that would set someone back a pretty penning in 2009. And the processors came ranging from the 800 MHz to 1.2 GHz. We’d also gone from PS/2 ports with serial and parallel  to USB 2 ports and from SIMM to DIMM slots, up to DDR4 with the memory about as fast as a CPU. 

But they went back to the ATX and newer Micro ATX with the Series 4. They embraced the Intel i series chips and we got all the fun little metal designs on the cases. Cases that slowly shifted to being made of recycled parts. The Latitude laptops followed a similar pattern. Bigger faster, and heavier. They released the Dell Dimension and acquired Alienware in 2006, at the time the darling of the gamer market. Higher margin hardware, like screaming fast GPU graphic cards. But also lower R&D costs for the Dell lines as there was the higher end line that flowed down to the OptiPlex then Dimension.

Meanwhile, there was this resurgent Apple. They’d released the iMac in 1998 and helped change the design language for computers everywhere. Not that everyone needed clear cases. Then came the iPod in 2001. Beautiful design could sell products at higher prices. But they needed to pay a little more attention to detail. But more importantly, those Dells were getting bigger and faster and heavier while the Apple computers were getting lighter, and even the desktops more portable. The iPhone came in 2007. The Intel MacBook Air came 10 years after that iMac, in 2008. The entire PC industry was in a race for bigger power supplies to push more and more gigahertz through a CPU without setting the house on fire and Apple changed the game. The iPad was released in 2010. Apple finally delivered on the promise of the Dynabook that began life at Xerox PARC.

Dell had been in the drivers seat. They became the top personal computer company in 2003 and held that spot until HP and Compaq merged. But their spot would never be regained as revenue slowed from the time the iPad was released for almost a decade, even contracting at times. See, Dell had a close partnership with Intel and Microsoft. Microsoft made operating systems for mobile devices but the Dell Venue was not competitive with the iPhone. They also tried making a mobile device using Android but the Streak never sold well either and was discontinued as well. 

While Microsoft retooled their mobile platforms to compete in the tablet space, Dell tried selling Android tablets but discontinued those in 2016. To make matters worse for Dell, they’d ridden a Microsoft Windows alliance where they never really had to compete with Microsoft for nearly 30 years and then Microsoft released the Surface in 2012. The operating systems hadn’t been pushing people to upgrade their computers and Microsoft even started selling Office directly and online, so Dell lost revenue bundling Office with computers. 

They too had taken their eye off the market. HP bought EDS in 2008, diversifying into a services organization, something IBM had done well over a decade before. Except rather than sell their PC business they made a go at both. So Dell did the same, acquiring Perot Systems, the company Perot started after he sold EDS and ran for president, for $3.9 billion, which came in at a solid $10 billion less than what HP paid for EDS. 

The US was in the midst of a recession, so that didn’t help matters either. But it did make for an interesting investment climate. Interest rates were down, so large investors needed to put money to work to show good returns for customers. Dell had acquired just 8 companies before the Great Recession but acquired an average of 5 over each of the next four years. This allowed them to diversify, And Michael Dell made another savvy finance move, he took the company private in 2013 with the help of Silver Lake partners. 5 years off the public market was just what they needed. 2018 they went public again on the backs of revenues that had shot up to to $79 billion from a low of around $50 billion in 2016. And they exceeded $94 billion in 2021. 

The acquisition of EMC-VMware was probably the most substantial to $67 billion. That put them in the enterprise server market and gave them a compelling offer at pretty much every level of the enterprise stack. Although at this point maybe it remains to be seen if the enterprise server and storage stack is still truly a thing. 

A Dell Optiplex costs about the same amount today as it did when Dell sold that first Turbo PC. They can be had cheaper but probably shouldn’t. Adjusted for an average 2.6 percent inflation rate, that brings those first Dell PCs to just north of $2,000 as of the time of this writing. Yet the computer remained the same, with fairly consistent margins. That means the components have gotten half as expensive because they’re made in places with cheaper labor than they were in the early 1980s. That means there are potentially less components, like a fan for certain chips or RAM when they’re memory integrated in a SoC, etc. 

But the world is increasingly mobile. Apple, Google, and Microsoft sell computers for their own operating systems now. Dell doesn’t make phones and they aren’t in the top 10 for the tablet market. People don’t buy products from magazines that show up any longer. Now it’s a quick search on Amazon. And looking for a personal computer there, the results right this second (that is, while writing this paragraph) showed the exact same order as vendor market share for 2021: Lenovo, followed by HP, then Dell. All of the devices looked about the same. Kinda’ like those beige injection-molded devices looked about the same. 

HP couldn’t have such a large company exist under one roof and eventually spun HP Enterprise out into its own entity. Dell sold Perot Systems to NTT Docomo to get the money to buy EMC on leverage. Not only do many of these companies have products that look similar, but their composition does as well. What doesn’t look similar is Michael Dell. He’s worth just shy of $60 billion dollars (according to the day and the markets). His book, Direct From Dell is one of the best looks at the insides of a direct order mail business making the transition to early commerce one can find. Oh, and it’s not just him and some friends in a dorm room. It’s 158,000 employees who help make up over a $42 billion market cap. And helped generations of people afford personal computers. That might be the best part of such a legacy.

We had this Mac lab in school. And even though they were a few years old at the time, we had a whole room full of Macintosh SEs. I’d been using the Apple II Cs before that and these just felt like Isaac Asimov himself dropped them off just for me to play with. Only thing: no BASIC interpreter. But in the Apple menu, tucked away in the corner was a little application called HyperCard.

HyperCard wasn’t left by Asimov, but instead burst from the mind of Bill Atkinson. Atkinson was the 51st employee at Apple and a former student of Jeff Raskin, the initial inventor of the Mac before Steve Jobs took over. Steve Jobs convinced him to join Apple where he started with the Lisa and then joined the Mac team until he left with the team who created General Magic and helped bring shape to the world of mobile devices. But while at Apple he was on the original Mac team developing the menu bar, the double-click, Atkinson dithering, MacPaint, QuickDraw, and HyperCard. 

Those were all amazing tools and many came out of his work on the original 1984 Mac and the Lisa days before that. But HyperCard was something entirely different. It was a glimpse into the future, even if self-contained on a given computer. See, there had been this idea floating around for awhile.  Vannevar Bush initially introduced the world to a device with all the world’s information available in his article “As We May Think” in 1946. Doug Engelbart had a team of researchers working on the oN-Line System that saw him give “The Mother of All Demos in 1968” where he showed how that might look, complete with a graphical interface and hypertext, including linked content. Ted Nelson introduced furthered the ideas in 1969 of having linked content, which evolved into what we now call hyperlinks. Although Nelson thought ahead to include the idea of what he called transclusions, or the snippets of text displayed on the screen from their live, original source. 

HyperCard built on that wealth of information with a database that had a graphical front-end that allowed inserting media and a programming language they called HyperTalk. Databases were nothing new. But a simple form creator that supported graphics and again stressed simple, was new. Something else that was brewing was this idea of software economics. Brooks’ Law laid it out but Barry Boehm’s book on Software Engineering Economics took the idea of rapid application development another step forward in 1981. People wanted to build smaller programs faster. And so many people wanted to build tools that we needed to make it easier to do so in order for computers to make us more productive.

Against that backdrop, Atkinson took some acid and came up with the idea for a tool he initially called WildCard. Dan Winkler signed onto the project to help build the programming language, HyperTalk, and they got to work in 1986. They changed the name of the program to HyperCard and released it in 1987 at MacWorld. Regular old people could create programs without knowing how to write code. There were a number of User Interface (UI) components that could easily be dropped on the screen, and true to his experience there was panel of elements like boxes, erasers, and text, just like we’d seen in MacPaint. Suppose you wanted a button, just pick it up from the menu and drop it where it goes. Then make a little script using the HyperText that read more like the English language than a programming language like LISP. 

Each stack might be synonymous with a web page today. And a card was a building block of those stacks. Consider the desktop metaphor extended to a rolodex of cards. Those cards can be stacked up. There were template cards and if the background on a template changed, that flowed to each card that used the template, like styles in Keynote might today. The cards could have text fields, video, images, buttons, or anything else an author could think of. And the author word is important. Apple wanted everyone to feel like they could author a hypercard stack or program or application or… app. Just as they do with Swift Playgrounds today. That never left the DNA.

We can see that ease of use in how scripting is done in HyperTalk. Not only the word scripting rather than programming, but how HyperTalk is weakly typed. This is to say there’s no memory safety or type safety, so a variable might be used as an integer or boolean. That either involves more work by the interpreter or compiler - or programs tend to crash a lot. Put the work on the programmers who build programming tools rather than the authors of HyperCard stacks.

The ease of use and visual design made Hypercard popular instantly. It was the first of its kind. It didn’t compile at first, although larger stacks got slow because HyperTalk was interpreted, so the team added a just-in-time compiler in 1989 with HyperCard 2.0. They also added a debugger. 

There were some funny behaviors. Like some cards could have objects that other cards in a stack didn’t have. This led to many a migration woe for larger stacks that moved into modern tools. One that could almost be considered HyperCard 3, was FileMaker. Apple spun their software business out as Claris, who bought Noshuba software, which had this interesting little database program called Nutshell. That became FileMaker in 1985. By the time HyperCard was ready to become 3.0, FileMaker Pro was launched in 1990. 

Attempts to make Hypercard 3.0 were still made, but Hypercard had its run by the mid-1990s and died a nice quiet death. The web was here and starting to spread. The concept of a bunch of stacks on just one computer had run its course. Now we wanted pages that anyone could access. HyperCard could have become that but that isn’t its place in history. It was a stepping stone and yet a milestone and a legacy that lives on. Because it was a small tool in a large company. Atkinson and some of the other team that built the original Mac were off to General Magic. Yet there was still this idea, this legacy. 

Hypercard’s interface inspired many modern applications we use to create applications. The first was probably Delphi, from Borland. But over time Visual Studio (which we still use today) for Microsoft’s Visual Basic. Even Powerpoint has some similarities with HyperCard’s interface. WinPlus was similar to Hypercard as well. Even today, several applications and tools use HyperCard’s ideas such as HyperNext, HyperStudio, SuperCard, and LiveCode. HyperCard also certainly inspired FileMaker and every Apple development environment since - and through that, most every tool we use to build software, which we call the IDE, or Integrated Development Environment.

The most important IDE for any Apple developer is Xcode. Open Xcode to build an app and look at Interface Builder and you can almost feel Bill Atkinson’s pupils dilated pupils looking back at you, 10 hours into a trip. And within those pupils visions - visions of graphical elements being dropped into a card and people digitized CD collections, built a repository for their book collection, put all the Grateful Dead shows they’d recorded into a stack, or even built an application to automate their business. Oh and let’s not forget the Zine, or music and scene magazines that were so popular in the era that saw photocopying come down in price. HyperCard made for a pretty sweet Zine. 

HyperCard sprang from a trip when the graphical interface was still just coming into its own. Digital computing might have been 40 years old but the information theorists and engineers hadn’t been as interested in making things easy to use. They wouldn’t have been against it, but they weren’t trying to appeal to regular humans. Apple was, and still is. The success of HyperCard seems to have taken everyone by surprise. Apple sold the last copy in 2004, but the legacy lives on. Successful products help to mass-

Its success made a huge impact at that time as well on the upcoming technology. Its popularity declined in the mid-1990s and it died quietly when Apple sold its last copy in 2004. But it surely left a legacy that has inspired many - especially old-school Apple programmers, in today’s “there’s an app for that” world.

As with many a programming language, ruby was originally designed as a teaching language - to teach programming to students at universities. From there, it is now used to create various programs, including games, interfaces for websites, scripts to run on desktop computers, backend REST endpoints, and business software. Although ruby is used for web development more than anything else. It has an elegant syntax that makes it easy to read the code; this is one of the reasons why Ruby is so popular, especially with beginners (after all it was designed to teach programming).

Yukihiro Matsumoto, or Mats for short, originally developed the ruby's programming language in the 1990s. Ruby was initially designed as an interpreted scripting language. That first interpreter, MRI, or Mats’s Ruby Interpreter, spread quickly. In part because he’s nice. In fact, he’s so nice that the motto MINASWAN, or “Matz is nice and so we are nice.” Juxtapose this against some of the angrier programmers who develop their own languages. And remember, it was a teach language. And so he named ruby  after a character he encountered in a children's book. Or because it was a birthstone. Or both.

He graduated from the University of Tsukuba and worked on compilers before writing a mail agent in Emacs Lisp. Having worked with Lisp and Perl and Python, he was looking for a language that was truly object-oriented from the ground up. He came up with the idea in 1993 of another Lisp at the core, but something that used objects like Smalltalk. That would allow developers to write less cyclomatically complex code. And yet he wanted to provide higher-order functions for routine tasks like Perl and Python did. Just with native objects rather than those bolted on the side. And he wanted to do so in as consistent a manner as possible.

Believe it or not that meant dynamic typing. And garbage collection for free. And literal notation for some things like arrays and regular expressions while allowing for dynamic reflection for meta programming and allowing for everything to be an expression. The syntax is similar to a python or a perl and yet whitespace in things like indentation doesn’t play a part. It’s concise and the deep thinking that goes into making something concise can be incredible. And yet freeing. 

The first version of Ruby was released in 1995 and allowed programs to be concise, so written with fewer lines of code than would have been possible with other languages at the time. And yet elegant. In 1996, David Flanagan and Jim Weirich grabbed the MRI interpreter and started using ruby for real projects. And so ruby expanded outside of Japan. 

As the popularity grew, Matz founded his own company called Object Technology Inc, This allowed him to continue developing Ruby while making money. After all, programmers gotta’ eat too. In 2006 Matsumoto committed the first version of what would eventually become Rails on Version Control Systems (VCS), a precursor git. 

Ruby is written in C, which means it has access to most underlying operating systems given the right API access. It has a vast dictionary with nearly 1 million entries. It can often be found in many event-driven frameworks, with the most popular being Ruby on Rails, a server-side web application framework developed by David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp in 2004. Other frameworks include Sinatra (which came in 2007), Roda, Camping (which comes in at a whopping 4k in size), and Padrino. And Ramaze and Merb and Goliath. Each has their own merits. 

These libraries help developers code faster, easier, and more efficiently than if they had to write all the server-side code from scratch. Another aspect of Ruby that made it popular is a simple package manager. RubyGems came about in 2003. Here, we lay out a simple structure that includes a README, a gem spec with info about the gem, a lib directory (the code for the gem), a test directory, and a makefile for Ruby they call a Rake. This way the developer of the gem does everything needed to be able to call them in their code. And so there are now well over 100,000 gems out there.

Not all work with all the interpreters. Ruby went from 1.0 in 1996 to 1.2 in 1998 to 1.4 in 1999 and 1.6 in 2000. Then to 1.8 in 2003 and by then it was gettin popular and ready to get standardized. This always slows down changes. So it went to become an ISO standard in 2012 - the hallmark if you will that a language is too big to fail. Ruby 2 came along the next year with nearly full backwards compatibility. And then 3 came in 2020 in order to bring just-in-time compilation, which can make the runtime faster than just interpreting. And unlike the XRuby variant, no need to do java-style compilation.

Still, not all ruby tooling needs to be compiled. Ruby scripts can be loaded in tools like Amazon’s Lambda service or Google Cloud Functions. From there, it can talk to tools like MySQL and MongoDB. And it’s fun. I mean, Matz uses the word fun. And ruby can present a challenge that to experienced programmers might be seen as fun. Because anything you can do with other languages, you can do with ruby. Might not get as much for free as with a spring security for Java, but it’s still an excellent language and sometimes I can’t help but wonder if we shouldn’t get so much for free with certain lanuages.

Matz is now the chief architect of Heroku. He has since written a slimmed down version of ruby called mruby and another language called streem. He also wrote a few books on ruby. Because you know, he’s nice.

With over 2.6 billion active users ad 4.6billion active accounts email has become a significant means of communication in the business, professional, academic, and personal worlds. Before email we had protocols that enabled us to send messages within small splinters of networks. Time Sharing systems like PLATO at the University of Champaign-Urbana, DTSS at Dartmouth College, BerkNet at the University of California Berkeley, and CTTS at MIT pioneered electronic communication. Private corporations like IBM launched VNET We could create files or send messages that were immediately transferred to other people.

The universities that were experimenting with these messaging systems even used some of the words we use today. MIT’s CTSS used the MAIL program to send messages. Glenda Schroeder from there documented that messages would be placed into a MAIL BOX in 1965. She had already been instrumental in implementing the MULTICS shell that would later evolve into the Unix shell. Users dialed into the IBM 7094 mainframe and communicated within that walled garden with other users of the system. That was made possible after Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris picked up her documentation and turned it into reality, writing the program in MAD or the Michigan Algorithm Decoder.

But each system was different and mail didn’t flow between them. One issue was headers. These are the parts of a message that show what time the message was sent, who sent the message, a subject line, etc. Every team had different formats and requirements. The first attempt to formalize headers was made in RFC 561 by Abhay Bhutan and Ken Pogran from MIT, Jim White at Stanford, and Ray Tomlinson.

Tomlinson was a programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman. He defined the basic structure we use for email while working on a government-funded project at ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in 1971. While there, he wrote a tool called CYPNET to send various objects over a network, then ported that into the SNDMSG program used to send messages between users of their TENEX system so people could send messages to other computers. The structure he chose was Username@Computername because it just made sense to send a message to a user on the computer that user was at. We still use that structure today, although the hostname transitioned to a fully qualified domain name a bit later. Given that he wanted to route messages between multiple computers, he had a keen interest in making sure other computers could interpret messages once received.

The concept of instantaneous communication between computer scientists led to huge productivity gains and new, innovative ideas. People could reach out to others they had never met and get quick responses. No more walking to the other side of a college campus. Some even communicated primarily through the computers, taking terminals with them when they went on the road. Email was really the first killer app on the networks that would some day become the Internet. People quickly embraced this new technology. By 1975 almost 75% of the ARPANET traffic was electronic mails, which provided the idea to send these electronic mails to users on other computers and networks.

Most universities that were getting mail only had one or two computers connected to ARPANET. Terminals were spread around campuses and even smaller microcomputers in places. This was before the DNS (Domain Name Service), so the name of the computer was still just a hostname from the hosts file and users needed to know which computer and what the correct username was to send mail to one another. Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler had been maintaining a hosts file to keep track of computers on the growing network when her employer Stanford was just starting the NIC, or Network Information Center. Once the Internet was formed that NIC would be the foundation or the InterNIC who managed the buying and selling of domain names once Paul Mockapetris formalized DNS in 1983.

At this point, the number of computers was increasing and not all accepted mail on behalf of an organization. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began to connect people across the world to the Internet during the 1980s and for many people, electronic mail was the first practical application they used on the internet. This was made easier by the fact that the research community had already struggled with email standards and in 1981 had defined how servers sent mail to one another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP, in RFC 788, updated in 1982 with 821 and 822. Still, the computers at networks like CSNET received email and users dialed into those computers to read the email they stored. Remembering the name of the computer to send mail to was still difficult.

By 1986 we also got the concept routing mail in RFC 974 from Craig Partridge. Here we got the first MX record. Those are DNS records that define the computer that received mail for a given domain name. So stanford.edu had a single computer that accepted mail for the university. These became known as mail servers. As the use of mail grew and reliance on mail increased, some had multiple mail servers for fault tolerance, for different departments, or to split the load between servers. We also saw some split various messaging roles up. A mail transfer agent, or MTA, sent mail between different servers. The received field in the header is stamped with the time the server acting as the MTA got an email. MTAs mostly used port 25 to transfer mail until SSL was introduced when port 587 started to be used for encrypted connections.

Bandwidth and time on these computers was expensive. There was a cost to make a phone call to dial into a mail provider and providers often charged by the minute. So people also wanted to store their mail offline and then dial in to send messages and receive messages. Close enough to instant communication. So software was created to manage email storage, which we call a mail client or more formally a Mail User Agent, or MUA. This would be programs like Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail today or even a web mail client as with Gmail. POP, or Post Office Protocol was written to facilitate that transaction in 1984. Receive mail over POP and send over SMTP. POP evolved over the years with POPv3 coming along in 1993.

At this point we just needed a username and the domain name to send someone a message. But the number of messages was exploding. As were the needs. Let’s say a user needed to get their email on two different computers. POP mail needed to know to leave a copy of messages on servers. But then those messages all showed up as new on the next computer. So Mark Crispin developed IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, in 1986, which left messages on the server and by IMAPv4 in the 1990s, was updated to the IMAPv4 we use today. Now mail clients had a few different options to use when accessing mail.

Those previous RFCs focused on mail itself and the community could use tools like FTP to get files. But over time we also wanted to add attachments to emails so MIME, or Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions became a standard with RFC 1341 in 1993. Those mail and RFC standards would evolve over the years to add better support for encapsulations and internationalization.

With the more widespread use of electronic mail, the words were shortened and to email and became common in everyday conversations. With the necessary standards, the next few years saw a number of private vendors jump on the internet bandwagon and invest in providing mail to customers America Online added email in 1993, Echomail came along in 1994, Hotmail added advertisements to messages, launching in 1996, and Yahoo added mail in 1997. All of the portals added mail within a few years.

The age of email kicked into high gear in the late 1990s, reaching 55 million users in 1997 and 400 million by 1999. During this time having an email address went from a luxury or curiosity to a societal and business expectation, like having a phone might be today. We also started to rely on digital contacts and calendars, and companies like HP released Personal Information Managers, or PIMs. Some companies wanted to sync those the same way they did email, so Microsoft Exchange was launched in 1996. That original concept went all the way back to PLATO in the 1960s with Dave Wooley’s PLATO NOTES and was Ray Ozzie’s inspiration when he wrote the commercial product that became Lotus Notes in 1989. Microsoft inspired Google who in turn inspired Microsoft to take Exchange to the cloud with Outlook.com.

It hadn’t taken long after the concept of sending mail between computers was possible that we got spam. Then spam blockers and other technology to allow us to stay productive despite the thousands of messages from vendors desperately trying to sell us their goods through drip campaigns. We’ve even had legislation to limit the amount of spam, given that at one point over 9 out of 10 emails was spam. Diligent efforts have driven that number down to just shy of a third at this point.

Email is now well over 40 years old and pretty much ubiquitous around the world. We’ve had other tools for instant messaging, messaging within every popular app, and group messaging products like bulletin boards online and now group instant messaging products like Slack and Microsoft Teams. We even have various forms of communication options integrated with one another. Like the ability to initiate a video call within Slack or Teams. Or the ability to toggle the Teams option when we send an invitation for a meeting in Outlook. Every few years there’s a new communication medium that some think will replace email. And yet email is as critical to our workflows today as it ever was.

Teleprinters, sometimes referred to as teletypes based on the dominance of the Tyletype corporation in their hayday, are devices that send or receive written transmissions over a wire or over radios. Those have evolved over time to include text and images. And while it may seem as though their development corresponds to the telegraph, that’s true only so far as discoveries in electromagnetism led to the ability to send tones or pules over wires once there was a constant current.

That story of the teletype evolved through a number of people in the 1800s. The modern telegraph was invented in 1835 and taken to market a few years later. Soon after that, we were sending written messages encoded and typed on what we called a teletype machine, or teletypewriter if you will. Those were initially invented by a German inventor, Friedrich König in 1837, the same year Cooke and Wheatstone got their patent on telgraphy in England, and a few years before they patented automatic printing.

König figured out how to send messages over about 130 miles. Parts of the telegraph were based on his work. But he used a wire per letter of the alphabet and Samuel Morse used a single wire and encoded messages with the Morse code he developed.

Alexander Bain developed a printing telegraph that used electromagnets that turned clockworks. But keep in mind that these were still considered precision electronics at the time and human labor to encode, signal, receive, and decode communications were still cheaper. Therefore, the Morse telegraph service that went operational in 1846 became the standard.

Meanwhile Royal Earl House built a device that used piano keyboards to send letters, which had a shift register to change characters being sent. Thus predating the modern typewriter, developed in 1878, by decades. Yet, while humans were cheaper, machines were less prone to error, unless of course they broke down.

Then David Edward Hughes developed the first commercial teletype machine known as the Model 11 in 1855 to 1856. A few small telegraph companies then emerged to market the innovation, including Wester Union Telegraph company.

Picking up where Morse left off, Émile Baudot developed a code that consisted of five units, that became popular in France and spread to England in 1897 before spreading to the US. That’s when Donald Murray added punching data into paper tape for transmissions and incremented the Baudot encoding scheme to add control characters like carriage returns and line feeds. And some of the Baudot codes and Murray codes are still in use.

The ideas continued to evolve. In 1902, Charles Krum invented something he called the teletypewriter, picking up on the work started by Frank Pearne and funded by Joy Morton of the Morton Salt company. He filed a patent for his work. He and Morton then formed a new company called the Morkrum Printing Telegraph. Edward Kleinschmidt had filed a similar patent in 1916 so they merged the two companies into the Morkrump-Kleinschmidt Company in 1925 but to more easily market their innovation changed the name to the Teletype Corporation in 1928, then selling to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company, or AT&T, for $30M. And so salt was lucrative, but investing salt money netted a pretty darn good return as well.

Teletype Corporation produced a number of models over the next few decades. The Model 15 through 35 saw an increase in the speed messages could be sent and improved encoding techniques. As the typewriter became a standard, the 8.5 by 11 inch came as a means of being most easily compatible for those typewriters. The A standard was developed so A0 is a square meter, A1 is half that, A2, half that, and so on, with A4 becoming a standard paper size in Europe. But teletypes often had continual feeds and so while they had the same width in many cases, paper moved from a small paper tape to a longer roll of paper cut the same size as letter paper.

Decades after Krum was out of the company, the US Naval Observatory built what they called a Krum TTY to transmit data over radio, naming their device after him. Now, messages could be sent over a telegraph wire and wirelessly.

Thus by 1966 when the Inktronic shipped and printed 1200 characters a minute, it was able to print in baud or ASCII, which Teletype had developed for guess who, the Navy. But they had also developed a Teletype they called the Dataspeed with what we think of as a modem today, which evolved into the Teletype 33, the first Teletype to be consistently used with a computer. The teletype could send data to a computer and receive information that was printed in the same way information would be sent to another teletype operator who would respond in a printout. Another teletype with the same line receives that signal. When hooked to a computer though, the operator presses one of the keys on the teletype keyboard, it transmits an electronic signal.

Over time, those teletypes could be installed on the other side of a phone line. And if a person could talk to a computer, why couldn’t two computers talk to one another? ASCII was initially published in 1963 so computers could exchange information in a standardized fashion. Bell Labs was involved and so it’s no surprise we saw ASCII show up within just a couple of years on the Teletype.

ASCII was a huge win. Teletype sold over 600,000 of the 32s and 33s. Early video screens cost over $10,000 so interactive computing meant sending characters to a computer, which translated the characters into commands, and those into machine code. But the invention of the integrated circuit, MOSFET, and microchip dropped those prices considerably.

When screens dropped in price enough, and Unix came along in 1971, also from the Bell system, it’s no surprised that the first shells were referred to as TTY, short for teletype. After all, the developers and users were often literally using teletypes to connect. As computing companies embraced time sharing and added the ability to handle multiple tasks those evolved into the ability to invoke multiple TTY sessions as a given user, thus while waiting for a task to complete we could do another task. And so we got tty1, tty2, tty3, etc.

The first GUIs were then effectively macros or shell scripts that were called by clicking a button. And those evolved so they weren’t obfuscating the shell but instead now we open a terminal emulator in most modern operating systems not to talk to the shell directly but to send commands to the emulator that interprets them in more modern languages. And yet run tty and we can still see the “return user’s terminal name” to quote the man page.

Today we interact with computers in a very different way than we did over teletypes. We don’t send text and receive the output in a a print-out any longer. Instead we use monitors that allow us to use keyboards to type out messages through the Internet as we do over telnet and then ssh using either binary or ASCII codes.

The Teletype and typewriter evolved into today's keyboard, which offers a faster and more efficient way to communicate. Those early CTSS then Unix C programs that evolved into ls and ssh and cat are now actions performed in graphical interfaces or shells. The last remaining teletypes are now used in airline telephone systems. And following the breakup of AT&T, Teletype Corporation need finally in 1990, as computer terminals evolved into a different direction. Yet we still see their remnants in everyday use.

It’s human nature to make everything we do competitive. I’ve played football, ran track at times, competed in hacking competitions at Def Con, and even participated in various gaming competitions like Halo tournaments. I always get annihilated by kids who had voices that were cracking, but I played!

Humans have been competing in sports for thousands of years. The Lascaux in France shows people sprinting over 15,000 years ago. The Egyptians were bowling in the 5,000s BCE. The Sumerians were wrestling 5,000 years ago. Mesopotamian art shows boxing in the second or third millennium BCE. The Olmecs in Mesoamerican societies were playing games with balls around the same time.

Egyptian monuments show a number of individual sports being practiced in Egypt as far back as 2,000 BCE. The Greeks evolved the games first with the Minoans and Mycenaeans between 1,500 BCE and 1,000BCE and then they first recorded their Olympic games in 776 BCE, although historians seem to agree the games were practiced at least 500 years before that evolving potentially from funeral games.

Sports competitions began as ways to showcase an individuals physical prowess. Weight lifting, discus, whether individual or team sports, sports rely on physical strength, coordination, repetitive action, or some other feat that allows one person or team to stand out.

Organized team sports first appeared in ancient times. The Olmecs in Mesoamerica but Hurling supposedly evolved past 1000 BCE, although written records of that only begin around the 16th century and it could be that was borrowed through the Greek game harpaston when the Romans evolved it into the game harpastum and it spread with Roman conquests. But the exact rules and timelines of all of these are lost to written history. Instead, written records back up that western civilization team sports began with polo appearing about 2,500 years ago in Persia. The Chinese gave us a form of kickball they called cuju, around 200 BCE. Football, or soccer for the American listeners, started in 9th century England but evolved into the game we think of today in the 1850s, then a couple of decades later to American football. Meanwhile, cricket came around in the 16th century and then hockey and baseball came along in the mid 1800s with basketball arriving in the 1890s. That’s also around the same time the modern darts game was born, although that started in the Middle Ages when troops threw arrows or crossbow bolts at wine barrels turned on their sides or sections of tree trunks.

Many of these sports are big business today, netting multi-billion dollar contracts for media rights to show and stream games, naming rights to stadiums for hundreds of millions, and players signing contracts for hundreds of millions across all major sports. There’s been a sharp increase in sports contracts since the roaring 1920s, rising steadily until the television started to show up in homes around the world until ESPN solidified a new status in our lives when it was created in 1979. Then came the Internet and the money got crazy town.

All that money leads the occasional entrepreneurial minded sports enthusiast to try something new. We got the World Wrestling Body in the 1950s, which evolved out of Jim McMahon’s father’s boxing promotions put him working with Toots Mondt on what they called Western Style Wrestling. Beating people up has been around since the dawn of life but became an official sport when UFC 1 was launched in 1993. We got the XFL in 1999. So it’s no surprise that we would take a sport that requires hand-eye coordination and turn that into a team endeavor. That’s been around for a long time, but we call it Esports today.

Video Game Competitions Competing in video games is as almost as old as, well, video games. Spacewar! was written in 1962 and students from MIT competed with one another for dominance of deep space, dogfighting little ships, which we call sprites today, into oblivion. The game spread to campuses and companies as the PDP minicomputers spread. Countless hours spent playing and by 1972, there were enough players that they held the first Esports competition, appropriately called the Intergalactic Spacewar! Olympics. Of course, Steward Brand would report on that for Rolling Stone, having helped Mouse inventor Doug Englebart with the “Mother of All Demos” just four years before.

Pinball had been around since the 1930s, or 1940s with flippers. They could be found around the world by the 1970s and 1972 was also the first year there was a Pinball World Champion. So game leagues were nothing new. But Brand and others, like Atari founder Nolan Bushnell knew that video games were about to get huge.

Tennis was invented in the 1870s in England and went back to 11th century France. Tennis on a screen would make loads of sense as well when Tennis For Two debuted in 1958. So when Pong came along in 1972, the world (and the ability to mass produce technology) was ready for the first video game hit. So when people flowed into bars first in the San Francisco Bay Area, then around the country to play Pong, it’s no surprise that people would eventually compete in the game.

From competing in billiards to a big game console just made sense. Now it was a quarter a game instead of just a dart board hanging in the corner. And so when Pong went to home consoles of course people competed there as well.

Then came Space Invaders in 1978. By 1980 we got the first statewide Space Invaders competition, and 10,000 players showed up. The next year there was a Donkey Kong tournament and Billy Mitchell set the record for the game at 874,300 that stood for 18 years. We got the US National Video Game Team in 1983 and competitions for arcade games sprung up around the world. A syndicated television show called Starcade even ran to show competitions, which now we might call streaming. And Tron came in 1982. Then came the video game crash of 1983.

But games never left us. The next generation of consoles and arcade games gave us competitions and tournaments for Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat then first-person game like Goldeneye and other first-person shooters later in the decade, paving the way for games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. Then in 1998 a legendary StarCraft 2 tournament was held and 50 million people around the world tuned in on the Internet. That’s a lot of eyeballs.

Team options were also on the rise. Netter had been written to play over the Internet by 16 players at once. Within a few years, massive multiplayers could have hundreds of players duking it out in larger battle scenes. Some were recorded and posted to web pages. There was appetite for tracking scores for games and competing and even watching games, which we’ve all done over the shoulders of friends since the arcades and consoles of old.

Esports and Twitch As the 2000s came, Esports grew in popularity. Esports is short for the term electronic sports, and refers to competitive video gaming, which includes tournaments and leagues. Let’s set aside the earlier gaming tournaments and think of those as classic video games. Let’s reserve the term Esports for events held after 2001.

That’s because the World Cyber Games was founded in 2000 and initially held in 2001, in Seoul, Korea (although there was a smaller competition in 2000). The haul was $300,000 and events continue on through the current day, having been held in San Francisco, Italy, Singapore, and China. Hundreds of people play today. That started a movement.

Major League Gaming (MLG) came along in 2002 and is now regarded as one of the most significant Esports hosts in the world. The Electronic Sports World Cup came in 2003 were the first tournaments, which were followed by the introduction of ESL Intel Extreme Master in 2007 and many others. The USA Network broadcast their first Halo 2 tournament in 2006.

We’ve gone from 10 major tournaments held in 2000 to an incalculable number today. That means more teams. Most Esports companies are founded by former competitors, like Cloud9, 100 Thieves, and FaZeClan. Team SoloMid is the most valuable Esports organization. Launched by League of Legends star Dan Dinh and his brother in 2009, and is now worth over $400 million and has fielded teams like ZeRo for Super Smash Brothers, Excelerate Gaming for Rainbow Six Seige, Team Dignitas for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and even chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura.

The analog counterpart would be sports franchises. Most of those were started by athletic clubs or people from the business community. Gaming has much lower startup costs and thus far has been more democratic in the ability to start a team with higher valuations.

Teams play in competitions held by leagues, of which There seems to be new ones all the time. The NBA 2K League and the Overwatch League are two new leagues that have had early success. One reason for teams and leagues like this is naming and advertising rights. Another is events like The International 2021, with a purse of over $40M. The inaugural League of Legends World Championship took place in 2011. In 2013 another tournament was held in the Staples Center in Los Angeles (close to their US offices). Tickets for the event sold out within minutes. The purse for that was originally $100,000 and has since risen to over $7M. But others are even larger. Arena of Valor tournament Honor of Kings World Champion Cup is $7.7M and Fortnite World Cup Finals has gone as high as $15M.

One reason for the leagues and teams is that companies that make games want to promote their games. The video game business is almost an 86 billion dollar industry. Another is that people started watching other people play on YouTube. But then YouTube wasn’t really purpose-built for gaming. Streamers made due using cameras to stream images of themselves in a picture-in-picture frame but that still wasn’t optimal. Esports had been broadcast (the original form of streaming) before but streaming wasn't all that commercially successful until the birth of Twitch in 2011.

YouTube had come along in 2005 and Justin Kan and Emmett Shear created Justin.tv in 2007 as a place for people to broadcast video, or stream, online. They started with just one channel: Justin’s life. Like 24 by 7 life. They did Y Combinator and managed to land an $8M seed round. Justin had a camera mounted to his hat, and left that outside the bathroom since it wasn’t that kind of site. They made a video chat system and not only was he streaming, but he was interacting with people on the other side of the stream. It was like the Truman Show, but for reals.

A few more people joined up, but then came other sites to provide this live streaming option. They added forums, headlines, comments, likes, featured categories of channels, and other features but just weren’t hitting it. One aspect was doing really well: gaming. They moved that to a new site in 2011 and called that Twitch. This platform allowed players to stream themselves and their games. And they could interact with their viewers, which gave the entire experience a new interactive paradigm. And it grew fast with the whole thing being rebranded as Twitch in 2014.

Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for $1B. They made $2.3 Billion in 2020 with an average of nearly 3 million concurrent viewers watching nearly 19 billion hours of content provided monthly by nearly 9 million streamers. Other services like Youtube Gaming have come and gone but Twitch remains the main way people watch others game. ESPN and others still have channels for Esports, but Twitch is purpose-built for gaming. And watching others play games is no different than Greeks showing up for the Olympics or watching someone play pool or watching Liverpool play Man City. In fact, the money they make is catching up.

Platforms like Twitch allow professional gamers and those who announce the games to to become their own unique class of celebrities. The highest paid players have made between three and six million dollars, with the top 10 living outside the US and making their hauls from Dota 2. Others have made over a million playing games like Counter-Strike, Fortnite, League of Legends, and Call of Duty. None are likely to hold a record for any of those games for 18 years. But they are likely to diversify their sources of income. Add a YouTube channel, Twitch stream, product placements, and appearances - and a gamer could be looking at doubling what they bring in from competitions.

Esports has come far but has far further to go. The total Esports market was just shy of $1B in 2020 and expected tor each $2.5B in 2025 (which the pandemic may push even faster). Not quite the 100 million that watch the Super Bowl every year or the half billion that tune into the World Cup finals but growing at a faster rate than the Super Bowl, which has actually declined in the past few years. And the International Olympic Committee recognized the tremendous popularity of Esports throughout the world in 2017 and left open the prospect of Esports becoming an Olympic sport in the future (although with the number of vendors involved that’s hard to imagine happening).

Perhaps some day when archaeologists dig up what we’ve left behind, they’ll find some Egyptian Obelisk or gravestone with a controller and a high score. Although they’ll probably just scoff at the high score, since they already annihilated that when they first got their neural implants and have since moved on to far better games!

Twitch is young in the context of the decades of history in computing. However, the impact has been fast and along with Esports shows us a windows into how computing has reshaped entire ways we week not only entertainment, but also how we make a living. In fact, the US Government recognized League of Legends as a sport as early as 2013, allowing people to get Visas to come into the US and play. And where there’s money to be made, there’s betting and abuse. 2010 saw SaviOr and some of the best Starcraft players to ever play embroiled in a match-fixing scandal. That almost destroyed the Esports gaming industry. And yet as with the Video Game Crash of 1983, the industry has always bounced back, at magnitudes larger than before.

The Industrial Revolution gave us the rise of factories all over the world in the 1800s. Life was moving faster and we were engineering complex solutions to mass produce items. And many expanded from there to engineer complex solutions for simple problems. Cartoonist Heath Robinson harnessed the reaction from normal humans to this changing world in the forms of cartoons and illustrations of elaborate machines meant to accomplish simple tasks. These became known as “Heath Robinson contraptions” and were a reaction to the changing and increasingly complicated world order as much as anything. Just think of the rapidly evolving financial markets as one sign of the times! Following World War I, other cartoonists made similar cartoons. Like Rube Goldberg, giving us the concept of Rube Goldberg machines in the US.

And the very idea of breaking down simple operations into Boolean logic from those who didn’t understand the “why” would have seemed preposterous. I mean a wheel with 60 teeth or a complex series of switches and relays to achieve the same result? And yet with flip-flop circuits one would be able to process infinitely faster than it would take that wheel to turn with any semblance of precision. The Industrial Revolution of our data was to come.

And yet we were coming to a place in the world where we were just waking up to the reality of moving from analog to digital as Robinson passed away in 1944 with a series of electromechanical computers named after Robinson and then The Colossus. These came just one year after Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, two giants in the early history of computers, met at Bell Labs.

And a huge step in that transition was a paper by Alan Turing in 1936 called "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This would become the basis for a programmable computing machine concept and so before the war, Alan Turing had published papers about the computability of problems using what we now call a Turing machine - or recipes. Some of the work on that paper was inspired by Max Newman, who helped Turing go off to Princeton to work on all the maths, where Turing would get a PhD in 1938. He returned home and started working part-time at the Government Code and Cypher school during the pre-war buildup.

Hitler invaded Poland the next year, sparking World War II. The Poles had gotten pretty good with codebreaking, being situated right between world powers Germany and Russia and their ability to see troop movements through decrypted communications was one way they were able to keep forces in optimal locations. And yet the Germans got in there. The Germans had built a machine called the Enigma that also allowed their Navy to encrypt communications. Unable to track their movements, Allied forces were playing a cat and mouse game and not doing very well at it. Turing came up with a new way of decrypting the messages and that went into a new version of the Polish Bomba.

Later that year, the UK declared war on Germany. Turing’s work resulted in a lot of other advances in cryptanalysis throughout the war. But he also brought home the idea of an electromechanical machine to break those codes - almost as though he’d written a paper on building machines to do such things years before.

The Germans had given away a key to decrypt communications accidentally in 1941 and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park got to work on breaking the machines that used the Lorenz Cipher in new and interesting ways. The work had reduced the amount of losses - but they needed more people. It was time intensive to go through the possible wheel positions or guess at them, and every week meant lives lost. Or they needed more automation of people tasks… So they looked to automate the process.

Turing and the others wrote to Churchill directly. Churchill started his memo to General Ismay with “ACTION THIS DAY” and so they were able to get more bombes up and running. Bill Tutte and the codebreakers worked out the logic to process the work done by hand. The same number of codebreakers were able to a ton more work. The first pass was a device with uniselectors and relays. Frank Morrell did the engineering design to process the logic. And so we got the alpha test of an automation machine they called the Tunny. The start positions were plugged in by hand and it could still take weeks to decipher messages.

Max Newman, Turing’s former advisor and mentor, got tapped to work on the project and Turing was able to take the work of Polish code breakers and others and add sequential conditional probability to guess at the settings of the 12 wheels of an Enigma machine and thus get to the point they could decipher messages coming out of the German navy on paper. No written records indicate that Turing was involved much in the project beyond that.

Max Newman developed the specs, heavily influenced by Turing’s previous work. They got to work on an electro-mechanical device we now call the Heath Robinson. They needed to be able to store data. They used paper tape - which could process a thousand characters per second using photocell readers - but there were two and they had to run concurrently. Tape would rip and two tapes running concurrently meant a lot might rip.

Charles Wynn-Williams was a brilliant physicist who worked with electric waves since the late 1920s at Trinity College, Cambridge and was recruited from a project helping to develop RADAR because he’d specifically worked on electronic counters at Cambridge. That work went into the counting unit, counting how many times a function returned a true result.

As we saw with Bell Labs, the telephone engineers were looking for ways to leverage switching electronics to automate processes for the telephone exchange. Turing recommended they bring in telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to design the Combining unit, which used vacuum tubes to implement Boolean logic - much as the paper Shannon wrote in 1936 that he gave Turing over tea at Bell labs earlier 1943. It’s likely Turing would have also heard of the calculator George Stibitz of Bell Labs built out of relay switches all the way back in 1937. Slow but more reliable than the vacuum tubes of the era. And it’s likely he influenced those he came to help by collaborating on encrypted voice traffic and likely other projects as much if not more. Inspiration is often best found at the intersectionality between ideas and cultures.

Flowers looked to use vacuum tubes where the wheel patterns were produced. This gave one less set of paper tapes and infinitely more reliability. And a faster result. The programs were stored but they were programmable. Input was made using the shift registers from the paper tape and thyratron rings that simulated the bitstream for the wheels. There was a master control unit that handled the timing between the clock, signals, readouts, and printing. It didn’t predate the Von Neumann architecture. But it didn’t not.

The switch panel had a group of switches used to define the algorithm being used with a plug-board defining conditions. The combination provided billions of combinations for logic processing. Vacuum tube valves were still unstable but they rarely blew when on, it was the switching process. So if they could have the logic gates flow through a known set of wheel settings the new computer would be more stable. Just one thing - they needed 1,500 valves! This thing would be huge!

And so the Colossus Mark 1 was approved by W.G. Radley in 1943. It took 50 people 11 months to build and was able to compute wheel settings for ciphered message tapes. Computers automating productivity at its finest. The switches and plugs could be repositioned and so not only was Colossus able get messages decrypted in hours but could be reprogrammed to do other tasks.

Others joined and they got the character reading up to almost 10,000 characters a second. They improved on the design yet again by adding shift registers and got over four times the speeds. It could now process 25,000 characters per second.

One of the best uses was to confirm that Hitler got tricked into thinking the attack at Normandy at D-Day would happen elsewhere. And so the invasion of Normandy was safe to proceed. But the ability to reprogram made it a mostly universal computing machine - proving the Turing machine concept and fulfilling the dreams of Charles Babbage a hundred years earlier.

And so the war ended in 1945. After the war, The Colossus machines were destroyed - except the two sent to British GHCQ where they ran until 1960. So the simple story of Colossus is that it was a series of computers built in England from 1943 to 1945, at the heart of World War II. The purpose: cryptanalysis - or code breaking.

Turing went on to work on the Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory after the war and wrote a paper on the ACE - but while they were off to a quick start in computing in England having the humans who knew the things, they were slow to document given that their wartime work was classified.

ENIAC came along in 1946 as did the development of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. That same year Max Newman wrote to John Von Neumann (Wiener’s friend) about building a computer in England. He founded the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Victory University of Manchester, got Turing out to help and built the Manchester Baby, along with Frederic Williams and Thomas Kilburn. In 1946 Newman would also decline becoming Sir Newman when he rejected becoming an OBE, or Officer of the Order of the British Empire, over the treatment of his protege Turing not being offered the same. That’s leadership. They’d go on to collaborate on the Manchester Mark I and Ferranti Mark I. Turing would work on furthering computing until his death in 1954, from taking cyanide after going through years of forced estrogen treatments for being a homosexual. He has since been pardoned post

Following the war, Flowers tried to get a loan to start a computer company - but the very idea was ludicrous and he was denied. He retired from the Post Office Research Station after spearheading the move of the phone exchange to an electric, or what we might think of as a computerized exchange.

Over the next decade, the work from Claude Shannon and other mathematicians would perfect the implementation of Boolean logic in computers. Von Neumann only ever mentioned Shannon and Turing in his seminal 1958 paper called The Computer And The Brain. While classified by the British government the work on Colossus was likely known to Von Neumann, who will get his own episode soon - but suffice it to say was a physicist turned computer scientist and worked on ENIAC to help study and develop atom bombs - and who codified the von Neumann architecture.

We did a whole episode on Turing and another on Shannon, and we have mentioned the 1945 article As We May Think where Vannevar Bush predicted and inspired the next couple generations of computer scientists following the advancements in computing around the world during the war. He too would have likely known of the work on Colossus at Bletchley Park. Maybe not the specifics but he certainly knew of ENIAC - which unlike Colossus was run through a serious public relations machine.

There are a lot of heroes to this story. The brave men and women who worked tirelessly to break, decipher, and analyze the cryptography. The engineers who pulled it off. The mathematicians who sparked the idea. The arrival of the computer was almost deterministic. We had work on the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Iowa State, work at Bell Labs, Norbert Wiener’s work on anti-aircraft guns at MIT during the war, Konrad Zuse’s Z3, Colossus, and other mechanical and electromechanical devices leading up to it.

But deterministic doesn’t mean lacking inspiration. And what is the source of inspiration and when mixed with perspiration - innovation? There were brilliant minds in mathematics, like Turing. Brilliant physicists like Wynn-Williams. Great engineers like Flowers. That intersection between disciplines is the wellspring of many an innovation. Equally as important, then there’s a leader who can take the ideas, find people who align with a mission, and help clear roadblocks. People like Newman. When they have domain expertise and knowledge - and are able to recruit and keep their teams inspired, they can change the world. And then there are people with purse strings who see the brilliance and can see a few moves ahead on the chessboard - like Churchill. They make things happen.

And finally, there are the legions who carried on the work in theoretical, practical, and in the pure sciences. People who continue the collaboration between disciplines, iterate, and bring products to ever growing markets. People who continue to fund those innovations. It can be argued that our intrepid heroes in this story helped win a war - but that the generations who followed, by connecting humanity and bringing productivity gains to help free our minds to solve bigger and bigger problems will hopefully some day end war.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We hope to cover your contributions. Drop us a line and let us know how we can. And thank you so much for listening. We are so, so lucky to have you.