The History of Computing

The amount published in scientific journals has exploded over the past few hundred years. This helps in putting together a history of how various sciences evolved. And sometimes helps us revisit areas for improvement - or predict what’s on the horizon. The rise of computers often begins with stories of Babbage. As we’ve covered a lot came before him and those of the era were often looking to automate calculating increasingly complex mathematic tables.

Charles Babbage was a true Victorian era polymath. A lot was happening as the world awoke to a more scientific era and scientific publications grew in number and size. Born in London, Babbage loved math from an early age and went away to Trinity College in Cambridge in 1810. There he helped form the Analytical Society with John Herschel - a pioneer of early photography and a chemist and invented of the blueprint. And George Peacock, who established the British arm of algebraic logic, which when picked up by George Boole would go on to form part of Boolean algebra, ushering in the idea that everything can be reduced to a zero or a one.

Babbage graduated from Cambridge and went on to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and helped found the Royal Astronomical Society. He published works with Herschel on electrodynamics that went on to be used by Michael Faraday later and even dabbled in actuarial tables - possibly to create a data driven insurance company. His father passed away in 1827, leaving him a sizable estate. And after applying multiple times he finally became a professor at Cambridge in 1828.

He and the others from the Analytical Society were tinkering with things like generalized polynomials and what we think of today as a formal power series, all of which an be incredibly tedious and time consuming. Because it’s iterative. Pascal and Leibnitz had pushed math forward and had worked on the engineering to automate various tasks, applying some of their science. This gave us Pascal’s calculator and Leibnitz’s work on information theory and his calculus ratiocinator added a stepped reckoner, now called the Leibniz wheel where he was able to perform all four basic arithmetic operations. 

Meanwhile, Babbage continued to bounce around between society, politics, science, mathematics, and even coining a book on manufacturing where he looked at rational design and profit sharing. He also looked at how tasks were handled and made observations about the skill level of each task and the human capital involved in carrying them out. Marx even picked up where Babbage left off and looked further into profitability as a motivator. He also invented the pilot for trains and was involved with lots of learned people of the day.

Yet Babbage is best known for being the old, crusty gramps of the computer. Or more specifically the difference engine, which is different from a differential analyzer. A difference engine was a mechanical calculator that could perform polynomial functions. A differential analyzer on the other hand solves differential equations using wheels and disks. 

Babbage expanded on the ideas of Pascal and Leibniz and added to mechanical computing, making the difference engine, the inspiration of many a steampunk work of fiction. Babbage started work on the difference engine in 1819. Multiple engineers built different components for the engine and it was powered by a crank that spun a series of wheels, not unlike various clockworks available at the time. The project was paid for by the British Government who hoped it could save time calculating complex tables. Imagine doing all the work in spreadsheets manually. Each cell could take a fair amount of time and any mistake could be disastrous. 

But it was just a little before its time. The plans have been built and worked and while he did produce a prototype capable of raising numbers to the third power and perform some quadratic equations the project was abandoned in 1833. We’ll talk about precision in a future episode.

Again, the math involved in solving differential equations at the time was considerable and the time-intensive nature was holding back progress. So Babbage wasn’t the only one working on such ideas. Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis, known for the Coriolis effect, was studying the collisions of spheres and became a professor of mechanics in Paris. To aid in his works, he designed the first mechanical device to integrate differential equations in 1836. 

After Babbage scrapped his first, he moved on to the analytical engine, adding conditional branching, loops, and memory  - and further complicating the machine. The engine borrowed the punchcard tech from the Jacquard loom and applied that same logic, along with the work of Leibniz, to math. The inputs would be formulas, much as Turing later described when concocting some of what we now call Artificial Intelligence. Essentially all problems could be solved given a formula and the output would be a printer. The analytical machine had 1,000 numbers worth of memory and a logic processor or arithmetic unit that he called a mill, which we’d call a CPU today. He even planned on a programming language which we might think of as assembly today. All of this brings us to the fact that while never built, it would have been a Turing-complete in that the simulation of those formulas was a Turing machine. 

Ada Lovelace contributed the concept of Bernoulli numbers in algorithms giving us a glimpse into what an open source collaboration might some day look like. And she was in many ways the first programmer - and daughter of Lord Byron and Anne Millbanke, a math whiz. She became fascinated with the engine and ended up becoming an expert at creating a set of instructions to punch on cards, thus the first programmer of the analytical engine and far before her time. In fact, there would be no programmer for 100 years with her depth of understanding. Not to make you feel inadequate, but she was 27 in 1843. Luigi Menabrea took the idea to France. And yet by the time Babbage died in 1871 without a working model. 

During those years, Per Georg Scheutz built a number of difference engines based on Babbage’s published works - also funded by the government and would evolve to become the first calculator that could print. Martin Wiberg picked up from there and was able to move to 20 digit processing. George Grant at Harvard developed calculating machines and published his designs by 1876, starting a number of companies to fabricate gears along the way. 

James Thomson built a differential analyzer in 1876 to predict tides. And that’s when his work on fluid dynamics and other technology seemed to be the connection between these machines and the military. Thomson’s work would Joe added to work done by Arthur Pollen and we got our first automated fire-control systems. 

Percy Ludgate and Leonardo Torres wrote about Babbages work in the early years the 1900s and other branches of math needed other types of mechanical computing. Burroughs built a difference engine in 1912 and another in 1929.

The differential analyzer was picked up by a number of scientists in those early years. But Vaneevar Bush was perhaps one of the most important. He, with Harold Locke Hazen built one at MIT and published an article on it in 1931. Here’s where everything changes. The information was out there in academic journals. Bush published another in 1936 connecting his work to Babbage’s.

Bush’s designs get used by a number of universities and picked up by the the Balistic Research Lab in the US. One of those installations was in the same basement ENIAC would be built in. Bush did more than inspire other mathematicians. Sometimes he paid them. His research assistant was Claude Shannon, who built the General Purpose Analog Computer in 1941 and went on to become founder of the whole concept of information theory, down to the bits to bytes. Shannon’s computer was important as it came shortly after Alan Turing’s work on Turing machines and so has been seen as a means to get to this concept of general, programmable computing - basically revisiting the Babbage concept of a thinking, or analytical machine.

And Howard Aiken went a step further than mechanical computing and into electromechanical computing with he Mark I, where he referenced Babbage’s work as well. Then we got the Atanasoff-Berry Computer in 1942. By then, our friend Bush had gone on to chair the National Defense Research Committee where he would serve under Roosevelt and Truman and help develop radar and the Manhattan Project as an administrator where he helped coordinate over 5,000 research scientists. Some helped with ENIAC, which was completed in 1945, thus beginning the era of programmable, digital, general purpose computers.

Seeing how computers helped break Enigma machine encryption and solve the equations, blow up targets better, and solve problems that held science back was one thing - but  unleashing such massive and instantaneous violence as the nuclear bomb caused Bush to write an article for The Atlantic called As We May Think, that inspired generations of computer scientists. Here he laid out the concept of a Memex, or a general purpose computer that every knowledge worker could have. And thus began the era of computing. 

What we wanted to look at in this episode is how Babbage wasn’t an anomaly. Just as Konrad Zuse wasn’t. People published works, added to the works they read about, cited works, pulled in concepts from other fields, and we have unbroken chains in our understanding of how science evolves. Some,  like Konrad Zuse, might have been operating outside of this peer reviewing process - but he eventually got around to publishing as well.

Investors have pumped capital into emerging markets since the beginning of civilization. Egyptians explored basic mathematics and used their findings to build larger structures and even granaries to allow merchants to store food and serve larger and larger cities. Greek philosophers expanded on those learnings and applied math to learn the orbits of planets, the size of the moon, and the size of the earth. Their merchants used the astrolabe to expand trade routes. They studied engineering and so learned how to leverage the six simple machines to automate human effort, developing mills and cranes to construct even larger buildings. The Romans developed modern plumbing and aqueducts and gave us concrete and arches and radiant heating and bound books and the postal system. 

Some of these discoveries were state sponsored; others from wealthy financiers. Many an early investment was into trade routes, which fueled humanities ability to understand the world beyond their little piece of it and improve the flow of knowledge and mix found knowledge from culture to culture. 

As we covered in the episode on clockworks and the series on science through the ages, many a scientific breakthrough was funded by religion as a means of wowing the people. And then autocrats and families who’d made their wealth from those trade routes. Over the centuries of civilizations we got institutions who could help finance industry. 

Banks loan money using an interest rate that matches the risk of their investment. It’s illegal, going back to the Bible to overcharge on interest. That’s called usury, something the Romans realized during their own cycles of too many goods driving down costs and too few fueling inflation. And yet, innovation is an engine of economic growth - and so needs to be nurtured. 

The rise of capitalism meant more and more research was done privately and so needed to be funded. And the rise of intellectual property as a good. Yet banks have never embraced startups. 

The early days of the British Royal Academy were filled with researchers from the elite. They could self-fund their research and the more doing research, the more discoveries we made as a society. Early American inventors tinkered in their spare time as well. But the pace of innovation has advanced because of financiers as much as the hard work and long hours. Companies like DuPont helped fuel the rise of plastics with dedicated research teams. Railroads were built by raising funds. Trade grew. Markets grew. And people like JP Morgan knew those markets when they invested in new fields and were able to grow wealth and inspire new generations of investors. And emerging industries ended up dominating the places that merchants once held in the public financial markets. 

Going back to the Venetians, public markets have required regulation. As banking became more a necessity for scalable societies it too required regulation - especially after the Great Depression. And yet we needed new companies willing to take risks to keep innovation moving ahead., as we do today And so the emergence of the modern venture capital market came in those years with a few people willing to take on the risk of investing in the future.

John Hay “Jock” Whitney was an old money type who also started a firm. We might think of it more as a family office these days but he had acquired 15% in Technicolor and then went on to get more professional and invest. Jock’s partner in the adventure was fellow Delta Kappa Epsilon from out at the University of Texas chapter, Benno Schmidt. Schmidt coined the term venture capital and they helped pivot Spencer Chemicals from a musicians plant to fertilizer - they’re both nitrates, right? They helped bring us Minute Maid. and more recently have been in and out of Herbalife, Joe’s Crab Shack, Igloo coolers, and many others. But again it was mostly Whitney money and while we tend to think of venture capital funds as having more than one investor funding new and enterprising companies. 

And one of those venture capitalists stands out above the rest. Georges Doriot moved to the United States from France to get his MBA from Harvard. He became a professor at Harvard and a shrewd business mind led to him being tapped as the Director of the Military Planning Division for the Quartermaster General. He would be promoted to brigadier general following a number of massive successes in the research and development as part of the pre-World War II military industrial academic buildup. 

After the war Doriot created the American Research and Development Corporation or ARDC with the former president of MIT, Karl Compton, and engineer-turned Senator Ralph Flanders - all of them wrote books about finance, banking, and innovation. They proved that the R&D for innovation could be capitalized to great return. The best example of their success was Digital Equipment Corporation, who they invested $70,000 in in 1957 and turned that into over $350 million in 1968 when DEC went public, netting over 100% a year of return. Unlike Whitney, ARDC took outside money and so Doriot became known as the first true venture capitalist.

Those post-war years led to a level of patriotism we arguably haven’t seen since. John D. Rockefeller had inherited a fortune from his father, who built Standard Oil. To oversimplify, that company was broken up into a variety of companies including what we now think of as Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and Chevron. But the family was one of the wealthiest in the world and the five brothers who survived John Jr built an investment firm they called the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

We might think of the fund as a social good investment fund these days. Following the war in 1951, John D Rockefeller Jr endowed the fund with $58 million and in 1956, deep in the Cold War, the fund president Nelson Rockefeller financed a study and hired Henry Kissinger to dig into the challenges of the United States. And then came Sputnik in 1957 and a failed run for the presidency of the United States by Nelson in 1960. 

Meanwhile, the fund was helping do a lot of good but also helping to research companies Venrock would capitalize. The family had been investing since the 30s but Laurance Rockefeller had setup Venrock, a mashup of venture and Rockefeller. In Venrock, the five brothers, their sister, MIT’s Ted Walkowicz, and Harper Woodward banded together to sprinkle funding into now over 400 companies that include Apple, Intel, PGP, CheckPoint, 3Com, DoubleClick and the list goes on. Over 125 public companies have come out of the fund today with an unimaginable amount of progress pushing the world forward.

The government was still doing a lot of basic research in those post-war years that led to standards and patents and pushing innovation forward in private industry. ARDC caught the attention of a number of other people who had money they needed to put to work. Some were family offices increasingly willing to make aggressive investments. Some were started by ARDC alumni such as Charlie Waite and Bill Elfers who with Dan Gregory founded Greylock Partners. Greylock has invested in everyone from Red Hat to Staples to LinkedIn to Workday to Palo Alto Networks to Drobo to Facebook to Zipcar to Nextdoor to OpenDNS to Redfin to ServiceNow to Airbnb to Groupon to Tumblr to Zenprise to Dropbox to IFTTT to Instagram to Firebase to Wandera to Sumo Logic to Okta to Arista to Wealthfront to Domo to Lookout to SmartThings to Docker to Medium to GoFundMe to Discord to Houseparty to Roblox to Figma. Going on 800 investments just since the 90s they are arguably one of the greatest venture capital firms of all time. 

Other firms came out of pure security analyst work. Hayden, Stone, & Co was co-founded by another MIT grad, Charles Hayden, who made his name mining copper to help wire up the world in what he expected to be an increasingly electrified world. Stone was a Wall Street tycoon and the two of them founded a firm that employed Joe Kennedy, the family patriarch, Frank Zarb, a Chairman of the NASDAQ and they gave us one of the great venture capitalists to fund technology companies, Arthur Rock. 

Rock has often been portrayed as the bad guy in Steve Jobs movies but was the one who helped the “Traitorous 8” leave Shockley Semiconductor and after their dad (who had an account at Hayden Stone) mentioned they needed funding, got serial entrepreneur Sherman Fairchild to fund Fairchild Semiconductor. He developed tech for the Apollo missions, flashes, spy satellite photography - but that semiconductor business grew to 12,000 people and was a bedrock of forming what we now call Silicon Valley. Rock ended up moving to the area and investing. Parlaying success in an investment in Fairchild to invest in Intel when Moore and Noyce left Fairchild to co-found it. 

Venture Capital firms raise money from institutional investors that we call limited partners and invest that money. After moving to San Francisco, Rock setup Davis and Rock, got some limited partners, including friends from his time at Harvard and invested in 15 companies, including Teledyne and Scientific Data Systems, which got acquired by Xerox, taking their $257,000 investment to a $4.6 million dollar valuation in 1970 and got him on the board of Xerox. He dialed for dollars for Intel and raised another $2.5 million in a couple of hours, and became the first chair of their board. He made all of his LPs a lot of money.

One of those Intel employees who became a millionaire retired young. Mike Markulla invested some of his money and Rock put in $57,000 - growing it to $14 million and went on to launch or invest in companies and make billions of dollars in the process. 

Another firm that came out of the Fairchild Semiconductor days was Kleiner Perkins. They started in 1972, by founding partners Eugene Kleiner, Tom Perkins, Frank Caufield, and Brook Byers. Kleiner was the leader of those Traitorous 8 who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. He later hooked up with former HP head of Research and Development and yet another MIT and Harvard grad, Bill Perkins. Perkins would help Corning, Philips, Compaq, and Genentech - serving on boards and helping them grow. 

Caufield came out of West Point and got his MBA from Harvard as well. He’d go on to work with Quantum, AOL, Wyse, Verifone, Time Warner, and others.  Byers came to the firm shortly after getting his MBA from Stanford and started four biotech companies that were incubated at Kleiner Perkins - netting the firm over $8 Billion dollars. And they taught future generations of venture capitalists. People like John Doerr - who was a great seller at Intel but by 1980 graduated into venture capital bringing in deals with Sun, Netscape, Amazon, Intuit, Macromedia, and one of the best gambles of all time - Google. And his reward is a net worth of over $11 billion dollars. But more importantly to help drive innovation and shape the world we live in today. 

Kleiner Perkins was the first to move into Sand Hill Road. From there, they’ve invested in nearly a thousand companies that include pretty much every household name in technology. From there, we got the rise of the dot coms and sky-high rent, on par with Manhattan. Why? Because dozens of venture capital firms opened offices on that road, including Lightspeed, Highland, Blackstone, Accel-KKR, Silver Lake, Redpoint, Sequoia, and Andreesen Horowitz.

Sequoia also started in the 70s, by Don Valentine and then acquired by Doug Leone and Michael Moritz in the 90s. Valentine did sales for Raytheon before joining National Semiconductor, which had been founded by a few Sperry Rand traitors and brought in some execs from Fairchild. They were venture backed and his background in sales helped propel some of their earlier investments in Apple, Atari, Electronic Arts, LSI, Cisco, and Oracle to success. And that allowed them to invest in a thousand other companies including Yahoo!, PayPal, GitHub, Nvidia, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Zoom, and many others. 

So far, most of the firms have been in the US. But venture capital is a global trend. 

Masayoshi Son founded Softbank in 1981 to sell software and then published some magazines and grew the circulation to the point that they were Japan’s largest technology publisher by the end of the 80s and then went public in 1994. They bought Ziff Davis publishing, COMDEX, and seeing so much technology and the money in technology, Son inked a deal with Yahoo! to create Yahoo! Japan. They pumped $20 million into Alibaba in 2000 and by 2014 that investment was worth $60 billion. In that time they became more aggressive with where they put their money to work. They bought Vodafone Japan, took over competitors, and then the big one - they bought Sprint, which they merged with T-Mobile and now own a quarter of the combined companies. An important aspect of venture capital and private equity is multiple expansion. The market capitalization of Sprint more than doubled with shares shooting up over 10%. They bought Arm Limited, the semiconductor company that designs the chips in so many a modern phone, IoT device, tablet and even computer now.

As with other financial firms, not all investments can go great. SoftBank pumped nearly $5 billion into WeWork. Wag failed. 2020 saw many in staff reductions. They had to sell tens of billions in assets  to weather the pandemic. And yet with some high profile losses, they sold ARM for a huge profit, Coupang went public and investors in their Vision Funds are seeing phenomenal returns across over 200 companies in the portfolios.

Most of the venture capitalists we mentioned so far invested as early as possible and stuck with the company until an exit - be it an IPO, acquisition, or even a move into private equity. Most got a seat on the board in exchange for not only their seed capital, or the money to take products to market, but also their advice. In many a company the advice was worth more than the funding. For example, Randy Komisar, now at Kleiner Perkins, famously recommended TiVo sell monthly subscriptions, the growth hack they needed to get profitable.

As the venture capital industry grew and more and more money was being pumped into fueling innovation, different accredited and institutional investors emerged to have different tolerances for risk and different skills to bring to the table. Someone who built an enterprise SaaS company and sold within three years might be better served to invest in and advise another company doing the same thing. Just as someone who had spent 20 years running companies that were at later stages and taking them to IPO was better at advising later stage startups who maybe weren’t startups any more.

Here’s a fairly common startup story. After finishing a book on Lisp, Paul Graham decides to found a company with Robert Morris. That was Viaweb in 1995 and one of the earliest SaaS startups that hosted online stores - similar to a Shopify today. Viaweb had an investor named Julian Weber, who invested $10,000 in exchange for 10% of the company. Weber gave them invaluable advice and they were acquired by Yahoo! for about $50 million in stock in 1998, becoming the Yahoo Store. 

Here’s where the story gets different. 2005 and Graham decides to start doing seed funding for startups, following the model that Weber had established with Viaweb. He and Viaweb co-founders Robert Morris (the guy that wrote the Morris worm) and Trevor Blackwell start Y Combinator, along with Jessica Livingston. They put in $200,000 to invest in companies and with successful investments grew to a few dozen companies a year. They’re different because they pick a lot of technical founders (like themselves) and help the founders find product market fit, finish their solutions, and launch. And doing so helped them bring us Airbnb, Doordash, Reddit, Stripe, Dropbox and countless others.

Notice that many of these firms have funded the same companies. This is because multiple funds investing in the same company helps distribute risk. But also because in an era where we’ve put everything from cars to education to healthcare to innovation on an assembly line, we have an assembly line in companies. We have thousands of angel investors, or humans who put capital to work by investing in companies they find through friends, family, and now portals that connect angels with companies. 

We also have incubators, a trend that began in the late 50s in New York when Jo Mancuso opened a warehouse up for small tenants after buying a warehouse to help the town of Batavia. The Batavia Industrial Center provided office supplies, equipment, secretaries, a line of credit, and most importantly advice on building a business. They had made plenty of money on chicken coops and though that maybe helping companies start was a lot like incubating chickens and so incubators were born. 

Others started incubating. The concept expanded from local entrepreneurs helping other entrepreneurs and now cities, think tanks, companies, and even universities, offer incubation in their walls. Keep in mind many a University owns a lot of patents developed there and plenty of companies have sprung up to commercialize the intellectual property incubated there. Seeing that and how technology companies needed to move faster we got  accelerators like Techstars, founded by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis in 2006 out of Boulder, Colorado. They have worked with over 2,500 companies and run a couple of dozen programs. Some of the companies fail by the end of their cohort and yet many like Outreach and Sendgrid grow and become great organizations or get acquired.

The line between incubator and accelerator can be pretty slim today. Many of the earlier companies mentioned are now the more mature venture capital firms. Many have moved to a focus on later stage companies with YC and Techstars investing earlier. They attend the demos of companies being accelerated and invest. And the fact that founding companies and innovating is now on an assembly line, the companies that invest in an A round of funding, which might come after an accelerator, will look to exit in a B round, C round, etc. Or may elect to continue their risk all the way to an acquisition or IPO. 

And we have a bevy of investing companies focusing on the much later stages. We have private equity firms and family offices that look to outright own, expand, and either harvest dividends from or sell an asset, or company. We have traditional institutional lenders who provide capital but also invest in companies. We have hedge funds who hedge puts and calls or other derivatives on a variety of asset classes. Each has their sweet spot even if most will opportunistically invest in diverse assets.

Think of the investments made as horizons. The Angel investor might have their shares acquired in order to clean up the cap table, or who owns which parts of a company, in later rounds. This simplifies the shareholder structure as the company is taking on larger institutional investors to sprint towards and IPO or an acquisition.

People like Arthur Rock, Tommy Davis, Tom Perkins, Eugene Kleiner, Doerr, Masayoshi Son, and so many other has proven that they could pick winners. Or did they prove they could help build winners? Let’s remember that investing knowledge and operating experience were as valuable as their capital. Especially when the investments were adjacent to other successes they’d found.

Venture capitalists invested more than $10 billion in 1997. $600 million of that found its way to early-stage startups. But most went to preparing a startup with a product to take it to mass market. Today we pump more money than ever into R&D - and our tax systems support doing so more than ever. And so more than ever, venture money plays a critical role in the life cycle of innovation. Or does venture money play a critical role in the commercialization of innovation? Seed accelerators, startup studios, venture builders, public incubators, venture capital firms, hedge funds, banks - they’d all have a different answer. And they should. Few would stick with an investment like Digital Equipment for as long as ARDC did. And yet few provide over 100% annualized returns like they did. 

As we said in the beginning of this episode, wealthy patrons from Pharaohs to governments to industrialists to now venture capitalists have long helped to propel innovation, technology, trade, and intellectual property. We often focus on the technology itself in computing - but without the money the innovation either wouldn’t have been developed or if developed wouldn’t have made it to the mass market and so wouldn’t have had an impact into our productivity or quality of life. 

The knowledge that comes with those who provide the money can be seen with irreverence. Taking an innovation to market means market-ing. And sales. Most generations see the previous generations as almost comedic, as we can see in the HBO show Silicon Valley when the cookie cutter industrialized approach goes too far. We can also end up with founders who learn to sell to investors rather than raising capital in the best way possible, selling to paying customers.

But there’s wisdom from previous generations when offered and taken appropriately. A coachable founder with a vision that matches the coaching and a great product that can scale is the best investment that can be made. Because that’s where innovation can change the world.

Author Albert Cory joins the podcast in this episode to talk about his new book, Inventing the Future. Inventing the Future was a breath of fresh air from an inspirational time and person. Other books have told the story of how the big names in computing were able to commercialize many of the innovations that came out of Xerox PARC. But Inventing the Future adds a really personal layer that ties in the culture of the day (music, food, geography, and even interpersonal relationships) to what was happening in computing - that within a couple of decades would wildly change how we live our lives. 

We’re lucky he made the time to discuss his take on a big evolution in modern technology through the lens of historical fiction. I would absolutely recommend the book to academics and geeks and just anyone looking to expand their minds. And we look forward to having him on again!

Roy Allen opened his first root beer stand in 1919, in Lodi, California. He’d bought a recipe for root beer and boy, it sure was a hit. He brought in people to help. One was Frank Wright, who would become a partner in the endeavor and they’d change the name to A&W Root Beer, for their names, and open a restaurant in 1923 in Sacramento, California. Allen bought Wright back out in 1925, but kept the name. Having paid for the root beer license he decided to franchise out the use of that - but let’s not call that the first fast food chain just yet. After all, it was just a license to make root beer just like he’d bought the recipe all those years ago. 

A&W’s Allen sold the company in 1950 to retire. The franchise agreements moved from a cash payment to royalties. But after Allen the ownership of the company bounced around until it landed with United Fruit which would become United Brands, who took A&W to the masses and the root beer company was split from the restaurant chain with the chain eventually owned by Yum! Brands now nearly 1,000 locations and over $300M in revenues. 

White Castle 

As A&W franchised, some experimented with other franchising options or with not going that route at all. Around the same time Wright opened his first stand, Walt Anderson was running a few food stands around Witchita. He met up with Billy Ingram and in 1921 they opened the first White Castle, putting in $700 of their own money. By 1927 they expanded out to Indianapolis. As is often the case, the original cook with the concept sold out his part of the business in 1933 when they moved their headquarters to Columbus, Ohio and the Ingram family expanded all over the United States. Many a fast food chain is franchised but White Castle has stayed family owned and operates profitably not taking on debt to grow. 

Kentucky Fried Chicken 

KFC îs fried chicken. They sell some other stuff I guess. They were started by Harland Sanders in 1930 but as we see with a lot of these they didn’t start franchising until after the war. His big hack was to realize he needed to cook chicken faster to serve more customers and so he converted a pressure cooker into a pressure fryer, completely revolutionizing how food is fried. 

He perfected his original recipe in 1940 and by 1952 was able to parlay the success of his early success into franchising out what is now the second largest fast food chain in the world. But the largest is McDonald’s. 

McDonalds

1940 comes around and Richard and Maurice McDonald open a little restaurant called McDonalds. It was a drive-up barbecue joint in San Bernadino. But drive-in restaurants were getting competitive and while looking back at the business, they realized that four fifths of the sales were hamburgers. So they shut down for a bit and got rid of the car hops that were popular at the time, simplified the menu and trimmed out everything they could - getting down to less than 10 items on the menu. 

They were able to get prices down to 15 cent hamburgers using something they called the Speedee Service System. That was an assembly-line of food preparation that became the standard in the fast food industry over the next few decades. They also looked at industrial equipment and used that to add french fries and shakes, which finally unlocked an explosion of sales and profits doubled. 

But then the milkshake mixer salesman payed a visit to them in San Bernadino to see why the brothers need 8 of his mixers and was amazed to find they were, in fact, cranking out 48 shakes at a time with them. The assembly-line opened his eyes and he bought the rights to franchise the McDonalds concept opening his first one in Des Plaines, Illinois. One of the best growth hacks for any company is just to have an amazing sales and marketing arm. OK, so not a hack but just good business. And Ray Kroc will go down as one of the greatest. From those humble beginnings selling milkshake mixers he moved from licensing to buying the company outright for $2.7 million dollars in 1961. 

Another growth hack was to realize, thanks to a former VP at Tastee-Freez, that owning the real estate brought yet another revenue stream. A low deposit and a 20% or higher increase in the monthly spend would grow into a nearly 38 billion dollar revenue stream. 

The highway system was paying dividends to the economy. People were moving out to the suburbs. Cars were shipping in the highest volumes ever. They added the filet-o-fish and were exploding internationally in the 60s and 70s and now sitting on over 39,000 stores with about a $175 billion market cap with over $5 billion dollars in revenue.

Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives

Those post-war years were good to fast food. Anyone that’s been to a 50s themed restaurant can see the car culture on display and drive-ins were certainly a part of that. People were living their lives at a new pace to match the speed of those cars and it was a golden age of growth in the United States. The computer industry was growing right along with those diners, drive-ins, and dives. 

One company that started before World War II and grew fast was Dairy Queen, started in 1940 by John Fremont McCullough. He’d invented soft-serve ice cream in 1938 and opened the first Dairy Queen in Joliet, Illinois with his friend Sherb Noble, who’d been selling his soft-serve ice cream out of his shop for a couple of years. During those post-war 1950s explosive years they introduced the Dilly Bar and have now expanded to 6,800 locations around the world. 

William Rosenberg opened a little coffee shop in in Quincy, Massachusetts. As with the others in this story, he parlayed quick successes and started to sell franchises in 1955 and Dunkin’ Donuts grew to 12,400 locations. 

In-N-Out Burger started in 1948 as well, by Harry and Esther Snyder and while they’ve only expanded around the west coast of the US, they’ve grown to around 350 locations and stay family owned. 

Pizza Hut was started in 1958 in Wichita, Kanas. While it was more of a restaurant for a long time, it’s now owned by Yum! Brands and operates well over 18,000 locations. Yum! Also owns KFC and Taco Bell. Glen Bell served as a cook in World War II and moved to San Bernardino to open a drive-in hot dog stand in 1948. He sold it and started a taco stand, selling them for 19 cents a piece, expanding to three locations by 1955 and went serial entrepreneur - selling those locations and opening four new ones he called El Tacos down in Long Beach. He sold that to his partner in 1962 and started his first Taco Bell, finally ready to start selling franchises in 1964 and grew it to 100 restaurants by 1967. 

They took Taco Bell public in 1970 when they had 325 locations. And Pepsi bought the 868 location in 1978 for $125 million in stock, eventually spinning the food business off to what is now called Yum! Brands and co-branding with cousin restaurants in that portfolio - Pizza Hut and Long John Silver’s. I haven’t been to a Long John Silver’s since I was a kid but they still have over a thousand locations and date back to a hamburger stand started in 1929 that over the years pivoted to a roast beef sandwich shop and pivoting many times until landing on the fish and chips concept in 1969. 

The Impact of Computing

It’s hard to imagine that any of these companies could have grown the way they did without more than an assembly-line of human automation. Mechanical cash registers had been around since the Civil War in the United States, with early patents filed in 1883 by Charles Kettering and James Ritty. Arguably the abacus and counting frame goes back way further but the Ritty Model I patent was sparked the interest of Jacob Eckert who bought the patent, added some features and took on $10,000 in debt to take the cash register to market, forming National Manufacturing Company. That became National Cash Register still a more than 6 billion dollar market cap company.

But the growth of IBM and other computing companies, the release of semiconductors, and the miniaturization and dropping costs of printed circuit boards helped lead to the advent of electronic cash registers. After all those are just purpose-built computers. IBM introduced the first point of sale system in 1973, bringing that cash register into the digital age. Suddenly a cash register could be in the front as a simplified terminal to send print outs or information to a screen in the back. 

Those IBM 3650s evolved to the first use of peer-to-peer client-server technology and ended up in Dillard’s in 1974. That same year McDonald’s had William Brobeck and Associates develop a microprocessor-based terminal. It was based on the Intel 8008 chip and used a simple push-button device to allow cashiers to enter orders. This gave us a queue of orders being sent by terminals in the front. And we got touchscreens registers in 1986, running on the Atari 520ST, with IBM introducing a 486-based system running on FlexOS. 

Credit Cards

As we moved into the 90s, fast food chains were spreading fast and the way we payed for goods was starting to change. All these electronic registers could suddenly send the amount owed over an electronic link to a credit card processing machine. 

John Biggins launched the Charg-it card in 1946 and it spread to Franklin National Bank a few years later. Diners Club Card picked up on the trend and launched the Diners Club Card in 1950, growing to 20,000 cardholders in 1951. American Express came along in 1958 with their card and in just five years grew to a million cards. Bank of America released their BankAmericard in 1958, which became the first general-purpose credit card. They started in California and went national in the first ten years. That would evolve into Visa by 1966 and by 1966 we got MasterCard as well. THat’s also the same year the Barclaycard brought credit cards outside the US for the first time, showing up first in England. Then Carte bleue in 67 in France and the Eurocard as a collaboration between the Wallenberg family and Interbank in 1968 to serve the rest of Europe.

Those spread and by the 90s we had enough people using them to reach a critical mass where fast food needed to take them as well. Whataburger and Carl’s Jr added the option in 1989, Arby’s in 1990,  and while slower to adopt taking cards, McDonald’s finally did so in 2002. We were well on our way to becoming a cashless society.

And the rise of the PC led to POS systems moving a little down-market and systems from and others like Aloha, designed in 1998 (now owned by NCR). And lots of other brands of devices as well as home-brewed tooling from large vendors.  

And computers helped revolutionize the entire organization. Chains could automate supply lines to stores with computerized supply chain management. Desktop computers also led to management functions being computerized in the back office, like scheduling and time clocks and so less managers were needed. That was happening all over post-War America by the 90s.

Post-War America 

In that era after World War II people were fascinated with having the same experiences over and over - and having them be identical. Think about it, before the war life was slower and every meal required work. After it was fast and the food always came out hot and felt like a suburban life, wherever you were. Even when that white flight was destroying city centers and the homogeneity leading to further centralized organizations dividing communities. 

People flocked to open these restaurants. They could make money, it was easier to get a loan to open a store with a known brand, there were high profit margins, and in a lot of cases, there was a higher chance of success than many other industries. This leads to even more homogeneity. That rang true for other types of franchising on the rise as well. Fast food became a harbinger of things to come and indicative of other business trends as well.

These days we think of high fructose corn syrup, fried food, and GMOs when we think of fast food. And that certainly led to the rise. People who eat fast food want that. Following the first wave of fast food we got other brands rising as well. Arby’s was founded in 1964, Subway in 1965, Wendy’s in 1969, Jack in the Box in 1961, Chick-fil-A in 1946, just a few miles from where I was born. And newer chains like Quiznos in 1981, Jimmy John’s in 1983, and Chipotle in 1993. These touch other areas of the market focusing on hotter, faster, or spicier. 

From the burger craze to the drive-in craze to just plain fast, fast food has been with us since long before anyone listening to this episode was born and is likely to continue on long after we’re gone. Love it or hate it, it’s a common go-to when we’re working on systems - especially far from home. 

And the industry continues to evolve. A barrier to opening any type of retail chain was once the point of sale system. Another was finding a way to accept credit cards. Stripe emerged to help with the credit cards and a cadre of tablet and app-based solutions for the iPhone, Android, and tablets emerged to help make taking credit cards simple for new businesses. A lot of the development was once put into upmarket solutions but these days downmarket is so much more approachable. And various fraud prevention machine learning algorithms and chip and pin technologies makes taking a credit card for a simple transaction safer than ever. 

The Future

The fast food and retail in general continues to evolve. The next evolution seems to be self-service. This is well underway but a number of companies are looking at kiosks to take orders and all those cashiers might find RFID tags as another threat to their jobs. If a machine can see what’s in a cart on the way out of a store there’s no need for cashiers. Here, we see the digitization as one wave of technology but given the inexpensive cost of labor we are just now seeing the cost of the technology come down to where it’s cheaper. Much as the cost of clockworks and then industrialization caused first the displacement of Roman slave labor and then workers in factories. Been to a parking ramp recently? That’s a controlled enough environment where the people were some of the first to be replaced with simple computers that processed first magnetic stripes and now license plates using simple character recognition technology.

Another revolution that has already begun is how we get the food. Grubhub launched in 2004, we got Postmates in 2011, and DoorDash came in 2013 to make it where we don’t even have to leave the house to get our burger fix. We can just open an app, use our finger print to check out, and have items show up at our homes often in less time than if we’d of gone to pick it up. And given that they have a lot of drivers and know exactly where they are, Uber attempted to merge with DoorDash in 2019, but that’s fine because they’d already launched Uber Eats in 2014. But DoorDash has about half that market at $2.9 billion in revenues for 2020 and that’s just with 18 million users - still less than 10% of US households. I guess that’s why DoorDash enjoys a nearly $60 billion market cap. We are in an era of technology empires.

And yet McDonald’s is only worth about three times what DoorDash is worth and guess which one is growing faster.

Empires come and go. 

The ability to manage an empire that scales larger than the technology and communications capabilities allows for was a downfall of many an empire - from Rome to Poland to the Russian Czarist empire. Each was profoundly changed by splitting up the empire as with Rome, becoming a pawn between neighboring empires, or even the development of an entirely new system of governance, as with Russia. Fast food employs four and a half million people in the US today, with another almost 10 million people employed globally. About half of those are adults. An industry that’s grown from revenues of just $6 billion to a half trillion dollar industry since just 1970. And those employees often make minimum wage. Think about this, that’s over twice the number of slaves as there were in the Roman Empire. Many of whom rose up to conquer the empire.

And the name of the game is automation. Has been since that McDonald’s Speedee Service System that enthralled Ray Kroc. But the human labor will some day soon be drastically cut. Just as the McDonald brothers cut car hops from their roster all those years ago. And that domino will knock down others in every establishment we walk into to pay for goods. Probably not in the next 5 years, but certainly in my lifetime. Job displacement due to technology is nothing new. It goes back past the Romans. But it is accelerating faster than at other points in history. And you have to wonder what kinds of socio, political, and economical repercussions we’ll have. Add in other changes around the world and the next few decades will be interesting to watch. 

The Internet is not a simple story to tell. In fact, every sentence here is worthy of an episode if not a few. 

Many would claim the Internet began back in 1969 when the first node of the ARPAnet went online. That was the year we got the first color pictures of earthen from Apollo 10 and the year Nixon announced the US was leaving Vietnam. It was also the year of Stonewall, the moon landing, the Manson murders, and Woodstock. A lot was about to change.

But maybe the story of the Internet starts before that, when the basic research to network computers began as a means of networking nuclear missile sites with fault-tolerant connections in the event of, well, nuclear war. Or the Internet began when a T3 backbone was built to host all the datas. Or the Internet began with the telegraph, when the first data was sent over electronic current. Or maybe the Internet began when the Chinese used fires to send messages across the Great Wall of China. Or maybe the Internet began when drums sent messages over long distances in ancient Africa, like early forms of packets flowing over Wi-Fi-esque sound waves. 

We need to make complex stories simpler in order to teach them, so if the first node of the ARPAnet in 1969 is where this journey should end, feel free to stop here. To dig in a little deeper, though, that ARPAnet was just one of many networks that would merge into an interconnected network of networks. We had dialup providers like CompuServe, America Online, and even The WELL. We had regional timesharing networks like the DTSS out of Dartmouth University and PLATO out of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. We had corporate time sharing networks and systems. Each competed or coexisted or took time from others or pushed more people to others through their evolutions. Many used their own custom protocols for connectivity. But most were walled gardens, unable to communicate with the others. 

So if the story is more complicated than that the ARPAnet was the ancestor to the Internet, why is that the story we hear? Let’s start that journey with a memo that we did an episode on called “Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” sent by JCR Licklider in 1963 and can be considered the allspark that lit the bonfire called The ARPANet. Which isn’t exactly the Internet but isn’t not. In that memo, Lick proposed a network of computers available to research scientists of the early 60s. Scientists from computing centers that would evolve into supercomputing centers and then a network open to the world, even our phones, televisions, and watches.

It took a few years, but eventually ARPA brought in Larry Roberts, and by late 1968 ARPA awarded an RFQ to build a network to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who would build Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPS were computers that connected a number of sites and routed traffic. The first IMP, which might be thought of more as a network interface card today, went online at UCLA in 1969 with additional sites coming on frequently over the next few years. That system would become ARPANET.

The first node of ARPAnet went online at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA for short). It grew as leased lines and more IMPs became more available. As they grew, the early computer scientists realized that each site had different computers running various and random stacks of applications and different operating systems. So we needed to standardize certain aspects connectivity between different computers. 

Given that UCLA was the first site to come online, Steve Crocker from there began organizing notes about protocols and how systems connected with one another in what they called RFCs, or Request for Comments. That series of notes was then managed by a team that included Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler from Stanford once Doug Engelbart’s project on the “Augmentation of Human Intellect” at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) became the second node to go online. SRI developed a Network Information Center, where Feinler maintained a list of host names (which evolved into the hosts file) and a list of address mappings which would later evolve into the functions of Internic which would be turned over to the US Department of Commerce when the number of devices connected to the Internet exploded. Feinler and Jon Postel from UCLA would maintain those though, until his death 28 years later and those RFCs include everything from opening terminal connections into machines to file sharing to addressing and now any place where the networking needs to become a standard. 

The development of many of those early protocols that made computers useful over a network were also being funded by ARPA. They funded a number of projects to build tools that enabled the sharing of data, like file sharing and some advancements were loosely connected by people just doing things to make them useful and so by 1971 we also had email. But all those protocols needed to flow over a common form of connectivity that was scalable. Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies were independently investigating packet switching and Roberts brought Kleinrock into the project as he was at UCLA. Bob Kahn entered the picture in 1972. He would team up with Vint Cerf from Stanford who came up with encapsulation and so they would define the protocol that underlies the Internet, TCP/IP. By 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote RFC 675 where they coined the term internet as shorthand for internetwork. The number of RFCs was exploding as was the number of nodes. The University of California Santa Barbara then the University of Utah to connect Ivan Sutherland’s work. The network was national when BBN connected to it in 1970. Now there were 13 IMPs and by 1971, 18, then 29 in 72 and 40 in 73. Once the need arose, Kleinrock would go on to work with Farouk Kamoun to develop the hierarchical routing theories in the late 70s.

By 1976, ARPA became DARPA. The network grew to 213 hosts in 1981 and by 1982, TCP/IP became the standard for the US DOD and in 1983, ARPANET moved fully over to TCP/IP. And so TCP/IP, or Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is the most dominant networking protocol on the planet. It was written to help improve performance on the ARPAnet with the ingenious idea to encapsulate traffic. But in the 80s, it was just for researchers still. That is, until NSFNet was launched by the National Science Foundation in 1986. 

And it was international, with the University College of London connecting in 1971, which would go on to inspire a British research network called JANET that built their own set of protocols called the Colored Book protocols. And the Norwegian Seismic Array connected over satellite in 1973. So networks were forming all over the place, often just time sharing networks where people dialed into a single computer.

Another networking project going on at the time that was also getting funding from ARPA as well as the Air Force was PLATO. Out of the University of Illinois, was meant for teaching and began on a mainframe in 1960. But by the time ARPAnet was growing PLATO was on version IV and running on a CDC Cyber. The time sharing system hosted a number of courses, as they referred to programs. These included actual courseware, games, convent with audio and video, message boards, instant messaging, custom touch screen plasma displays, and the ability to dial into the system over lines, making the system another early network. In fact, there were multiple CDC Cybers that could communicate with one another. And many on ARPAnet also used PLATO, cross pollinating non-defense backed academia with a number of academic institutions. 

The defense backing couldn’t last forever. The Mansfield Amendment in 1973 banned general research by defense agencies. This meant that ARPA funding started to dry up and the scientists working on those projects needed a new place to fund their playtime. Bob Taylor split to go work at Xerox, where he was able to pick the best of the scientists he’d helped fund at ARPA. He helped bring in people from Stanford Research Institute, where they had been working on the oNLineSystem, or NLS and people like Bob Metcalfe who brought us Ethernet and better collusion detection. Metcalfe would go on to found 3Com a great switch and network interface company during the rise of the Internet.

But there were plenty of people who could see the productivity gains from ARPAnet and didn’t want it to disappear. And the National Science Foundation (NSF) was flush with cash. And the ARPA crew was increasingly aware of non-defense oriented use of the system. So the NSF started up a little project called CSNET in 1981 so the growing number of supercomputers could be shared between all the research universities. It was free for universities that could get connected and from 1985 to 1993 NSFNET, surged from 2,000 users to 2,000,000 users. Paul Mockapetris made the Internet easier than when it was an academic-only network by developing the Domain Name System, or DNS, in 1983. That’s how we can call up remote computers by names rather than IP addresses. And of course DNS was yet another of the protocols in Postel at UCLAs list of protocol standards, which by 1986 after the selection of TCP/IP for NSFnet, would become the standardization body known as the IETF, or Internet Engineering Task Force for short. Maintaining a set of protocols that all vendors needed to work with was one of the best growth hacks ever. No vendor could have kept up with demand with a 1,000x growth in such a small number of years.

NSFNet started with six nodes in 1985, connected by LSI-11 Fuzzball routers and quickly outgrew that backbone. They put it out to bid and Merit Network won out in a partnership between MCI, the State of Michigan, and IBM. Merit had begun before the first ARPAnet connections went online as a collaborative effort by Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and the University of Michigan. They’d been connecting their own machines since 1971 and had implemented TCP/IP and bridged to ARPANET. The money was getting bigger, they got $39 million from NSF to build what would emerge as the commercial Internet. 

They launched in 1987 with 13 sites over 14 lines. By 1988 they’d gone nationwide going from a 56k backbone to a T1 and then 14 T1s. But the growth was too fast for even that. They re-engineered and by 1990 planned to add T3 lines running in parallel with the T1s for a time. By 1991 there were 16 backbones with traffic and users growing by an astounding 20% per month. 

Vint Cerf ended up at MCI where he helped lobby for the privatization of the internet and helped found the Internet Society in 1988. The lobby worked and led to the the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act in 1992. Before that, use of NSFNET was supposed to be for research and now it could expand to non-research and education uses. This allowed NSF to bring on even more nodes. And so by 1993 it was clear that this was growing beyond what a governmental institution whose charge was science could justify as “research” for any longer. 

By 1994, Vent Cerf was designing the architecture and building the teams that would build the commercial internet backbone at MCI. And so NSFNET began the process of unloading the backbone and helped the world develop the commercial Internet by sprinkling a little money and know-how throughout the telecommunications industry, which was about to explode. NSFNET went offline in 1995 but by then there were networks in England, South Korea, Japan, Africa, and CERN was connected to NSFNET over TCP/IP. And Cisco was selling routers that would fuel an explosion internationally. There was a war of standards and yet over time we settled on TCP/IP as THE standard. 

And those were just some of the nets. The Internet is really not just NSFNET or ARPANET but a combination of a lot of nets. At the time there were a lot of time sharing computers that people could dial into and following the release of the Altair, there was a rapidly growing personal computer market with modems becoming more and more approachable towards the end of the 1970s. You see, we talked about these larger networks but not hardware. 

The first modulator demodulator, or modem, was the Bell 101 dataset, which had been invented all the way back in 1958, loosely based on a previous model developed to manage SAGE computers. But the transfer rate, or baud, had stopped being improved upon at 300 for almost 20 years and not much had changed. That is, until Hayes Hayes Microcomputer Products released a modem designed to run on the Altair 8800 S-100 bus in 1978. Personal computers could talk to one another. 

And one of those Altair owners was Ward Christensen met Randy Suess at the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange and the two of them had this weird idea. Have a computer host a bulletin board on one of their computers. People could dial into it and discuss their Altair computers when it snowed too much to meet in person for their club. They started writing a little code and before you know it we had a tool they called Computerized Bulletin Board System software, or CBBS. The software and more importantly, the idea of a BBS spread like wildfire right along with the Atari, TRS-80, Commodores and Apple computers that were igniting the personal computing revolution.

The number of nodes grew and as people started playing games, the speed of those modems jumped up with the v.32 standard hitting 9600 baud in 84, and over 25k in the early 90s. By the early 1980s, we got Fidonet, which was a network of Bulletin Board Systems and by the early 90s we had 25,000 BBS’s. And other nets had been on the rise. And these were commercial ventures.

The largest of those dial-up providers was America Online, or AOL. AOL began in 1985 and like most of the other dial-up providers of the day were there to connect people to a computer they hosted, like a timesharing system, and give access to fun things. Games, news, stocks, movie reviews, chatting with your friends, etc. There was also CompuServe, The Well, PSINet, Netcom, Usenet, Alternate, and many others. Some started to communicate with one another with the rise of the Metropolitan Area Exchanges who got an NSF grant to establish switched ethernet exchanges and the Commercial Internet Exchange in 1991, established by PSINet, UUNet, and CERFnet out of California. 

Those slowly moved over to the Internet and even AOL got connected to the Internet in 1989 and thus the dial-up providers went from effectively being timesharing systems to Internet Service Providers as more and more people expanded their horizons away from the walled garden of the time sharing world and towards the Internet. The number of BBS systems started to wind down. All these IP addresses couldn’t be managed easily and so IANA evolved out of being managed by contracts from research universities to DARPA and then to IANA as a part of ICANN and eventually the development of Regional Internet Registries so AFRINIC could serve Africa, ARIN could serve Antarctica, Canada, the Caribbean, and the US, APNIC could serve South, East, and Southeast Asia as well as Oceania LACNIC could serve Latin America and RIPE NCC could serve Europe, Central Asia, and West Asia. By the 90s the Cold War was winding down (temporarily at least) so they even added Russia to RIPE NCC.

And so using tools like WinSOCK any old person could get on the Internet by dialing up. Modems for dial-ups transitioned to DSL and cable modems. We got the emergence of fiber with regional centers and even national FiOS connections. And because of all the hard work of all of these people and the money dumped into it by the various governments and research agencies, life is pretty darn good. 

When we think of the Internet today we think of this interconnected web of endpoints and content that is all available. Much of that was made possible by the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in in 1991 at CERN, and Mosaic came out of the National Center for Supercomputing applications, or NCSA at the University of Illinois, quickly becoming the browser everyone wanted to use until Mark Andreeson left to form Netscape. Netscape’s IPO is probably one of the most pivotal moments where investors from around the world realized that all of this research and tech was built on standards and while there were some patents, the standards were freely useable by anyone. 

Those standards let to an explosion of companies like Yahoo! from a couple of Stanford grad students and Amazon, started by a young hedge fund Vice President named Jeff Bezos who noticed all the money pouring into these companies and went off to do his own thing in 1994. The companies that arose to create and commercialize content and ideas to bring every industry online was ferocious. 

And there were the researchers still writing the standards and even commercial interests helping with that. And there were open source contributors who helped make some of those standards easier to implement by regular old humans. And tools for those who build tools. And from there the Internet became what we think of today. Quicker and quicker connections and more and more productivity gains, a better quality of life, better telemetry into all aspects of our lives and with the miniaturization of devices to support wearables that even extends to our bodies. Yet still sitting on the same fundamental building blocks as before. The IANA functions to manage IP addressing has moved to the private sector as have many an onramp to the Internet. Especially as internet access has become more ubiquitous and we are entering into the era of 5g connectivity. 

And it continues to evolve as we pivot due to new needs and threats a globally connected world represent. IPv6, various secure DNS options, options for spam and phishing, and dealing with the equality gaps  surfaced by our new online world. We have disinformation so sometimes we might wonder what’s real and what isn’t. After all, any old person can create a web site that looks legit and put whatever they want on it. Who’s to say what reality is other than what we want it to be. This was pretty much what Morpheus was offering with his choices of pills in the Matrix. But underneath it all, there’s history. And it’s a history as complicated as unraveling the meaning of an increasingly digital world. And it is wonderful and frightening and lovely and dangerous and true and false and destroying the world and saving the world all at the same time. 

This episode is pretty simplistic and many of the aspects we cover have entire episodes of the podcast dedicated to them. From the history of Amazon to Bob Taylor to AOL to the IETF to DNS and even Network Time Protocol. It’s a story that leaves people out necessarily; otherwise scope creep would go all the way back to to include Volta and the constant electrical current humanity received with the battery. But hey, we also have an episode on that! And many an advance has plenty of books and scholarly works dedicated to it - all the way back to the first known computer (in the form of clockwork), the Antikythera Device out of Ancient Greece. Heck even Louis Gerschner deserves a mention for selling IBM’s stake in all this to focus on things that kept the company going, not moonshots. 

But I’d like to dedicate this episode to everyone not mentioned due to trying to tell a story of emergent networks. Just because they were growing fast and our modern infrastructure was becoming more and more deterministic doesn’t mean that whether it was writing a text editor or helping fund or pushing paper or writing specs or selling network services or getting zapped while trying to figure out how to move current that there aren’t so, so, so many people that are a part of this story. Each with their own story to be told. As we round the corner into the third season of the podcast we’ll start having more guests. If you have a story and would like to join us use the email button on thehistoryofcomputing.net to drop us a line. We’d love to chat!

Nearly everything is fine in moderation. Plastics exploded as an industry in the post World War II boom of the 50s and on - but goes back far further. A plastic is a category of materials called a polymer. These are materials comprised of long chains of molecules that can be easily found in nature because cellulose, the cellular walls of plants, comes in many forms. But while the word plastics comes from easily pliable materials, we don’t usually think of plant-based products as plastics. Instead, we think of the synthetic polymers.

But documented uses go back thousands of years, especially with early uses of natural rubbers, milk proteins, gums, and shellacs. But as we rounded the corner into the mid-1800s with the rise of chemistry things picked up steam. That’s when Charles Goodyear wanted to keep tires from popping and so discovered vulcanization as a means to treat rubber. Vulcanization is when rubber is heated and mixed with other chemicals like sulphur.

Then in 1869 John Wesley Hyatt looked for an alternative to natural ivory for things like billiards. He found that cotton fibers could be treated with camphor, which came from the waxy wood of camphor laurels. The substance could be shaped, dried, and then come off as most anything nature produced. When Wesley innovated plastics most camphor was extracted from trees, but today most camphor is synthetically produced from petroleum-based products, further freeing humans from needing natural materials to produce goods. Not only could we skip killing elephants but we could avoid chopping down forests to meet our needs for goods.

Leo Baekeland gave us Bakelite in 1907. By then we were using other materials and the hunt was on for all kinds of materials. Shellac had been used as a moisture sealant for centuries and came from the female lac bugs in trees around India but could also be used to insulate electrical components. Baekeland created a phenol and formaldehyde solution he called Novolak but as with the advent of steel realized that he could change the temperature and how much pressure was applied to the solution that he could make it harder and more moldable - thus Bakelite became the first fully synthetic polymer.

Hermann Staudinger started doing more of the academic research to explain why these reactions were happening. In 1920, he wrote a paper that looked at rubber, starch, and other polymers, explaining how their long chains of molecular units were linked by covalent bonds. Thus their high molecular weights. He would go on to collaborate with his wife Magda Voita, who was a bonanist and his polymer theories proven. And so plastics went from experimentation to science. 

Scientists and experimenters alike continued to investigate uses and by 1925 there was even a magazine called Plastics. They could add filler to Bakelite and create colored plastics for all kinds of uses and started molding jewelry, gears, and other trinkets. They could heat it to 300 degrees and then inject it into molds. And so plastic manufacturing was born. As with many of the things we interact with in our modern world, use grew through the decades and there were other industries that started to merge, evolve, and diverge. 

Éleuthère Irénée du Pont had worked with gunpowder in France and his family immigrated to the United States after the French Revolution. He’d worked with chemist Antoine Lavoisier while a student and started producing gunpowder in the early 1800s. That company, which evolved into the modern DuPont, always excelled in various materials sciences and through the 1920s also focused on a number of polymers. One of their employees, Wallace Carothers, invented neoprene and so gave us our first super polymer in 1928. He would go on to invent nylon as a synthetic form of silk in 1935. DuPont also brought us Teflon and insecticides in 1935.

Acrylic acid went back to the mid-1800s but as people were experimenting with combining chemicals around the same time we saw British chemists John Crawford and Rowland Hill and independently German Otto Röhm develop products based on polymathy methacrylate. Here, they were creating clear, hard plastic to be used like glass. The Brits called theirs Perspex and the Germans called theirs Plexiglas when they went to market, with our friends back at DuPont creating yet another called Lucite. 

The period between World War I and World War II saw advancements in nearly every science - from mechanical computing to early electrical switching and of course, plastics. The Great Depression saw a slow-down in the advancements but World War II and some of the basic research happening around the world caused an explosion as governments dumped money into build-ups. That’s when DuPont cranked out parachutes and tires and even got involved in building the Savannah Hanford plutonium plant as a part of the Manhattan Project. This took them away from things like nylon, which led to riots. We were clearly in the era of synthetics used in clothing. 

Leading up to the war and beyond, every supply chain of natural goods got constrained. And so synthetic replacements for these were being heavily researched and new uses were being discovered all over the place. Add in assembly lines and we were pumping out things to bring joy or improve lives at a constant clip. BASF had been making dyes since the 1860s but chemicals are chemicals and had developed polystyrene in the 1930s and continued to grow and benefit from both licensing and developing other materials like Styropor insulating foam. 

Dow Chemical had been founded in the 1800s by Herbert Henry Dow, but became an important part of the supply chain for the growing synthetics businesses, working with Corning to produce silicones and producing styrene and magnesium for light parts for aircraft. They too would help in nuclear developments, managing the Rocky Flats plutonium triggers plant and then napalm, Agent Orange, breast implants, plastic bottles, and anything else we could mix chemicals with. Expanded polystyrene led to plastics in cups, packaging, and anything else.

By the 60s we were fully in a synthetic world. A great quote from 1967’s “The Graduate” was “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” The future was here. And much of that future involved injection molding machines, now more and more common. Many a mainframe was encased in metal but with hard plastics we could build faceplates out of plastic. The IBM mainframes had lots of blinking lights recessed into holes in plastic with metal switches sticking out. Turns out people get shocked less when the whole thing isn’t metal. 

The minicomputers were smaller but by the time of the PDP-11 there were plastic toggles and a plastic front on the chassis. The Altair 8800 ended up looking a lot like that, but bringing that technology to the hobbyist. By the time the personal computer started to go mainstream, the full case was made of injection molding.

The things that went inside computers were increasingly plastic as well. Going back to the early days of mechanical computing, gears were made out of metal. But tubes were often mounted on circuits screwed to wooden boards. Albert Hanson had worked on foil conductors that were laminated to insulating boards going back to 1903 but Charles Ducas patented electroplating circuit patterns in 1927 and Austrian Paul Eisler invented printed circuits for radio sets in the mid-1930s. John Sargrove then figured out he could spray metal onto plastic boards made of Bakelite in the late 1930s and uses expanded to proximity fuzes in World War II and then Motorola helped bring them into broader consumer electronics in the early 1950s.

Printed circuit boards then moved to screen printing metallic paint onto various surfaces and Harry Rubinstein patented printing components, which helped pave the way for integrated circuits. Board lamination and etching was added to the process and conductive inks used in the creation might be etched copper, plated substrates or even silver inks as are used in RFID tags. We’ve learned over time to make things easier and with more precise machinery we were able to build smaller and smaller boards, chips, and eventually 3d printed electronics - even the Circuit Scribe to draw circuits.

Doug Engelbart’s first mouse was wood but by the time Steve Jobs insisted they be mass produceable they’d been plastic for Englebart and then the Alto. Computer keyboards had evolved out of the flexowriter and so become plastic as well. Even the springs that caused keys to bounce back up eventually replaced with plastic and rubberized materials in different configurations. 

Plastic is great for insulating electronics, they are poor conductors of heat, they’re light, they’re easy to mold, they’re hardy, synthetics require less than 5% of the oil we use, and they’re recyclable. Silicone, another polymer, is a term coined by the English chemist F.S. Kipping in 1901. His academic work while at University College, Nottingham would kickstart the synthetic rubber and silicone lubricant industries. But that’s not silicon. That’s an element and a tetravalent metalloid at that. Silicon was discovered in 1787 by Antoine Lavoisier. Yup the same guy that taught Du Pont. While William Shockley started off with germanium and silicon when he was inventing the transistor, it was Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce who realized how well it acted as an insulator or a semiconductor it ended up used in what we now think of as the microchip. But again, that’s not a plastic…

Plastic of course has its drawbacks. Especially since we don’t consume plastics in moderation. It takes 400 to a thousand years do decompose many plastics. The rampant use in every aspect of our lives has led to animals dying after eating plastic, or getting caught in islands of it as plastic is all over the oceans and other waterways around the world. That’s 5 and a quarter trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean that weighs a combined 270,000 tons with another 8 million pieces flowing in there each and every day. In short, the overuse of plastics is hurting our environment. Or at least our inability to control our rampant consumerism is leading to their overuse. They do melt at low temperatures, which can work as a good or bad thing. When they do, they can release hazardous fumes like PCBs and dioxins. Due to many of the chemical compounds they often rely on fossil fuels and so are derived from non-renewable resources. But they’re affordable and represent a trillion dollar industry. And we can all do better at recycling - which of course requires energy and those bonds break down over time so we can’t recycle forever. Oh and the byproducts from the creation of products is downright toxic.

We could argue that plastic is one of the most important discoveries in the history of humanity. That guy from The Graduate certainly would. We could argue it’s one of the worst. But we also just have to realize that our modern lives, and especially all those devices we carry around, wouldn’t be possible without plastics and other synthetic polymers. There’s a future where instead of running out to the store for certain items, we just 3d print them. Maybe we even make filament from printed materials we no longer need. The move to recyclable materials for packaging helps reduce the negative impacts of plastics. But so does just consuming less. Except devices. We obviously need the latest and greatest of each of those all the time! 

Here’s the thing, half of plastics are single-purpose. Much of it is packaging like containers and wrappers. But can you imagine life without the 380 million tons of plastics the world produces a year? Just look around right now. Couldn’t tell you how many parts of this microphone, computer, and all the cables and adapters are made of it. How many couldn’t be made by anything else. There was a world without plastics for thousands of years of human civilization. We’ll look at one of those single-purpose plastic-heavy industries called fast food in an episode soon. But it’s not the plastics that are such a problem. It’s the wasteful rampant consumerism. When I take out my recycling I can’t help but think that what goes in the recycling versus compost versus garbage is as much a symbol of who I want to be as what I actually end up eating and relying on to live. And yet, I remain hopeful for the world in that these discoveries can actually end up bringing us back into harmony with the world around us without reverting to luddites and walking back all of these amazing developments like we see in the science fiction dystopian futures.

The largest global power during the rise of intellectual property was England, so the world adopted her philosophies. The US had the same impact on software law.

Most case law that shaped the software industry is based on copyright law. Our first real software laws appeared in the 1970s and now have 50 years of jurisprudence to help guide us. This episode looks at the laws, supreme court cases, and some circuit appeals cases that shaped the software industry.

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In our previous episode we went through a brief review of how the modern intellectual property laws came to be. Patent laws flowed from inventors in Venice in the 1400s, royals gave privileges to own a monopoly to inventors throughout the rest of Europe over the next couple of centuries, transferred to panels and academies during and after the Age of Revolutions, and slowly matured for each industry as technology progressed. 

Copyright laws formed similarly, although they were a little behind patent laws due to the fact that they weren’t really necessary until we got the printing press. But when it came to data on a device, we had a case in 1908 we covered in the previous episode that led Congress to enact the 1909 Copyright Act. 

Mechanical music boxes evolved into mechanical forms of data storage and computing evolved from mechanical to digital. Following World War II there was an explosion in new technologies, with those in computing funded heavily by US government. Or at least, until we got ourselves tangled up in a very unpopular asymmetrical war in Vietnam. The Mansfield Amendment of 1969, was a small bill in the 1970 Military Authorization Act that ended the US military from funding research that didn’t have a direct relationship to a specific military function. Money could still flow from ARPA into a program like the ARPAnet because we wanted to keep those missiles flying in case of nuclear war. But over time the impact was that a lot of those dollars the military had pumped into computing to help develop the underlying basic sciences behind things like radar and digital computing was about to dry up. This is a turning point: it was time to take the computing industry commercial. And that means lawyers.

And so we got the first laws pertaining to software shortly after the software industry emerged from more and more custom requirements for these mainframes and then minicomputers and the growing collection of computer programmers. The Copyright Act of 1976 was the first major overhaul to the copyright laws since the 1909 Copyright Act. Since then, the US had become a true world power and much as the rest of the world followed the British laws from the Statute of Anne in 1709 as a template for copyright protections, the world looked on as the US developed their laws. Many nations had joined the Berne Convention for international copyright protections, but the publishing industry had exploded. We had magazines, so many newspapers, so many book publishers. And we had this whole weird new thing to deal with: software. 

Congress didn’t explicitly protect software in the Copyright Act of 1976. But did add cards and tape as mediums and Congress knew this was an exploding new thing that would work itself out in the courts if they didn’t step in. And of course executives from the new software industry were asking their representatives to get in front of things rather than have the unpredictable courts adjudicate a weird copyright mess in places where technology meets copy protection. So in section 117, Congress appointed the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works, or CONTU) to provide a report about software and added a placeholder in the act that empaneled them.

CONTU held hearings. They went beyond just software as there was another newish technology changing the world: photocopying. They presented their findings in 1978 and recommended we define a computer program as a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result. They also recommended that copies be allowed if required to use the program and that those be destroyed when the user no longer has rights to the software. This is important because this is an era where we could write software into memory or start installing compiled code onto a computer and then hand the media used to install it off to someone else. 

At the time the hobbyist industry was just about to evolve into the PC industry, but hard disks were years out for most of those machines. It was all about floppies. But up-market there was all kinds of storage and the righting was on the wall about what was about to come. Install software onto a computer, copy and sell the disk, move on. People would of course do that, but not legally. 

Companies could still sign away their copyright protections as part of a sales agreement but the right to copy was under the creator’s control. But things like End User License Agreements were still far away. Imagine how ludicrous the idea that a piece of software if a piece of software went bad that it could put a company out of business in the 1970s. That would come as we needed to protect liability and not just restrict the right to copy to those who, well, had the right to do so. Further, we hadn’t yet standardized on computer languages. And yet companies were building complicated logic to automate business and needed to be able to adapt works for other computers and so congress looked to provide that right at the direction of CONTU as well, if only to the company doing the customizations and not allowing the software to then be resold. These were all hashed out and put into law in 1980.

And that’s an important moment as suddenly the party who owned a copy was the rightful owner of a piece of software. Many of the provisions read as though we were dealing with book sellers selling a copy of a book, not dealing with the intricate details of the technology, but with technology those can change so quickly and those who make laws aren’t exactly technologists, so that’s to be expected. 

Source code versus compiled code also got tested. In 1982 Williams Electronics v Artic International explored a video game that was in a ROM (which is how games were distributed before disks and cassette tapes. Here, the Third Circuit weighed in on whether if the ROM was built into the machine, if it could be copied as it was utilitarian and therefore not covered under copyright. The source code was protected but what about what amounts to compiled code sitting on the ROM. They of course found that it was indeed protected. 

They again weighed in on Apple v Franklin in 1983. Here, Franklin Computer was cloning Apple computers and claimed it couldn’t clone the computer without copying what was in the ROMs, which at the time was a remedial version of what we think of as an operating system today.  Franklin claimed the OS was in fact a process or method of operation and Apple claimed it was novel. At the time the OS was converted to a binary language at runtime and that object code was a task called AppleSoft but it was still a program and thus still protected. One and two years later respectively, we got Mac OS 1 and Windows 1.

1986 saw Whelan Associates v Jaslow. Here, Elaine Whelan created a management system for a dental lab on the IBM Series One, in EDL. That was a minicomputer and when the personal computer came along she sued Jaslow because he took a BASIC version to market for the PC. He argued it was a different language and the set of commands was therefore different. But the programs looked structurally similar. She won, as while some literal elements were the same, “the copyrights of computer programs can be infringed even absent copying of the literal elements of the program.” This is where it’s simple to identify literal copying of software code when it’s done verbatim but difficult to identify non-literal copyright infringement. 

But this was all professional software. What about those silly video games all the kids wanted? Well, Atari applied for a copyright for one of their games, Breakout. Here, Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman chose not to Register the copyright. And so Atari sued, winning in the appeal.

There were certainly other dental management packages on the market at the time. But the court found that “copyrights do not protect ideas – only expressions of ideas.” Many found fault with the decision and  the Second Circuit heard Computer Associates v Altai in 1992. Here, the court applied a three-step test of Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison to determine how similar products were and held that Altai's rewritten code did not meet the necessary requirements for copyright infringement.

There were other types of litigation surrounding the emerging digital sphere at the time as well. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act came along in 1986 and would be amended in 89, 94, 96, and 2001. Here, a number of criminal offenses were defined - not copyright but they have come up to criminalize activities that should have otherwise been copyright cases. And the Copyright Act of 1976 along with the CONTU findings were amended to cover the rental market came to be (much as happened with VHS tapes and Congress established provisions to cover that in 1990. Keep in mind that time sharing was just ending by then but we could rent video games over dial-up and of course VHS rentals were huge at the time.

Here’s a fun one, Atari infringed on Nintendo’s copyright by claiming they were a defendant in a case and applying to the Copyright Office to get a copy of the 10NES program so they could actually infringe on their copyright. They tried to claim they couldn’t infringe because they couldn’t make games unless they reverse engineered the systems. Atari lost that one. But Sega won a similar one soon thereafter because playing more games on a Sega was fair use. Sony tried to sue Connectix in a similar case where you booted the PlayStation console using a BIOS provided by Connectix. And again, that was reverse engineering for the sake of fair use of a PlayStation people payed for. Kinda’ like jailbreaking an iPhone, right? Yup, apps that help jailbreak, like Cydia, are legal on an iPhone. But Apple moves the cheese so much in terms of what’s required to make it work so far that it’s a bigger pain to jailbreak than it’s worth. Much better than suing everyone. 

Laws are created and then refined in the courts. MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer made it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1993. This involved Eric Francis leaving MAI and joining Peak. He then loaded MAI’s diagnostics tools onto computers. MAI thought they should have a license per computer, but yet Peak used the same disk in multiple computers. The crucial change here was that the copy made, while ephemeral, was decided to be a copy of the software and so violated the copyright. We said we’d bring up that EULA though. In 1996, the Seventh Circuit found in ProCD v Zeidenberg, that the license preempted copyright thus allowing companies to use either copyright law or a license when seeking damages and giving lawyers yet another reason to answer any and all questions with “it depends.”

One thing was certain, the digital world was coming fast in those Clinton years. I mean, the White House would have a Gopher page and Yahoo! would be on display at his second inauguration. So in 1998 we got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Here, Congress added to Section 117 to allow for software copies if the software was required for maintenance of a computer. And yet software was still just a set of statements, like instructions in a book, that led the computer to a given result. The DMCA did have provisions to provide treatment to content providers and e-commerce providers. It also implemented two international treaties and provided remedies for anti-circumvention of copy-prevention systems since by then cracking was becoming a bigger thing. There was more packed in here. We got MAI Systems v Peak Computer reversed by law, refinement to how the Copyright Office works, modernizing audio and movie rights, and provisions to facilitate distance education. And of course the DMCA protected boat hull designs because, you know, might as well cram some stuff into a digital copyright act. 

In addition to the cases we covered earlier, we had Mazer v Stein, Dymow v Bolton, and even Computer Associates v Altai, which cemented the AFC method as the means most courts determine copyright protection as it extends to non-literal components such as dialogue and images. Time and time again, courts have weighed in on what fair use is because the boundaries are constantly shifting, in part due to technology, but also in part due to shifting business models. 

One of those shifting business models was ripping songs and movies. RealDVD got sued by the MPAA for allowing people to rip DVDs. YouTube would later get sued by Viacom but courts found no punitive damages could be awarded. Still, many online portals started to scan for and filter out works they could know were copy protected, especially given the rise of machine learning to aid in the process. But those were big, major companies at the time. IO Group, Inc sued Veoh for uploaded video content and the judge found Veoh was protected by safe harbor. 

Safe Harbor mostly refers to the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, or OCILLA for short, which shields online portals and internet service providers from copyright infringement. This would be separate from Section 230, which protects those same organizations from being sued for 3rd party content uploaded on their sites. That’s the law Trump wanted overturned during his final year in office but given that the EU has Directive 2000/31/EC, Australia has the Defamation Act of 2005, Italy has the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000, and lots of other countries like England and Germany have had courts find similarly, it is now part of being an Internet company. Although the future of “big tech” cases (and the damage many claim is being done to democracy) may find it refined or limited.

In 2016, Cisco sued Arista for allegedly copying the command line interfaces to manage switches. Cisco lost but had claimed more than $300 million in damages. Here, the existing Cisco command structure allowed Arista to recruit seasoned Cisco administrators to the cause. Cisco had done the mental modeling to evolve those commands for decades and it seemed like those commands would have been their intellectual property. But, Arista hadn’t copied the code. 

Then in 2017, in ZeniMax vs Oculus, ZeniMax wan a half billion dollar case against Oculus for copying their software architecture. 

And we continue to struggle with what copyright means as far as code goes. Just in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in Google v Oracle America that using application programming interfaces (APIs) including representative source code can be transformative and fall within fair use, though did not rule if such APIs are copyrightable. I’m sure the CP/M team, who once practically owned the operating system market would have something to say about that after Microsoft swooped in with and recreated much of the work they had done. But that’s for another episode.

And traditional media cases continue. ABS Entertainment vs CBS looked at whether digitally remastering works extended copyright. BMG vs Cox Communications challenged peer-to-peer file-sharing in safe harbor cases (not to mention the whole Napster testifying before congress thing). You certainly can’t resell mp3 files the way you could drop off a few dozen CDs at Tower Records, right? Capitol Records vs ReDigi said nope. Perfect 10 v Amazon, Goldman v Breitbart, and so many more cases continued to narrow down who and how audio, images, text, and other works could have the right to copy restricted by creators. But sometimes it’s confusing. Dr. Seuss vs ComicMix found that merging Star Trek and “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” was enough transformativeness to break the copyright of Dr Seuss, or was that the Fair Use Doctrine? Sometimes I find conflicting lines in opinions. Speaking of conflict…

Is the government immune from copyright? Allen v Cooper, Governor of North Carolina made it to the Supreme Court, where they applied blanket copyright protections. Now, this was a shipwreck case but extended to digital works and the Supreme Court seemed to begrudgingly find for the state, and looked to a law as remedy rather than awarding damages. In other words, the “digital Blackbeards” of a state could pirate software at will. Guess I won’t be writing any software for the state of North Carolina any time soon!

But what about content created by a state? Well, the state of Georgia makes various works available behind a paywall. That paywall might be run by a third party in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. So Public.Resource goes after anything where the edict of a government isn’t public domain. In other words, court decision, laws, and statutes should be free to all who wish to access them. The “government edicts doctrine” won in the end and so access to the laws of the nation continue to be free.

What about algorithms? That’s more patent territory when they are actually copyrightable, which is rare. Gottschalk v. Benson was denied a patent for a new way to convert binary-coded decimals to numerals while Diamond v Diehr saw an algorithm to run a rubber molding machine was patentable. And companies like Intel and Broadcom hold thousands of patents for microcode for chips.

What about the emergence of open source software and the laws surrounding social coding? We’ll get to the emergence of open source and the consequences in future episodes!

One final note, most have never heard of the names in early cases. Most have heard of the organizations listed in later cases. Settling issues in the courts has gotten really, really expensive. And it doesn’t always go the way we want. So these days, whether it’s Apple v Samsung or other tech giants, the law seems to be reserved for those who can pay for it. Sure, there’s the Erin Brockovich cases of the world. And lady justice is still blind. We can still represent ourselves, case and notes are free. But money can win cases by having attorneys with deep knowledge (which doesn’t come cheap). And these cases drag on for years and given the startup assembly line often halts with pending legal actions, not many can withstand the latency incurred. This isn’t a “big tech is evil” comment as much as “I see it and don’t know a better rubric but it’s still a thing” kinda’ comment.

Here’s something better that we’d love to have a listener take away from this episode. Technology is always changing. Laws usually lag behind technology change as (like us) they’re reactive to innovation. When those changes come, there is opportunity. Not only has the technological advancement gotten substantial enough to warrant lawmaker time, but the changes often create new gaps in markets that new entrants can leverage. Either leaders in markets adapt quickly or see those upstarts swoop in, having no technical debt and being able to pivot faster than those who previously might have enjoyed a first user advantage. What laws are out there being hashed out, just waiting to disrupt some part of the software market today?

Once upon a time, the right to copy text wasn’t really necessary. If one had a book, one could copy the contents of the book by hiring scribes to labor away at the process and books were expensive. Then came the printing press. Now, the printer of a work would put a book out and another printer could set their press up to reproduce the same text. More people learned to read and information flowed from the presses at the fastest pace in history. 

The printing press spread from Gutenberg’s workshop in the 1440s throughout Germany and then to the rest of Europe and appearing in England when William Caxton built the first press there in 1476. It was a time of great change, causing England to retreat into protectionism, and Henry VIII tried to restrict what could be printed in the 1500s. But Parliament needed to legislate further. 

England was first to establish copyright when Parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act in 1662, which regulated what could be printed. This was more to prevent printing scandalous materials and basically gave a monopoly to The Stationers’ Company to register, print, copy, and publish books. They could enter another printer and destroy their presses. That went on for a few decades until the act was allowed to lapse in 1694 but began the 350 year journey of refining what copyright and censorship means to a modern society. 

The next big step came in England when the Statute of Anne was passed in 1710. It was named for the reigning last Queen of the House of Stuart. While previously a publisher could appeal to have a work censored by others because the publisher had created it, this statute took a page out of the patent laws and granted a right of protection against copying a work for 14 years. Reading through the law and further amendments it is clear that lawmakers were thinking far more deeply about the balance between protecting the license holder of a work and how to get more books to more people. They’d clearly become less protectionist and more concerned about a literate society. 

There are examples in history of granting exclusive rights to an invention from the Greeks to the Romans to Papal Bulls. These granted land titles, various rights, or a status to people. Edward the Confessor started the process of establishing the Close Rolls in England in the 1050s, where a central copy of all those granted was kept. But they could also be used to grant a monopoly, with the first that’s been found being granted by Edward III to John Kempe of Flanders as a means of helping the cloth industry in England to flourish. 

Still, this wasn’t exactly an exclusive right but instead a right to emigrate. And the letters were personal and so letters patent evolved to royal grants, which Queen Elizabeth was providing in the late 1500s. That emerged out of the need for patent laws proven by Venicians in the late 1400s, when they started granting exclusive rights by law to inventions for 10 years. King Henry II of France established a royal patent system in France and over time the French Academy of Sciences was put in charge of patent right review.

English law evolved and perpetual patents granted by monarchs were stifling progress. Monarchs might grant patents to raise money and so allow a specific industry to turn into a monopoly to raise funds for the royal family. James I was forced to revoke the previous patents, but a system was needed. And so the patent system was more formalized and those for inventions got limited to 14 years when the Statue of Monopolies was passed in England in 1624. The evolution over the next few decades is when we started seeing drawings added to patent requests and sometimes even required. We saw forks in industries and so the addition of medical patents, and an explosion in various types of patents requested. 

They weren’t just in England. The mid-1600s saw the British Colonies issuing their own patents. Patent law was evolving outside of England as well. The French system was becoming larger with more discoveries. By 1729 there were digests of patents being printed in Paris and we still keep open listings of them so they’re easily proven in court. Given the maturation of the Age of Enlightenment, that clashed with the financial protectionism of patent laws and intellectual property as a concept emerged but borrowed from the patent institutions bringing us right back to the Statute of Anne, which established the modern Copyright system. That and the Statue of Monopolies is where the British Empire established the modern copyright and patent systems respectively, which we use globally today. Apparently they were worth keeping throughout the Age of Revolution, mostly probably because they’d long been removed from the monarchal control and handed to various public institutions.

The American Revolution came and went. The French Revolution came and went. The Latin American wars of independence, revolutions throughout the 1820s , the end of Feudalism, Napoleon. But the wars settled down and a world order of sorts came during the late 1800s. One aspect of that world order was the Berne Convention, which was signed in 1886. This  established the bilateral recognition of copyrights among sovereign nations that signed onto the treaty, rather than have various nations enter into pacts between one another. Now, the right to copy works were automatically in force at creation, so authors no longer had to register their mark in Berne Convention countries.

Following the Age of Revolutions, there was also an explosion of inventions around the world. Some ended up putting copyrighted materials onto reproducible forms. Early data storage. Previously we could copyright sheet music but the introduction of the player piano led to the need to determine the copyright ability of piano rolls in White-Smith Music v. Apollo in 1908. Here we saw the US Supreme Court find that these were not copies as interpreted in the US Copyright Act because only a machine could read them and they basically told congress to change the law. So Congress did.

The Copyright Act of 1909 then specified that even if only a machine can use information that’s protected by copyright, the copyright protection remains. And so things sat for a hot minute as we learned first mechanical computing, which is patentable under the old rules and then electronic computing which was also patentable. Jacquard patented his punch cards in 1801. But by the time Babbage and Lovelace used them in his engines that patent had expired. And the first digital computer to get a patent was the Eckert-Mauchly ENIAC, which was filed in 1947, granted in 1964, and because there was a prior unpatented work, overturned in 1973. Dynamic RAM was patented in 1968. But these were for physical inventions.

Software took a little longer to become a legitimate legal quandary. The time it took to reproduce punch cards and the lack of really mass produced software didn’t become an issue until after the advent of transistorized computers with Whirlwind, the DEC PDP, and the IBM S/360.

Inventions didn’t need a lot of protections when they were complicated and it took years to build one. I doubt the inventor of the Antikythera Device in Ancient Greece thought to protect their intellectual property because they’d of likely been delighted if anyone else in the world would have thought to or been capable of creating what they created. Over time, the capabilities of others rises and our intellectual property becomes more valuable because progress moves faster with each generation. Those Venetians saw how technology and automation was changing the world and allowed the protection of inventions to provide a financial incentive to invent. Licensing the commercialization of inventions then allows us to begin the slow process of putting ideas on a commercialization assembly line. 

Books didn’t need copyright until they could be mass produced and were commercially viable. That came with mass production. A writer writes, or creates intellectual property and a publisher prints and distributes. Thus we put the commercialization of literature and thoughts and ideas on an assembly line. And we began doing so far before the Industrial Revolution. 

Once there were more inventions and some became capable of mass producing the registered intellectual property of others, we saw a clash in copyrights and patents. And so we got the Copyright Act of 1909. But with digital computers we suddenly had software emerging as an entire industry. IBM had customized software for customers for decades but computer languages like FORTRAN and mass storage devices that could be moved between computers allowed software to be moved between computers and sometimes entire segments of business logic moved between companies based on that software. By the 1960s, companies were marketing computer programs as a cottage industry. 

The first computer program was deposited at the US Copyright Office in 1961. It was a simple thing. A tape with a computer program that had been filed by North American Aviation. Imagine the examiners looking at it with their heads cocked to the side a bit. “What do we do with this?” They hadn’t even figured it out when they got three more from General Dynamics and two more programs showed up from a student at Columbia Law. 

A punched tape held a bunch of punched cards. A magnetic tape just held more punched tape that went faster. This was pretty much what those piano rolls from the 1909 law had on them. Registration was added for all five in 1964. And thus software copyright was born. But of course it wasn’t just a metallic roll that had impressions for when a player piano struck a hammer. If someone found a roll on the ground, they could put it into another piano and hit play. But the likelihood that they could put reproduce the piano roll was low. The ability to reproduce punch cards had been there. But while it likely didn’t take the same amount of time it took to reproduce a copy Plato’s Republic before the advent of the printing press, the occurrences weren’t frequent enough to encounter a likely need for adjudication. That changed with high speed punch devices and then the ability to copy magnetic tape.

Contracts (which we might think of as EULAs today in a way) provided a license for a company to use software, but new questions were starting to form around who was bound to the contract and how protection was extended based on a number of factors. Thus the LA, or License Agreement part of EULA rather than just a contract when buying a piece of software. 

And this brings us to the forming of the modern software legal system. That’s almost a longer story than the written history we have of early intellectual property law, so we’ll pick that up in the next episode of the podcast!

Texts are sent and received using SMS, or Short Message Service. Due to the amount of bandwidth available on second generation networks, they were limited to 160 characters initially. You know the 140 character max from Twitter, we are so glad you chose to join us on this journey where we weave our way from the topmast of the 1800s to the skinny jeans of San Francisco with Twitter.

What we want you to think about through this episode is the fact that this technology has changed our lives. Before texting we had answering machines, we wrote letters, we sent more emails but didn’t have an expectation of immediate response. Maybe someone got back to us the next day, maybe not. But now, we rely on texting to coordinate gatherings, pick up the kids, get a pin on a map, provide technical support, send links, send memes, convey feelings in ways that we didn’t do when writing letters. I mean including an animated gif in a letter meant melty peanut butter. Wait, that’s jif. Sorry.

And few technologies have sprung into our every day use so quickly in the history of technology. It took generations if not 1,500 years for bronze working to migrate out of the Vinča Culture and bring an end to the Stone Age. It took a few generations if not a couple of hundred years for electricity to spread throughout the world. The rise of computing took a few generations to spread from first mechanical then to digital and then to personal computing and now to ubiquitous computing. And we’re still struggling to come to terms with job displacement and the productivity gains that have shifted humanity more rapidly than any other time including the collapse of the Bronze Age. 

But the rise of cellular phones and then the digitization of them combined with globalization has put instantaneous communication in the hands of everyday people around the world. We’ve decreased our reliance on paper and transporting paper and moved more rapidly into a digital, even post-PC era. And we’re still struggling to figure out what some of this means. But did it happen as quickly as we identify? Let’s look at how we got here.

Bell Telephone introduced the push button phone in 1963 to replace the rotary dial telephone that had been invented in 1891 and become a standard. And it was only a matter of time before we’d find a way to associate letters to it. Once we could send bits over devices instead of just opening up a voice channel it was only a matter of time before we’d start sending data as well. Some of those early bits we sent were things like typing our social security number or some other identifier for early forms of call routing. Heck the fax machine was invented all the way back in 1843 by a Scottish inventor called Alexander Bain. 

So given that we were sending different types of data over permanent and leased lines it was only a matter of time before we started doing so over cell phones. 

The first cellular networks were analog in what we now think of as first generation, or 1G. GSM, or Global System for Mobile Communications is a standard that came out of the European Telecommunications Standards Institue and started getting deployed in 1991. That became what we now think of as 2G and paved the way for new types of technologies to get rolled out.

The first text message simply said “Merry Christmas” and was sent on December 3rd, 1992. It was sent to Richard Jarvis at Vodafone by Neil Papworth. As with a lot of technology it was actually thought up eight years earlier by Bernard Ghillabaert and Friedhelm Hillebrand. From there, the use cases moved to simply alerting devices of various statuses, like when there was a voice mail. These days we mostly use push notification services for that. 

To support using SMS for that, carriers started building out SMS gateways and by 1993 Nokia was the first cell phone maker to actually support end-users sending text messages. Texting was expensive at first, but adoption slowly increased. We could text in the US by 1995 but cell phone subscribers were sending less than 6 texts a year on average. But as networks grew and costs came down, adoption increased up to a little over one a day by the year 2000. 

Another reason adoption was slow was because using multi-tap to send a message sucked. Multi-tap was where we had to use the 10-key pad on a device to type out messages. You know, ABC are on a 2 key so the first type you tap two it’s the number the next time it’s an A, the next a B, the next a C. And the 3 key is D, E, and F. The 4 is G, H, and I and the 5 is J, K, and L. The 6 is M, N, and O and the 7 is P, Q, R, and S. The 8 is T, U, and V and the 9 is W, X, Y, and Z. This layout goes back to old bell phones that had those letters printed under the numbers. That way if we needed to call 1-800-PODCAST we could map which letters went to what. 

A small company called Research in Motion introduced an Inter@active Pager in 1996 to do two-way paging. Paging services went back decades. My first was a SkyTel, which has its roots in Mississippi when John N Palmer bought a 300 person paging company using an old-school radio paging service. That FCC license he picked up evolved to more acquisitions through Alabama, Loisiana, New York and by the mid-80s growing nationally to 30,000 subscribers in 1989 and over 200,000 less than four years later. A market validated, RIM introduced the BlackBerry on the DataTAC network in 2002, expanding from just text to email, mobile phone services, faxing, and now web browsing. We got the Treo the same year. But that now iconic Blackberry keyboard. Nokia was the first cellular device maker to make a full keyboard for their Nokia 9000i Communicator in 1997, so it wasn’t an entirely new idea.

But by now, more and more people were thinking of what the future of Mobility would look like. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project, or 3GPP was formed in 1998 to dig into next generation networks. They began as an initiative at Nortel and AT&T but grew to include NTT DoCoMo, British Telecom, BellSouth, Ericsson, Telnor, Telecom Italia, and France Telecom - a truly global footprint. With a standards body in place, we could move faster and they began planning the roadmap for 3G and beyond (at this point we’re on 5G). 

Faster data transfer rates let us do more. We weren’t just sending texts any more. MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service was then introduced and use grow to billions and then hundreds of millions of photos sent encoded using technology like what we do with MIME for multimedia content on websites. At this point, people were paying a fee for every x number of messages and ever MMS. Phones had cameras now so in a pre-Instagram world this was how we were to share them. Granted they were blurry by modern standards, but progress. Devices became more and more connected as data plans expanded to eventually often be unlimited.

But SMS was still slow to evolve in a number of ways. For example, group chat was not really much of a thing. That is, until 2006 when a little company called Twitter came along to make it easy for people to post a message to their friends. Initially it worked over text message until they moved to an app. And texting was used by some apps to let users know there was data waiting for them. Until it wasn’t. Twilio was founded in 2008 to make it easy for developers to add texting to their software. Now every possible form of text integration was as simple as importing a framework.

Apple introduced the Apple Push Notification service, or APNs in 2009. By then devices were always connected to the Internet and the send and receive for email and other apps that were fine on desktops were destroying battery life. APNs then allowed developers to build apps that could only establish a communication channel when they had data. Initially we used 256 bytes in push notifications but due to the popularity and different implementation needs, notifications could grow to 2 kilobytes in 2015 and moved to an HTTP/2 interface and a 4k payload in 2015. This is important because it paved the way for iChat, now called iMessage or just Messages - and then other similar services for various platforms that moved instant messaging off SMS and over to the vendor who builds a device rather than using SMS or MMS messaging. 

Facebook Messenger came along in 2011, and now the kids use Instagram messaging, Snapchat, Signal or any number of other messaging apps. Or they just text. It’s one of a billion communications tools that also include Discord, Slack, Teams, LinkedIn, or even the in-game options in many a game. Kinda’ makes restricting communications a bit of a challenge at this point and restricting spam. 

My kid finishes track practice early. She can just text me. My dad can’t make it to dinner. He can just text me. And of course I can get spam through texts. And everyone can message me on one of about 10 other apps on my phone. And email. On any given day I receive upwards of 300 messages, so sometimes it seems like I could just sit and respond to messages all day every day and still never be caught up. And get this - we’re better for it all. We’re more productive, we’re more well connected, and we’re more organized. Sure, we need to get better at having more meaningful reactions when we’re together in person. We need to figure out what a smaller, closer knit group of friends is like and how to be better at being there for them rather than just sending a sad face in a thread where they’re indicating their pain. 

But there’s always a transition where we figure out how to embrace these advances in technology. There are always opportunities in the advancements and there are always new evolutions built atop previous evolutions. The rate of change is increasing. The reach of change is increasing. And the speed changes propagate are unparalleled today. Some will rebel against changes, seeking solace in older ways. It’s always been like that - the Amish can often be seen on a buggy pulled by a horse so a television or phone capable of texting would certainly be out of the question. Others embrace technology faster than some of us are ready for. Like when I realized some people had moved away from talking on phones and were pretty exclusively texting. Spectrums.

I can still remember picking up the phone and hearing a neighbor on with a friend. Party lines were still a thing in Dahlonega, Georgia when I was a kid. I can remember the first dedicated line and getting in trouble for running up a big long distance bill. I can remember getting our first answering machine and changing messages on it to be funny. Most of that was technology that moved down market but had been around for a long time. The rise of messaging on the cell phone then smart phone though - that was a turning point that started going to market in 1993 and within 20 years truly revolutionized human communication. How can we get messages faster than instant? Who knows, but I look forward to finding out. 

Java, Ruby, PHP, Go. These are web applications that dynamically generate code then interpreted as a file by a web browser. That file is rarely static these days and the power of the web is that an app or browser can reach out and obtain some data, get back some xml or json or yaml, and provide an experience to a computer, mobile device, or even embedded system. The web is arguably the most powerful, transformational technology in the history of technology.

But the story of the web begins in philosophies that far predate its inception. It goes back to a file, which we can think of as a document, on a computer that another computer reaches out to and interprets. A file comprised of hypertext. Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext. Plenty of others put the concepts of linking objects into the mainstream of computing. But he coined the term that he’s barely connected to in the minds of many.  Why is that?

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Elizabeth Feinler developed a registry of names that would evolve into DNS so we could find computers online and so access those web sites without typing in impossible to remember numbers. Bob Kahn and Leonard Kleinrock were instrumental in the Internet Protocol, which allowed all those computers to be connected together, providing the schemes for those numbers. Some will know these names; most will not. 

But a name that probably doesn’t come up enough is Ted Nelson. His tale is one of brilliance and the early days of computing and the spread of BASIC and an urge to do more. It’s a tale of the hacker ethic. And yet, it’s also a tale of irreverence - to be used as a warning for those with aspirations to be remembered for something great. Or is it?

Steve Jobs famously said “real artists ship.” Ted Nelson did ship. Until he didn’t. Let’s go all the way back to 1960, when he started Project Xanadu. Actually, let’s go a little further back first. 

Nelson was born to TV directory Ralph Nelson and Celeste Holm, who won an Academy Award for her role in Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947 and took home another pair of nominations through her career, and for being the original Ado Annie in Oklahoma. His dad worked on The Twilight Zone - so of course he majored in philosophy at Swarthmore College and then went off to the University of Chicago and then Harvard for graduate school, taking a stab at film after he graduated. But he was meant for an industry that didn’t exist yet but would some day eclipse the film industry: software.

 While in school he got exposed to computers and started to think about this idea of a repository of all the world’s knowledge. And it’s easy to imagine a group of computing aficionados sitting in a drum circle, smoking whatever they were smoking, and having their minds blown by that very concept. And yet, it’s hard to imagine anyone in that context doing much more. And yet he did.

Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960. As we’ll cover, he did a lot of projects during the remainder of his career. The Journey is what is so important, even if we never get to the destination. Because sometimes we influence the people who get there. And the history of technology is as much about failed or incomplete evolutions as it is about those that become ubiquitous. 

It began with a project while he was enrolled in Harvard grad school. Other word processors were at the dawn of their existence. But he began thinking through and influencing how they would handle information storage and retrieval. 

Xanadu was supposed to be a computer network that connected humans to one another. It was supposed to be simple and a scheme for world-wide electronic publishing. Unlike the web, which would come nearly three decades later, it was supposed to be bilateral, with broken links self-repairing, much as nodes on the ARPAnet did. His initial proposal was a program in machine language that could store and display documents. Being before the advent of Markdown, ePub, XML, PDF, RTF, or any of the other common open formats we use today, it was rudimentary and would evolve over time. Keep in mind. It was for documents and as Nelson would say later, the web - which began as a document tool, was a fork of the project. 

The term Xanadu was borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, itself written after some opium fueled dreams about a garden in Kublai Khan’s Shangdu, or Xanadu.In his biography, Coleridge explained the rivers in the poem supply “a natural connection to the parts and unity to the whole” and he said a “stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel.” 

Connecting all the things was the goal and so Xanadu was the name. He gave a talk and presented a paper called “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate” at the Association for Computing Machinery in 1965 that laid out his vision. This was the dawn of interactivity in computing. Digital Equipment had launched just a few years earlier and brought the PDP-8 to market that same year. The smell of change was in the air and Nelson was right there. 

After that, he started to see all these developments around the world. He worked on a project at Brown University to develop a word processor with many of his ideas in it. But the output of that project, as with most word processors since - was to get things printed. He believed content was meant to be created and live its entire lifecycle in the digital form. This would provide perfect forward and reverse citations, text enrichment, and change management. And maybe if we all stand on the shoulders of giants, it would allow us the ability to avoid rewriting or paraphrasing the works of others to include them in own own writings. We could do more without that tedious regurgitation. 

He furthered his counter-culture credentials by going to Woodstock in 1969. Probably not for that reason, but it happened nonetheless. And he traveled and worked with more and more people and companies, learning and engaging and enriching his ideas. And then he shared them. 

Computer Lib/Dream Machines was a paperback book. Or two. It had a cover on each side. Originally published in 1974, it was one of the most important texts of the computer revolution. Steven Levy called it an epic. It’s rare to find it for less than a hundred bucks on eBay at this point because of how influential it was and what an amazing snapshot in time it represents. 

Xanadu was to be a hypertext publishing system in the form of Xanadocs, or files that could be linked to from other files. A Xanadoc used Xanalinks to embed content from other documents into a given document. These spans of text would become transclusions and change in the document that included the content when they changed in the live document. The iterations towards working code were slow and the years ticked by. That talk in 1965 gave way to the 1970s, then 80s. Some thought him brilliant. Others didn’t know what to make of it all. But many knew of his ideas for hypertext and once known it became deterministic.

Byte Magazine published many of his thoughts in 1988 called “Managing Immense Storage” and by then the personal computer revolution had come in full force. Tim Berners-Lee put the first node of the World Wide Web online the next year, using a protocol they called Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or http. Yes, the hypertext philosophy was almost a means of paying homage to the hard work and deep thinking Nelson had put in over the decades. But not everyone saw it as though Nelson had made great contributions to computing. 

“The Curse of Xanadu” was an article published in Wired Magazine in 1995. In the article, the author points out the fact that the web had come along using many of the ideas Nelson and his teams had worked on over the years but actually shipped - whereas Nelson hadn’t. Once shipped, the web rose in popularity becoming the ubiquitous technology it is today. The article looked at Xanadu as vaporware. But there is a deeper, much more important meaning to Xanadu in the history of computing. 

Perhaps inspired by the Wired article, the group released an incomplete version of Xanadu in 1998. But by then, other formats - including PDF which was invented in 1993 and .doc for Microsoft Word, were the primary mechanisms we stored documents and first gopher and then the web were spreading to interconnect humans with content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72M5kcnAL-4

The Xanadu story isn’t a tragedy. Would we have had hypertext as a part of Douglas Engelbart’s oNLine System without it? Would we have object-oriented programming or later the World Wide Web without it? The very word hypertext is almost an homage, even if they don’t know it, to Nelson’s work. And the look and feel of his work lives on in places like GitHub, whether directly influenced or not, where we can see changes in code side-by-side with actual production code, changes that are stored and perhaps rolled back forever.

Larry Tessler coined the term Cut and Paste. While Nelson calls him a friend in Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, he also points out that Tessler’s term is flawed. And I think this is where we as technologists have to sometimes trim down our expectations of how fast evolutions occur. We take tiny steps because as humans we can’t keep pace with the rapid rate of technological change. We can look back and see a two steps forward and one step back approach since the dawn of written history. Nelson still doesn’t think the metaphors that harken back to paper have any place in the online written word. 

Here’s another important trend in the history of computing. As we’ve transitioned to more and more content living online exclusively, the content has become diluted. One publisher I wrote online pieces for asked that they all be +/- 700 words and asked that paragraphs be no more than 4 sentences long (preferably 3) and the sentences should be written at about a 5th or 6th grade level. Maybe Nelson would claim that this de-evolution of writing is due to search engine optimization gamifying the entirety of human knowledge and that a tool like Xanadu would have been the fix. After all, if we could borrow the great works of others we wouldn’t have to paraphrase them. But I think as with most things, it’s much more nuanced than that. 

Our always online, always connected brains can only accept smaller snippets. So that’s what we gravitate towards. Actually, we have plenty of capacity for whatever we actually choose to immerse ourselves into. But we have more options than ever before and we of course immerse ourselves into video games or other less literary pursuits. Or are they more literary? Some generations thought books to be dangerous. As do all oppressors. So who am I to judge where people choose to acquire knowledge or what kind they indulge themselves in. Knowledge is power and I’m just happy they have it. And they have it in part because others were willing to water own the concepts to ship a product. Because the history of technology is about evolutions, not revolutions. And those often take generations. And Nelson is responsible for some of the evolutions that brought us the ht in http or html. And for that we are truly grateful!

As with the great journey from Lord of the Rings, rarely is greatness found alone. The Xanadu adventuring party included Cal Daniels, Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Dean Tribble, Ravi Pandya, became a part of Autodesk in the 80s, got rewritten in Smalltalk, was considered a rival to the web, but really is more of an evolutionary step on that journey. If anything it’s a divergence then convergence to and from Vannevar Bush’s Memex.

So let me ask this as a parting thought? Are the places you are not willing to sacrifice any of your core designs or beliefs worth the price being paid? Are they worth someone else ending up with a place in the history books where (like with this podcast) we oversimplify complex topics to make them digestible? Sometimes it’s worth it. In no way am I in a place to judge the choices of others. Only history can really do that - but when it happens it’s usually an oversimplification anyways… So the building blocks of the web lie in irreverence - in hypertext. And while some grew out of irreverence and diluted their vision after an event like Woodstock, others like Nelson and his friend Douglas Englebart forged on. And their visions didn’t come with commercial success. But as an integral building block to the modern connected world today they represent as great a mind as practically anyone else in computing.