Well, here it is, 2014 already
Time to update our website (might be a little while) and talk a bit about where our energy and focus has been of late
We've been involved with a project stimulated by the Computer History Museum and Cisco Systems for much of the past year, wherein the concern became one about 'how much of the Cisco story has been saved' now that the company is approaching its 30th year.
Due to our work (Ray Price and I) on the HP Phenomenon book (which is about to go OUT OF PRINT, by the way), we were invited to comment on the project.
Our offer was to conduct a preview of available materials, several focus groups of outsiders re their view of Cisco's contribution to the rapid emergence and deployment of the Internet, and then structure some preliminary interviews to elicit the undiscovered or under-represented themes that could benefit from an in-depth study.
The surprise, for Cisco leadership and ourselves, was how seldom Cisco's name arose in some twenty focus groups, even compared with names like Equatorial Communications and Vitalink, names I'd not encountered much in the past twenty-five years. It turns out that infrastructure, even something as big as routers, doesn't make it into cocktail party conversation or as memorable 'who did what' stories.
I'll save for a later post what this might mean for that project, but here I want to point out something that we've seen in several incipient projects over the past year.
1. Infrastructure seldom makes headlines except when it fails
2. Infrastructure creation is not a simple task (ask the High-Speed Rail advocates about this)
3. Infrastructure contributions are seldom the result of one or a few people, except as catalysts
4. Infrastructure contributors get less recognition than just about all other creative designers
5. Infrastructure is seldom recognized as such until very late in its evolution
Let me give some specific examples
A. The Internet is infrastructure. It has no company managing it, it is essentially a profitless 'system', and the creators are almost innumerable, with only a few names really 'tied' to it (e.g. Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Len Kleinrock, Bob Kahn, and lightly, Doug Engelbart). And while there are plenty of books about aspects of the Internet, it is surprising to us that some "BIG" stories seem omitted. There are, by our count, at least forty books with chapters or full books devoted to Cisco alone, never mind Wellfleet, Bay Networks, SynOptics, and a myriad other LAN and WAN companies. And yet, the topical "miss" is amazing to us. Why? Because historians haven't yet focused here--the work is mostly from journalists concerned with the greatness of 'the leaders' or the analysts trying to focus on the next 10x money gains.
B. GPS is infrastructure. Your iPhone, your camera, and your car all figure out 'where you are' on a dynamic Global Positioning basis, within a few feet. Imagine if Chris Columbus had had this, or even better, Rene LaSalle could have found New Orleans on his fourth and fatal trip to America instead of the cannibalistic Karankawa Indians of the Texas Gulf Coast. Maybe Trimble Navigation, or Brad Parkinson, or JPL, should have more fame and recognition for how all of this happened--who knows? But the key is the players are all still alive, and no one to our knowledge has tried to collate "this story" At less than $1 per device today, this is important 'commodity' technology but not destined to ring the bells on the New York Stock Exchange ever again (10 billion people with 10 GPS devices each isn't one year's current revenue for HP, for example).
C. Electronic instrumentation -- the HP, Agilent, and now Keysight stories, plus Tektronix, Fluke, Beckman, General Radio and others -- has changed the scientific and engineering worlds incredibly. Yet the 'stories' are buried, or found in obscure places occasionally, at best. Who might care? Does it matter? Our assertion is YES, these are the kinds of things that excite kids to want to become designers and creators of the 'next infrastructure' -- this is what STEM is about, not how to become a Steve Jobs entrepreneur but rather how to become a contributing member of a truly important design team on a major topic of interest for society.
D. "Non-stop computing," popularized by Tandem Computers forty years ago, is more than a slogan--it is the highly reliable backbone of the world's stock markets, banking systems, security networks, and deployment of such things as gasoline, medicines, and foodstuffs, not to mention tracking their safety and quality. This is not the stuff of iPads and Wintel PCs--this is enterprise computing writ large. Go try to find some books on this, and you'll quickly come scratch. This is NOT a history of Tandem Computers; rather, it is a history of ideas, efforts, learnings, and lessons around a foundational piece of our society--how do you design an interoperable, trustable, reliable backbone? Think here for a moment about the simple issue that Target faced over the Christmas holidays about incursion of their Credit Card info for forty million Americans--wow! And think also about the North Korean saber-rattling and their headstart over the Iranians in both nuclear technology and space launch vehicles. These are not trivial questions, would you agree?
E. CAE, or EDA, or CAD/CAM These are all buzzwords for tools that emerged to help designers design ... well, just about everything. The big buzz right now is 3-D printing, prized for the ability to deposit ink, plastic, or organics in some three-dimensional pattern, kind of a LaserJet printer on steroids. Without the geometric toolkits of CAE history, this would be impossible. Without the incredibly sophisticated EDA tools for placing transistor cells on a silicon wafer, the 10 billion device microcomputer chips that Intel sells to TI or Apple or HP for less than one ten-millionth of a cent per device, we'd not have had our iPhones, iPads, or Internet world AT ALL, let alone at some reduced capability. So where are the recognitions and the insights from Mentor Graphics, or Cadence, or Applied Materials in our historical literature, let alone in our celebration of how to interest our youth in careers such as these tool builders pursued?
F. Even the 'big stories' (e.g. Intel) tend to aggrandize only the leaders. The books on Intel for example extol the virtues (or decry the vices) of the founders -- Moore and his law, Noyce and his flamboyant style, and ascetic Grove. There are short chapters about Ted Hoff, even shorter about Federico Faggin, and a squib or two about Justin Rattner. But the seventy five "Fellows" that Intel honored internally haven't ever been heard from by anyone else. Ditto for HP, Boeing, IBM, Motorola, Proctor and Gamble, you name it.
Well, that sort of "states the case"
What do we propose to do about it?
Stay tuned
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