Macro-trends?

 A long-time colleague from Informix, Bernard Golden, and I met yesterday for the first time in a year or so.  "Met" over Zoom, as he now is living in Bedford, England, 40 miles outside London.

Bernard has. a long high-tech career stemming from his design team lead at Informix, where he helped define and create the world's fastest UNIX database for its day--the day being circa 1992.  Most recently, he was several years at VM Ware, as a Field CTO.           https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernardgolden/

Bernard was intrigued by my new appointment to the Irish National University at Maynooth, and was hopeful I was now based in Ireland.  Nope, sorry.  But he wanted to talk about the reasons for that gig, which of course as readers know, was the COVID work we did for InnovaScapes over the past few years.   As the board minutes for many companies note, "Much discussion ensued.

Most engineers, you might have noticed, are focused on How Things Work, in. a pragmatic, down-to-earth manner, not given to reflection or wide speculation.  Bernard is not of that stripe.  Indeed, he shared near the end of our hour that his undergraduate degree was in strategic politics, long before the high-tech bug bit him.

And it was in that context that we veered into a "Macro-Trends" discussion, where he succinctly laid out the three 'drivers' across the globe at the moment that he thinks are affecting all of us.  See what you think of these:

1. Maybe a good way to frame this would be “we’re in the midst of a protracted demographic transition" — a changing of the guard from baby boomers who long for an imagined halcyon past and a new generation impatient for solutions to today’s problems and opportunities. This plays out in politics, media, social movements, and even non-profits.  I vividly recall being on the Computer History Museum Board and newcomers clamoring for 'new blood'.  The guise was 'how about software folk, how about younger folk, how about international folk' but one pointedly said one day "We're done with all you old white guys."   I have to admit, I winced at that jab, but on reflection, I realized that they had a valid point.  Bernard didn't pursue this much further, but I did give voice to groups that I've been in where there seemed to be a very real fear about minorities, immigration, and different religions and dogmas 'taking over.'

2. Most of us, certainly Bernard and me, celebrate the incredible technical progress in recent years.  Think simply about lithium batteries.   EVs are now a respectable 13+% of new car registrations in California, AFTER all the subsidies and tax benefits were removed.  And the new Chinese batteries about to become widely available provide longer range and significantly quicker recharging time.   And your cell phone, hearing aids, entertainment systems on airliners, and all sorts of other things (drones?) all owe their capability to these little marvels, way better than the EverReady batteries and the Energizer Bunny of both our youth and recent years.

In medicines, the recent stunning breakthrough with genetic manipulation for pancreatic cancer markers is just one of many incredible advances for formerly intractable diseases.   And diagnostics?  Two second scans of spit enable spotting COVID, or multiple cancers, or diabetes wtih 98% precision?  Treatments?  Leukemia, still a significant killer, has treaments which have improved the 5-year living expectation from 28% to 71% for the most intracctable form, and for childhood victims, to 88%.   

Not all high-tech, though is greeted with enthusiasm.  Many are terrified about AI and the potential loss of jobs, privacy, and even identity.  It is the Luddite reaction, writ large, across a broad landscape.  What will this mean?  Who can escape it?  You all know the laments and lamentations, and yes, we can aver that new jobs, and great new opportunities will arise, but my Gawd, man, this is DISRUPTIVE, and the future is worse than cloudy.

3. Not nearly so "topical" but perhaps one of the biggest longer-term trends is the shrinkage of the total population, coupled with the very different ethnic balances that will result.  Japan's birth rate has fallen dramatically.   The total fertility rae (average chidren per woman) hit an alltiem low of 1.14 in 2025.  This marks a decent of continuous decline (see the graph below), much faster than official predictions.

Digging a bit more deeply, no country in Western Europe except Switzerland is above 1.7 births per woman (it takes roughly 2.2 to sustain a current population, given youngster fatality rates).  The USA, Canada and the UK are both at 1.6.  China at 1.0 is lower even than Japan's 1.1.  South Korea is at an astonishing 0,7, while other big countries--Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and Canada, for example, are all 1.6 or lower.   Even India is at 2.0..    True, a number of countries are still above 2.2; for the most part, they are African nations, or smaller Asiatic nations.   For data country by country, see   https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

Despite continual Unied Nations estimates that the global population will continue to rise (to 10-11 billion by 2100), it doesn't take a math major to figure out that the world population could shrink if these trends continue, from 8.2 billion people to somewhere around 4 to 5 billion by 2100, if African nations dramatically drop their fecundity rates as did the Asian countries when urbanization and lower infact fatalities became normal.  Under the UN projections, and even if these shrinkages occur, a significantly higher percentage of ethnic and religious groups that don't fit the "proper Western Civilization" model will become the norm.

Bernard commented on our recent move to Sacramento, and also his move to England, with respect to the composition of the populations for either area fifty years ago vs. toady--many societal norms then would seem completely alien now to a 1970's version of Alexis de Tocqueville.   Just as today's version will seem antiquated in another couple of decades.

All in all, the three points were well taken--the world we so recently 'knew' is being DISRUPTED at a rapid pace, and for many it is breathtaking, and for some it is distressingly so.   The trick, we agreed, is to be open to chance, to embrace the changes insofar as possible, and to avoid pity parties wishing for 'the good old days'.

Have you been musing about this too?

Big Pharma and Drug Discovery

 The previous two posts have described talks at the FiRe 2026 conference, held in the Qualcomm Institute facility at the University of California at San Diego, one of America's premier science research institutes.  Toward the end of the 2nd day, CEO Mark Anderson of Pattern Computer introduced an hour of Pattern talks by various folk, the first of which was Pattern's work with AI in Pharma, for which Mark's opening (04:00-05:45) was important.    https://vimeo.com/1093395045?share=copy

After Mark's opening, Dr. Ben Brown of Pattern gave a synopsis of LLM and AI evolution and accomplishment, along with difficulties that have been hard to overcome to date.  (05:45-12:10).  It then shifted to a segment that covered the Drug discovery efforts and results for Pattern Computer, with a discussion led by Ian Walker, of IMW Pharma Ltd in Cambridge, England.   See segment 12:10 to 17:27 below:   https://vimeo.com/1093395045?share=copy

The significant slide that outlined Walker's talk is shown here:   

Several key points were made.  First, most of the AI search results to date, for nearly all of Pharma, have yet to yield any significant drug combinations or any disease diagnostics.  Why Pattern?  One is tempted to say, "Simple.  It is due to the multi-dimensional nature of the Pattern Engine", but while true, that is a bit hard to appreciate.  But 27 dimensions (vs. the 3-D world we 'know' or the 4-D world with time included) is vastly hard to appreciate of even conjure, but in such a world, big data combinations of molecular structures for diseases, drugs, and organisms is able to be outlined and researched.   And that has been the basis of the Pattern discoveries that led to the drug combinations listed above.  

Walker acknowledges and honors all of this, but then goes on to outline at length what that means for pharma and the world, which must take into account the lengthy trials and production cycles, followed by the awareness and acceptance and distribution of such solutions.  Clearly a convoluted and complex path to success. 

But it all has to start with efficacy, and for that, the scientific papers are a linchpin, based on the science and the trials.  In this context, the recent announcement of a potent aide for pancreatic cancer (results published in the New England Journal of Medicene, May 31, 2026) occasioned a standing ovation by doctors attending the ASCO meeting.

Each of Pattern's 8 drug trials and 3 biomarker developments deal with similarly difficult cancers--the results will likely be transformative.

The Vera Rubin Observatory

 The Future of Innovation in Review, Day 1 of the 2026 conference, opened with a stunning and dramatic talk and movie by Mario Juric, a long-time astronomer at the University of Washington   https://astro.washington.edu/people/mario-juric.   Juric, a Croatian, talked with enthusiasm to the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile https://rubinobservatory.org/.  That observatory has a web presence stating part of its mission: "Located on a mountaintop in Chile, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory will capture the cosmos in exaquisite detail.  Using the largest camera ever built, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our universe" 

The history of how this observatory first came to be, and the major challenges of creating it, is a saga that is fascinating, but I will skip that here, other than to observe that the camera itself was defined to record images with a 3.2 giga-pixel charge-coupled device by far the largest camera yet constructed.  

For FiRe, Juric put forth the radical premise not stated prominently on the Rubin website--the images will all become available for anyone anywhere.   Juric's point was that up until now, astronomers had just a handful of locales where key telescopes exist, and then try to gain user time on those telescopes.  As he noted, this put a premium on places like CalTech (my favorite alma mater) and left folk anywhere else bereft, notably anyone growing up in Croatia where Juric was born and raised.

Just how important might this be?   Well, start with the uniqueness of the images found in the first ten hours of operation: "The NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory has officially begun its journey to map the universe, and it started with a remarkable feat: capturing over 4,000 asteroids, including 2,100 brand new discoveries, in just ten hours of test imaging. "  https://rubinobservatory.org/news/11000-new-asteroids

Add in the charismatic personality of Juric as he described his own perspective: "I’m interested in astronomical ‘Big Data’: developing and applying methods and algorithms that let us use large data sets to answer research questions. Major astronomical surveys of today are routinely collecting hundreds of terabytes of images, creating databases with billions of objects and several billion measurements. Large surveys astronomers are becoming part data scientists. In my research, I go where the data takes me — I’ve worked on topics ranging from asteroids in the Solar System, Galactic structure, to the scale structure of the universe. My current focus is using survey data to understand the structure and evolution of the Milky Way. I also lead the Data Management team for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build the largest sky survey ever undertaken."   LSST, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, is the name of the ten-year 'scan the entire sky' project at the Rubin Observatory.

Juric illustrated his talk for FiRe with animated clips and movie clips from Rubin.  Many of these an be accessed at the Rubin gallery site: https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery

Dave Andermann comments

I spent yesterday 'particupating' in Day 1 of this year's FiRe conference, an annual conflab that is often praised as 'the best futures conference' on the globe, according to the Economist.   I've attended on occasion (I've been a speaker, and I'm certainly an enthusiast, but seldom an actual attendee: the fee is usually a stiff $6K per attendee).  https://www.futureinreview.com/

Pattern Computer was 'born' at this conference in 2015, and I've been privileged to be on Pattern's Advisory board since 2018, which this year earned me a Virtual Seat at the conference.   https://www.patterncomputer.com/about-us/ 

This is quite a privilege in its own right--access to leading-edge talks, if not the side-rooms and chat sessions, and in that connection, there were multiple spectacular talks yesterday, and I anticipate that today and tomorrow wil feature more of the same.

One that I was especially taken by yesterday was by Dave Andermann, CEO of Sovera Inc,, a company spun out of Elon Musk's Starlink and SpaceX endeavors.  Andermann has a pedigree that well suits him for work in this arena, having served as General Counsel for Space X for seven years, and for Lucas Film for 16 years prior to that.   Here's his LinkedIn profile   https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidanderman/details/experience/

His talk focused on How to Build Low-Orbit Satellite Systems for sovereign nations, what that means, and how you go about it--including the Perils of Pauline.  He started from the premise and observation that StarLink was the first global network for the world, despite the size and goals of major network corporations over the years.  He described the ongoing battle for sovereign control by every (major) nation, and what it has taken to counteract that.   Fascinating 150 year old 'history' of government control of information flow, and what that means for geopolitical issues.

The Blue Origins launch pad explosion last week came up, in the context of how constrained are the number of launch sites.   He said, contrary to what I knew, that more than a dozen new launch companies exist, and the 'common' expectation is that in a decade, the world will see 10,000 launches per year, somewhat analogous to how many planes fly worldwide daily.   So launch pads and launch vehicles, and the costs (now that, ala Musk, launch vehicles are 'recoverable') are 'easy issues' to surmount.  

That puts his answers to questions at the end into perspective.  The most telling answer to me was his retort about the brouhaha now surrounding the enormous drag on water for communities where these humongous data centers are being constructed for AI centers.   He pointed out that two things are true in space--solar power is 'free' and 'cold' is free.   So the huge cooling requirement for water to cool these centers is obviated by the coldness of space, and the huge energy demand is answerable by solar energy.

Ergo, why not launch satellite data centers?   Easy to beam data to the earth, compared to the savings in energy and cooling needs demanded by a planet-bound data center.  Oh, and costs?   Why not beam infra-red energy at night to all of the 'dark' solar farms, and render them two to three times more efficient?   Fascinating talk!

This has been in 'the press' but not in a clear way.   Here's one phrase, gleaned from a Google search: "Musk's space and AI ventures are aggressively pursuing off-Earth computing thorugh 'orbital data centers'.  SpaceX has filed an FCC application toluanch up to 1 million satelliees dedicated to running AI workloads in orbit, even when his terrestrial AI firm, xAI, is building massive data centers on the ground."   Well, duh--of course, a both-AND strategy.  

But the pushback to such a novel idea is almost predictable.  Forbes for example couldn't wait to predict a dire future, a bankrupt futre, for Musk if he follows such a ridiculous plan.  Kevin Platt, May 31, 2026 in Forbes: "SpaceX Vow to launch 1 million AI Satellites could spark a Doomsday Dive."   https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinholdenplatt/2026/05/31/spacex-vow-to-loft-1-million-ai-satellites-could-spark-doomsday-dive/

Andermann closed his talk by describing this possibility, and said: He then went on to say, "Never bet against Elon Musk's crazy ideas".   

Other talks were equally stimulating.   I might post some more stories from that conference.

And Cleve Moler?

Another stalwart gone.  The founder and long-time leader of MatLab, Cleve Moler, just passed.   https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-cleve-moler-1939-2026/

 I first met Cleve when he was a sophomore at Caltech--I think Pete Rux introduced us, but I am not sure about that.   Actually, now that I think about it, it probably was my old high school idol, Karl Pool.

Cleve was one of those 'big men on campus' types, rooming at Ricketts House with an even bigger personality, Brad Efron.  Cleve (pronounced and named for his grandfather who was named Cleveland for the Ohio town) oozed personality, charisma, and in addition, he was obsessed with mathematics.  Brad was, too, but made his way into statistics where his fame now resides.

Cleve's goal was to make mathematics 'available' to the lay public, which explains how he came to create MatLab.  Heres the one sentence about MatLab that I find so wonderful:  MATLAB, the language of engineers and scientists, is a programming and numerical computation environment for algorithm development, data analysis, and visualization.  

Now I grant you that not every person walking up and down the sidewalk in Sacramento (or any other town in America) would be apt to describe such a sentence as truy math 'avaiable' to the lay public, but that is how Cleve saw it.

Searching old records, I found a Caltech newspaper from March 5, 1959 which listed the Ricketts House candidates for office in my sophomore year.  And sure enough, Brad was running for president, and Karl was running for Athletics Director.  Cleve was watching Brad tear up the landscape   https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/477/1/1959_03_05_60_20.pdf

I caught up with Cleve in January 2024, for an ACM Archive interview about his career.  It was a solid interview, akin to the one that Thomas Haigh had done twenty years prior for SIAM.   https://history.siam.org/oralhistories/moler.htm.   Tom's was the classic historian interview of a techie; mine was more of a Who and Why as seen from a colleague, characteristic of the 175 interviews I've done for ACM.   Each has value, while providing some different insights.   I have an unedited transcript and Video on request, but they seem unable to attach here (cockpit error, early Sunday morning).

The surprise for me was that Cleve was a Salt Lake City kid, and so were a number of classmates, including Roger Noll and our Nobelist, Kip Thorne.   Cleve played high school basketball with Roger; Roger and Kip were both in my class, and we had some sport talking about our various career paths. Remarkably, Cleve did not know Al Despain, also in my class, who went on at Berkeley to pioneer Chess Games with Dave Patterson, and later founding AcornTechnologies (not to be confused with the British Acorn Computers).   

My first wife was born and raised in Salt Lake City, and my long-time Forest Service partner, Irv McQuarrie led me to his cousin who co-founded Beehive Medical Electronics, with Homer Warner.  Alan Kay's first job while attending U of Utah was at Beehive, where he used my HP1300A XY display for his pioneering PC, the FlexMachine.   Ivan Sutherland was still at NSF, five months from joining the U of Utah to help establish their fabled Graphics program.   Somehow (lament, lament), the HP 1300A never gets mentioned as the first interactive dynamic display that was used at U of Utah's program.  Ah, well.   

Cleve 'found' Jack Dongarra, an intern at Argonne, and persuaded him to join Cleve in a new PhD program at the University of New Mexico.   Jack, later a storied ACM Turing winner, gives Cleve full credit and then some for his keen eye and key leadership for Jack's nascent career.

We've lost another good one, at a mere 86 years.  Au revoir, Cleve.

These damned obituaries

 Damn, damn, damn: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/technology/peter-g-neumann-dead.html    John Markoff wrote a beautiful eulogy for the New York Times obituary, for an incredible man, Peter Neumann.

This one was a bit of a surprise (somehow, maybe they all are, even though we know that age catches us all)..  In this case, we anticipated that a wonderful colleague, Peter Neumann, would be speaking once again at the fabled Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop, now just completed its 52rd year.  https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/events/asilomar-microcomputer-workshop

Peter has been the author of the ACM RISKS column for well-nigh 40 years, uncovering all sorts of issues with dangerous software (including years ago the infamous DC-8 failures), and he got away with all of this while working at SRI throughout.  

He was scheduled to give a talk again at Asilomar last month, but illness prevented that, so his talk was given by a colleague, Robert Watson, from Oxford.   This morning, I got this full note from Brian Berg, the redoubtable long-term chairman for Asilomar Micro:

Hello, all,

Many of you attended AMW 52 earlier this month.  The plan included an in-person talk by SRI's Peter Neumann, but he was hospitalized due to an injury at the time of the workshop.  His talk was ultimately given by an Oxford University professor with whom he and others at SRI had collaborated for many years on a security project titled CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions).

AMW attendees - both in-person at Asilomar (like myself) and over Zoom (including Peter, while he was lying flat on his hospital bed) - heard Peter's talk on Thu, May 7, which was given via Zoom from Oxford, UK by Professor Robert N. M. Watson!  The talk - titled Trustworthiness: Reflections on My 73 Years of R&D - summed up Peter Neumann's career at SRI International's Computer Science Lab, and he provided this humble talk abstract: "I have been involved in three clean-slate hardware-software development efforts. Some of that is worth re-examining."

Peter also provided this nice bio:

Peter G. Neumann has been a computer professional since 1953, including 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill in the 1960s. He is in his 55th year at not-for-profit SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute). After being a Fulbright Scholar for 2 years in Darmstadt, he taught courses at Stanford, Berkeley, and Maryland, and then wound up with doctorates in both 1960 and 1961. He was in four National Academies study groups, and is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.

Peter's two previous AMW talks were:

• 2001: Voting is an End-to-End System Problem!
• 2013: Rethinking High-Assurance Security from the Ground Up

Ten days later - on Sun, May 20 - Peter sadly departed this planet.  ACM published an obituary here, and the NY Times obituary is attached.

Memorial Service

A memorial service will be held on Sat, 13 June, 10am-Noon PDT at the SRI Innovation Center in Menlo Park, CA. You can register for in-person and online attendance here.  Peter's daughter Helen asked that information about this event be circulated to his friends and colleagues, and she notes that she doesn't have access to Peter's emails or address book.

Thank you, and thanks to Rebecca Mercuri who first provided me information about the memorial service.

Brian Berg

Vojak and COVID

Bruce Vojak and I met, really for the first time, last week via Zoom.    Odd, when you 'know' someone, and even more odd, when they 'know' you, to find out that you've met only once, and that for only five minutest sixteen years ago.   What does it mean, to 'know'?

Bruce 'knew' me via his colleague and partner Ray Price when they were working on their Serial Innovators book (Stanford Press, 2012,  https://www.amazon.com/Serial-Innovators-Individuals-Breakthrough-Innovations/dp/0804775974).   I had been to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) in January 2010 to co-deliver a talk about Ray's and my Stanford 2009 book about Hewlett-Packard (The HP Phenomenon:  Innovation and Business Transformation)       https://www.amazon.com/HP-Phenomenon-Innovation-Business-Transformation/dp/0804752869

Both books, I am happy to report, continue to sell (admittedly in smaller quantities these days), even though the HP we reported on has since endured some choppy waters. 

Vojak attended our lecture, and Ray introduced him at the end, briefly, as a colleague rather than a co-author--the meeting was not memorable at the time.   Ray and Bruce had yet another colleague, Abbie Griffin, who had by this time left UIUC for a role at U of Utah, whom I did not meet.   

Well, Zoom is a wonderful mechanism to get to know someone.  Bruce on May 7th this year had just completed the first (of three) interviews with Aidan McCullen (described elsewhere in this post, and also in my Intrapreneuring Post   (https://intrapreneuringinnovation.blogspot.com/)   We scheduled a half-hour, that stretched easily to an hour and a half.  The book that the three wrote had a number of different stories about my career (more by far than I recalled were included in the book), and we visited about his writing experience there and in subsequent consulting gigs.   The book itself took them twelve years; indeed, they never intended to write a book, but the collected interviews of some twenty people were compelling enough that the book emerged, almost naturally.

But you cannot talk for an hour and a half without covering what has happened for each of us in the intervening sixteen years.  And that was the excitement, I think, for each of us.   We talked at length about 'the interview process' and our mutual findings about how they work, what it takes to get someone candid enough to share true goals, insights and key accomplishments without the braggadocio that ruins so many stories due to hagiography.

And then we talked about COVID, and in particular, the work that I've done on that topic over the past six years.   Bruce knew of the COPD work I'd done long ago, but not the recent work in that arena (see my COPD blog  https://breathecopd.blogspot.com/ ).  I also shared the lecture I had just delivered for the Innovation Value Institute in Ireland (at the Maynooth University, one of the four National Universities in Ireland).

And here is where an 'old friend'--one you've basically never met, but who 'knows' you--comes in.  The Zoom summary itself is insightful: The core of the discussion was Charles's development of advanced data visualization and analysis tools for COVID-19, including dynamic dashboards and compendiums that aggregate and interpret pandemic data at granular levels, such as county and province, using both traditional and AI-driven methods. He highlighted the challenges of data collection, inconsistencies in global reporting, and the political and emotional barriers to effective data use, as well as the lack of comprehensive public analysis of COVID-19 data. Charles shared his efforts to publish a prototype book and make the data accessible, but noted obstacles in distribution due to controversial topics like vaccination.

In a subsequent note, Bruce shared the following: I'm suggesting something of a lessons learned presentation of the data, laid out in a non-political, non-aligned way, with the message, "Isn't this interesting? What might we learn from this?" I think you're already doing this, but perhaps I'm suggesting it be framed in such a non-politically-aligned way that nobody will miss the message.

Food for thought?  I think so.   Great to have a new, interacting colleague!!!

More about Brainerd

 Yesterday's post about Paul Brainerd focused a bit on the early days, including his first outside investment as well as the date.  In doing so, I was a bit cheeky, suggesting that the Computer History Musuem oral interview done in 2007 was in error on those two factoids.  

History has a way of being recorded, and then repeated, sometimes to the total exclusion of any revisions over time.  That doubtless will be true in this case.   Consider for example the eulogy wirtten about Brainerd for GeekWire by Todd Bishop on Feb 19,  2026, which takes vthe CHM interview irtually intact  (https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainerd-1947-2026-aldus-founder-devoted-his-second-chapter-to-the-planet/).

My chary comments were not written to criticize the interviewer--au contrare--computer historians are best able to do great interviews, with modest back-checking usually.   They have a hard time contradicting the interviewee, especially if the subject has not previously had a series of equivalent interviews or fact-checks.  And for an interview done some 27 years after the fact, it is not all that surprising that Brainerd would get the year wrong by one, or the name of the first VC group.   

In addition, Brainerd provided one of the most insightful marketing research stories of our industry for the interviewer--which itself could serve to buttress many books about entrepreneurship if the authors only knew about the story.  Bishop relates this story well, taken from the excellent excerpt in the CHM interview.

So there are several points to consider from this extended example.  

1.  How do we validate oral interviews?  Because of concern for braggadocio or revenge-taking, or understated shyness or just faulty memory, historians have long been concerned about and in places wary of oral interviews.   I cover this in some depth in a monograph I wrote for the Computer History Board of Trustees in 2015 (https://www.lulu.com/shop/charles-house/digital-revolution-heritage/paperback/product-22378873.html?srsltid=AfmBOop5Db1DNvUso1lYNd-OtWySnOWrfyEUd_ZT6Jvhi145PaJqlXck&page=1&pageSize=4).

2. Now that the high-tech world has accumulated nearly 10,000 such interviews, how do we extract the powerful stories contained within them?  This is a great on-going subject, suitable for a later time.  Suffice here to note that although some details are 'suspect' due to my carping, that Todd Bishop very adroitly captured the essence of Brainerd's market research efforts and insight.  That is a key contrib ution, typical of what we aspire to, but too seldom happens.

3. "Correcting the record".   Ahh, the wistful desire.   Hard to do.  HP's origins are often proclaimed to start with selling eight audio oscillators to Disney.  HP PR is still stuck on this.   The facts are that the Disney order was nowhere near the first for the company; more importantly, it was NINE, not EIGHT, a fact that has been proven repeatedly to any and all interested folk at HP. and IGNORED, even denounced.  Ah, well.

So here let me just put some passages from the interview that might help the context for why it should be 1983 and not 1984.

I will let the record stand re the Summerhill investment (noted in The HP Phenomenon, p. 587.   https://www.amazon.com/HP-Phenomenon-Innovation-Business-Transformation/dp/0804752869)

When we first formed the company in January or thereabouts of ’84, it was essentially for the professional user.

There was an Apple branch office here in Belleview, Washington, and they had an OEM sales person there. He came and visited us in our first six weeks of being a company in a little studio apartment below the Pike Place Market, and he loaned us two prototype Macintoshes. He didn’t know us from Adam. I had called the office and set up this appointment. He showed up; he got two Macs out of his trunk, brought them into the office and said, “Here. You take them for the next six months.” So they didn’t actually come from Apple – I mean it came from Apple, but not from Cupertino. This whole relationship with Apple was based on individual Apple employees from the working level, i.e. Bruce Blumberg and a sales person. It had nothing to do with any high-level decision making on the part of Steve Jobs or anyone else at Apple. 

I started trying to raise money during the summer of 1984; I called upon 50 different venture capital firms both in Seattle and Silicon Valley and was told ‘no’ 49 out of 50 times. We got all the way to September which was our drop-dead date. We had less than $5,000 left in our bank account. Finally, we got a commitment from a group of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley – Palo Alto – that was made up of some partners who had been former Apple Computer executives, and they understood what we were trying to accomplish and why software might have value.

Note here that he says that Aldus actually started in mid to late 1983, in a little studio apartment.  All other docs except my anecdote trace the founding to 1984.  And they got two prototype MacIntoshs, weeks before the Super Bowl ad of January 22, 1984.   Must have been 1983, huh?

PageMaker would be the tool that they’d be using for that kind of publishing. It was just beyond our imagination. We started to show this in January of 1985 when the LaserWriter came out. We were there at that product launch, of course. When we started demonstrating it, people were grabbing for the sheets coming out of the LaserWriter because they couldn’t believe that we could do the quality of output with the quality of text, and that it really was coming close to what you could do with a traditional publishing system. It was then that we really began to understand how widespread the market opportunity was for desktop publishing. 

but it wasn’t as fundamental a shift in our thinking as you’re implying, perhaps, because the Macintosh with the LaserWriter was still going to be a $10,000 solution. We really underestimated how fundamental, even at $10,000, the value proposition was in terms of what PageMaker, the LaserWriter and Macintosh could do 

And it was very difficult to develop that whole interface that Apple had already done. So, we immediately started to work on PageMaker for the Macintosh

In the summer of ’84 when Macintosh unit sales weren’t doing that well. Bruce Blumberg came to me and said, “There’s an opportunity to go in front of the new president.” Steve had been pushed aside in that timeframe, or at least John Scully had come on the scene, and John wanted on his desk, from his product managers, a marketing plan. Bruce said, “I can’t do this by myself, and I want to partner with you. Can you pull together a marketing plan for desktop publishing?” So, I hired a marketing consultant locally, and in three or four weeks we put this thing together from nuts to bolts. We developed the whole marketing plan for desktop publishing for us and Apple

And the rest is history.  Brainerd drove the point abouot Desktop Publsihing, and a new era opened.  I could go on, and describe how great Persuasion was compared to PowerPoint, but that is a different topic.   Meanwhile, RIP Paul.

Paul Brainerd RIP

The obituary squib caught my eye, and gave me pause.   I knew Paul Brainerd, briefly.  https://lnkd.in/gBPmHenV brainerd-1947-2026-aldus-founder-devoted-his-second-chapter-to-the-planet/?

When I moved to Palo Alto for HP as their new Corporate Engineering Director in 1982, I had little exposure to the wider electronics and computer communities.   Yes, I had led the HP Logic Analyzer business, and in that connection met with key developers at many computer companies around their diagnostic issues.  Yes, I'd led the first computer graphics display project at HP, the HP 1300A, even earlier.  But except for a few stalwarts there, I didn't develop deep ties to any of the graphics teams.

In Colorado Springs, we were pretty remote, all things considered.

In Palo Alto, it was happening all around us.   And one day, an old colleague from HP--Tom Whitney--called me to invite me into a dinner club that purported to be a small-time investment club.  Tom was the lead manager for HP's (and the world's) first personal computer, the HP 9100A that I had used to develop the COPD thesis for the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission in 1970.  He also was the lead manager for the subsequent HP 35A, the world's first scientific pocket calculator.  And then he left HP to become Apple's VP of Research and Development.  That assignment didn't go so well--yes, he made $60M in stock from Apple's IPO, but his team produced the ill-fated Apple III, and he was bounced out in favor of his HP protege John Couch.  Couch also foundered, leading the LISA project before Jobs took over its slimmed-down version, the MacIntosh.

Whitney proposed a small dinner group, meeting monthly starting in late 1983, where he would invite friends and colleagues to chat about what they were working on, which inevitably led to requests for investment.  Well, we did do a little bit, but it was cursory to say the least.  The group was titled SummerHill Partners, since Tom and Donna lived on Summerhill Road in Los Altos Hills.  And SHP stood for "Since HP" for Tom.

Our third speaker was a young earnest fellow named Paul Brainerd, who was an escapee from Atex, a start-up in word processing automation tools.  One of their focii was productivity for the newspaper industry, and Brainerd had been deep into that world for awhile.  When Kodak bought the computing business, circa 1981, the word processing group was terminated.  Nearly all of the team went off on their own tangents, but almost all started some version of the same business.  Brainerd was the marketing guy, and he lacked the technical chops to invent another version, so instead he focused on a 'low-ball' derivative that he thought might be of interest for small-time newspapers.

NBI in Boulder, CO (stood for Nothing but Initials) was one version, Interleaf Inc. in Cambridge, MA was the best-known and most successful for a time.   David Boucher founded Interleaf, which developed the first commercial WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) document processor.   Stephen Kirsch would later found Framemaker, which was a dominant product for a time.   Wang acquired key folk from the group, as did Lanier, and others.   

And in my role at HP Palo Alto, I had been using (and loving) the Interleaf system for my own work for a year, when Brainerd came to our dinner in late 1983, along with a colleague, Charles Ying.  The dinner group had eleven members that night, and essentially none of them understood the value of the ideas presented.  What they did understand was the beauty of a new computer shown--a preliminary MacIntosh.  This was maybe eight weeks before the famous Apple ad at the SuperBowl, announcing the new MacIntosh.  The entire group had seen the Apple Lisa, and I believe that most of them had already seen the Xerox PARC devices.   So the idea of an icon-driven screen, rather than raster-based lines of text, was not novel to this group.   The idea of WYSIWYG printing was less familiar, but not unknown--although in fact, my usage of the Interleaf system had probably given me an edge here.

The way the club worked was each of the members (we had fourteen in total) put up $50,000 to play, and the club would vote where to invest, in small chunks of $50,000 total.   We took a vote when Brainerd finished, and the vote was 2 in favor (Tom Whitney and me) and nine against (including Bill Krause, CEO of 3Com at the time; Dave Norman, founder and CEO of BusinessLand; and Walt Loewenstern, co-founder (and the L) of ROLM Inc, about to be bought by IBM.  Ying was apoplectic, sahying something like "this will be big, you guys should support it."

I stepped in and described why I was excited.  Next thing you know, the group said, "Okay."  We gave Brainerd $50,000, of which each member had a $3,500 share.  Over seeral years time, it became $12.5M when Aldus was bought by Adobe a decade later .   It was the only significant winning investment that Summerhill ever made.   So, $3,500 became $900,000!  The worst one we made was two $50,000 votes for Manny Fernandez and his brilliant Gavilan computer, plus several of us invested some additional private money (I did another $50,000 on my own).   Gavilan declared bankruptcy 30 days after our investment!!!  Talk about sucker-punched.  

The sequels are perhaps worth recording.   Tom had loaned me my entire grubstake ($50,000) to be in the club.  I had recently arrived from Colorado and a big divorce, into what even then was Palo Alto real estate woes, so discretionary money was scarce.   His terms were to pay it back from club earnings, and I had done so for half of it within a few years.  And then, a second divorce gave up half of my small share.   So, running the numbers, I wound up investing a net $75,000 ($25,000 paid to Tom to clear the original debt, and $50,000 into Gavilan), and got back (1/2)*(1/2)*(1/14)*($900,000) = $160,000 after eleven years total time, which is a whopping 7.2% compound interest--not exactly a smash hit.

The other sequel of interest was many years later, when the Computer History Museum conducted an oral interview with Paul in 2006.   And we learned that his work to get funded was indeed difficult.  Here are the relevant passages from CHM's interview (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Brainerd_Paul/Brainerd_Paul_1.oral_history.2006.102657986.pdf)

I started trying to raise money during the summer of 1984; I called upon 50 different venture capital firms both in Seattle and Silicon Valley and was told ‘no’ 49 out of 50 times. We got all the way to September which was our drop-dead date. We had less than $5,000 left in our bank account. Finally, we got a commitment from a group of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley – Palo Alto – that was made up of some partners who had been former Apple Computer executives, and they understood what we were trying to accomplish and why software might have value. The basic reason I was told ‘no’ is that no one felt that a software company had any long-term market value; that basically anyone with an idea could come up with this in his garage, and in a matter of a weekend or two, write the software. Microsoft hadn’t gone public yet; it was still a private company, and people just didn’t see how a software company was a worthy investment. It was too risky. 

(Who was the VC?).  It was Vanguard, and the partner was Douglas DeVivo; he was on our board until we sold the company. The former Apple person was Gene Carter. So, in the summer of ’84, we raised $864,000 in one round of early-stage financing based on our business plan and a very rough prototype. The product shipped a year later. The Macintosh was introduced in January, and we shipped PageMaker 1.0 the following July. 

These passages reveal the difficulty historians have with oral interviews, when they complain that the facts are not always 'correct'.

Point 1: It wasn't 1984, but 1983.  Which shows up in the 2nd paragraph, noting that the MacIntosh introduced 'the following January' (and we all know from the 1984 SuperBowl ad when it debuted.

Point 2: It wasn't Vanguard, it was Summerhill Partners, who were indeed partially former Apple execs.  We only gave them $50,000, and then Tom and Charlie Ying called Doug DeVito to persuade hin to give Paul 'real money'.  

The facts otherwise are great, and while I mentioned these tidbits once to the CHM chairman, Len Shustek, he and I both agreed that this will have to stand as recorded.

The other thing that is fabulous in Paul's interview is the story of their 'big marketing trip'--a classic story of brilliant entrepreneurship.   But I will save that for now, and maybe put it up later or in a separate. blog.

Cheers 

RIP Vicki Hanson

 The news yesterday was sudden, surprising -- and yet it wasn't.   Vicki had always persevered, and it'd been months since I'd heard from her.   As the CEO of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), she was tireless and devoted.   She'd come up 'through the ranks' -- even the ranks that ACM once decried as 'fake' or 'not relevant' (e.g. their early stance on graphics, on HCI {Human-Computer Interaction; or CHI, as ACM preferred to call it, putting the computer in front of the human} and even the Internet itself).  She became President in 2016, a decade ago now, and ACM CEO two years later.   

Here's the memoriam in CACM https://cacm.acm.org/news/in-memoriam-vicki-l-hanson/

Vicki's later work, beyond HCI, was bent on aiding dis-advantaged communities to be part of the computer world.  You might say that was a logical extension from her first love, and in fact I believe that it was.   Her Anita Borg honor signals that love and that devotion.

When she became CEO, I began the ACM Awards Archive project.  Though it was mostly driven and supported by Pat Ryan, ACM's redoubtable {and self-preferred 'behind the scenes'} COO, Vicki was a strong supporter.   Our project focused on previous Award winners -- I sub-titled it the PIP group (Previously Important People); Vicki wanted in addition to support and honor the many volunteers and staff who make ACM work so well.  Her view was that these folk are the real backbone of the guts of the organization.  

She was so right in that view.

When we proposed a year ago to extend the Archive work into a Virtual Hall of Fame, she was supportive, but concerned because ACM had just modified the Digital Library pricing structure and with it, a key major revenue generator for ACM.  Alas, that work with Vicki at the helm is a missed opportunity at this point.  

I know many friends have been sad to learn about Vicki's last year, and this denouement.  I am happy though that I came to know and appreciate her gifts and her contributions.

Chuck

COVID literature

 January 22, 2026--the sixth anniversary of the first COVID diagnosis in America.   Our newspaper, the San Jose Mercury-News, failed to note this.  So, too, the New York Times and the Washington Post

And then, when I went to check my sources, they say, "NOPE, it was January 20th" until you read further and it was "actually January 18" if not January 17.   Well, the first positive test was on the 17th, and January 18 was the ID verification by CDC of that case in Washington state, and on January 20 a statement was released to the public.   Most newspapers carried their first COVID story on January 22nd, 

But almost all "anniversary date" stories credit March 11th, the day WHO declared COVID to be a pandemic in its infinitre wisdom.  By that date, 40 US states had 3,121 confirmed cases, and 42 deaths.  The world had 24,924 cases in 14 countries, and 982 deaths in 10 countries on four continents.   

What do the 'databases' say?   Well, the official Johns Hopkins database lists 723 cases and 1 death by January 22.   California had 722 cases, no deaths; Washington State had one case on January 22 but no deaths, and Wisconsin had one death but no cases.  Huh?    Turns out that the CA data was retroactively assessed, and 'added' back to the original files.  This didn't happen for any other US state.  Such jiggering of the data happened in several early outbreaks as people tried to reconstruct who was sick and who died from what, before the world knew about COVID.   

So, six years in, how good are the books?  Which ones should we venerate?  

A new one just came out mid-2025, "In COVID's wake" by Stephen Macedo and Frances E. Lee, two political scientists, with great credentials.   Reviews are laudatory from people who idolize political machinations, but health credentials seem suspect.  One critical reviewer wrote "The examinations of existing epidemiology literature in imcomplete, and the conclusions are wrong. . . .  A pathetic attempt at revisionist history of epidemiology of COVID-19 by political scientists.  It is difficult to list every factoid these writers got wrong."

I covered the slim book by the great UK Statistician David Spiegelhalter (2021) in an earlier post.  One key critic wrote: "Absolutely useless . . . "

Michael Lewis penned the popular Premonition at the end of 2020.   Usually a very solid writer, Lewis was panned by many for this one: "A polemic against the government and especially against the CDC . . . (while I share some antipathy toward those views, I like the thrust of this critic's main charge).  "It is a jumble of stories that do not get to Covid until around page 177.  It reads like a hot mess.  I am sorry I slogged through it."

The Plague Year, by Lawrence Wright, late 2020.   Praised by many for its detailed first-year coverage, some found it quite biased.  One said, "Political garbage, huge public disservice. . . . I kept trying so hard to give this book a chance, but once I saw Trump's name mentioned for about the 100th time, I realized that this author was very unhinged in his dislike of Trump.  The author absolutely deserves the right to criticize the Administration's handling of the crisis, but on my opinion focused on that too much in a pandemic that was global and involved numerous global impacts, not just Trump."

Jonathan Howard just published a similar screed, "Everyone else is lying to you: a damning archive of science denial."

One of the better is "Lessons from the COVID War" by the Covid Crisis Committee.  A collection of 34 authors, these are good primary source material, but no overall story emerges.

A European writer, Richard Chambers, wrote "A State of Emergency" about the first COVID year in Ireland.   Reasonably balanced, but only about one (small) nation.

There is room for more.

One Institute joins more tightly with another

 InnovaScapes Institute has been a long-term passion for me, as many of you readers know.   We've done some fun things, some not-so-fun things, and even in places some important things.  And it seems to me that the challenges have if anything increased rather than decreased.  So there is plenty to do, even as clients have struggled with funding for projects in this strange anti-science political climate at present.

Along the way, we have worked with many clients and groups, and one such group has periodically been the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) at Maynooth University in Leixlip, Ireland, maybe twenty miles each of Dublin.

I first became acquainted with Maynooth (which is one of the four linked universities of the University of Ireland) circa 2008 or so, when I was working with a nearby Intel Corporation division on a set of collaboration tools.   I headed a group at Intel where our motto was that collaboration with the right set of tools was "Better than Being There" -- that motto earned us a lot of critique and brickbats at the time, but it also predicted many of the specific issues that have been discovered since the Zoom revolution occasioned by the COVID pandemic and consequent lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Via MediaX at Stanford, where I was the director at the time, we composed a workshop for British Petroleum and professional societies in the UK and in Ireland that we titled "Prometheus Unbound"

This workshop strongly advanced the notion that Virtual Collaboration was a tool for "everyone", not just the privileged executives at major corporations (the classic target audience for HP, Cisco, IBM, and virtually every other corporation at the time).   Recall that HP was touting their Halo solution, and Cisco their Telepresence rooms.  Even Webex was focused on the C-suite.  Four years after our workshop, Eric Yuan left Cisco in frustration (they had bought Webex in the meantime, and Yuan was the CTO, but he could not persuade Cisco to drop the big 'rooms' and to shift the target audience to an individual becoming empowered.  Yuan, helped by a retiring exec from Cisco, Dan Scheinman (who agreed with him, so Dan resigned Cisco simulataneously, and funded the start-up now known as Zoom).   

We also worked with IVI three years ago for a couple of United Nations General Assembly presentations centered around highly interactive Multiple Display environments to depict Big Data discoveries for the COVID pandemic in various settings, including of course Ireland's 26 counties.

Well, the great news for this week is that I was invited to become a Senior Innovation Fellow at IVI.  Naturally I accepted, and I look forward to some novel and impactful IVI projects that will extend our investigations and contributions in the Public Health sector through IVI's curent Stay Left, Shift Left,  10x Digital Health initiative   This initiative, described clearly in a recent IJIC article (International Journal of Integrated Care. https://ijic.org/articles/10.5334/ijic.ICIC24544. ) is a compelling story, with a lot of promise but also a wide set of challenges.  

I am honored and thrilled to be invited to join IVI, and I look forward to some very fundamental work in this arena.