SIG/CIS at Dearborn

Who does history?  Who should do history?  Why do we (they) do it?  How are the choices of what to study made?  Who vets the resulting work? 

These questions provoke widely varying points of view. 

Just prior to the annual SHOT (Society for the History of Technology) conference at Dearborn, Michigan in November, the Special Interest Group for Computers In Society (SIG/CIS) had a spirited e-mail exchange on this topic.  The topic centered on the perceived historical flaws in Walter Isaacson’s newly published book, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and what should/could be or have been done.  Views varied widely, from solid enthusiasm for a truly well-written, engaging book about “our topic” to real concern for the lack of involving the SIG/CIS leadership as reviewers prior to publication—essentially vetting the book.

The keynote speaker at the SIG/CIS meeting, Jennifer Light, tackled the question of “who” head-on, averring that there are (at least) five different communities who are focused on the history of computing:

1.     Historians of technology (us, in that room, as SHOT and SIG/CIS members)

2.     Historians of science (them, having their annual conference the same week in Chicago)

3.     Practitioners in the computing design worlds (architecture, computer-aided tools, etc.)

4.     Practitioners in the communications/media worlds (movies, games, iPhones, etc.)

5.     Journalists, analysts, and amateur historians of many stripes and origins

Light’s key observation, for my taste, was that none of these five groups talk to each other.   Bernard Carlson, professor and Chair of the Engineering and Society department at the University of Virginia, lent special emphasis to this point when he mentioned that the head of the National Academy of Engineering  (unnamed at the conference, but it was Bill Wulf) asked to get the SHOT periodicals, but after a year of reading them, he reported to Carlson that “I don’t understand anything they’re talking of.”

Help me, please!  The chairperson of NAE for America, the premier group of eight thousand engineers in America, himself a pedigreed PhD with long engineering experience, numerous patents, business success and accolades, could not relate to the issues, debates, or even vocabulary of the leading historians of technology of the world?  It’d be hard to make up this story, it sounds so ludicrous. 

Light continued, noting that at most, there are perhaps four hundred practicing Historians of Computing Technology in the world today, versus an observation by the most popular author in that field (Jim Cortada) who recently wrote that “we will come to see this field as the most pivotal historical point in civilization.”

Cortada has a superb little book about 'our craft'--"History Hunting"--wherein he notes: "in the case of the world of computers, we have had the problem that so few participants have been interviewed and so many thousands could be.  Computing pioneers also have had the bad habit of dying, even if many have lived into their eighties and nineties.  Because doing high-grade interviews is so expensive and time-consuming, we needed to find another way to get that task done if we were going to scale up to interviewing many people rather than just staying content with a few.  Remember, there are only several hundred professionally trained historians in the world looking at the history of computing, and the number of people they can interview is low....   (After CBI, CHM and the Software History Center collaborated, got a $600K grant from Sloan, and built a website, sought lots of folk, etc....) the project proved to be a partial success."  And that overstates the success, measured against the original goal.

So... an opportunity awaits!  Or maybe multiple opportunities.  Historians are too few, amateurs are too amateurish, practitioners are too self-absorbed, etc.  But... meanwhile we're losing valuable stuff.

Capturing History

We've posted before in this blog about the importance of "Capturing History" for our High-Tech community.  See, for example, "An Added Focus for InnovaScapes Institute" posted 1/7/14, followed by "What have we learned via Oral and Video Histories" posted 7/19/14, and the sequel ""Why Collect Oral and Video Histories?"" on the same day.

Two recent events are worth noting in this regard:

First, the annual SHOT and SIG/CIS meeting in Dearborn, MI the second week in November

Then, the IEEE Silicon Valley chapter December 2014 meeting at the Texas Inst HQ in Sunnyvale.

The next two posts will report briefly on these events.  What this post does is introduce the topic that they have stimulated for me:

"History is too important to leave up to historians."

Seriously, we have a huge problem in this regard, and almost no one is aware of it, or more importantly, how they can help influence it.

For example, Christophe Lecuyer, an energetic, focused historical researcher long associated with Silicon Valley history recently was able to publish a small volume of "the Fairchild papers."  These are key notebook entries from the folk who famously bolted from Shockley Labs, pioneered almost all of the key technologies for silicon chip manufacture, and then created Intel Corporation.  It is a wonderful glimpse at "How it Happened"--where "It" is the crux of the digital revolution that will go down in history as probably THE epochal event for civilization's knowledge management.

The story, though, worth reporting is how closely we came to losing all of this historical record.

Fairchild Semiconductor eventually had more folk leave to start new companies than anything experienced at Shockley.  Intel, AMD, and National all spun directly out; Zilog was part of the second wave, etc.  Within a decade, more than 40 semiconductor companies were competing in what was just being termed "Silicon Valley."  Another decade, and most of them had disappeared, merged, or struggled against the Japanese 'onslaught.'  In fact, the irony is that Silicon Valley was no longer the home of much silicon by the time (1982) that National Geographic did its spotlight article re SV, and the Japanese had decimated the local firms by producing much higher-quality parts (as opposed to the dumping charges that U.S. manufacturers "manufactured").

Fairchild itself struggled, then was sold, first to Schlumberger, and then to National, its historical records boxed up and retained, but not examined at all.  Then National, years later, got sold to Texas Instruments, which had someone discover the historical records, start to dispose of them, and then thought to call the Computer History Museum to ask if they'd be interested in the corpus.

Wow!  What if they hadn't called, but instead dumped the records?  It urns out that we know most of the records of most of the companies in Silicon Valley history have been discarded, shredded, lost.  Irretrievably.

And we are losing the pioneers.  People are mortal, and our heroes are no exception.  So the leaders, the inventors, the creators--never mind the legions of helpers--are seldom recorded for their history, their experience, their perspective.

Does it matter?  We think so.  Can we got a grip on this?  How?  There are only an estimated 400 professional computer historians in the world--see the next post--hardly enough to do justice to the field reworking all of the world's societal infrastructure.  Moreover, most of those 400 are focused on the minutiae of a few people or companies, or even one or two specific machines (e.g. IBM 1401).

So--tell your friends, tell a CEO, tell your neighbors--SAVE THOSE RECORDS.  Preserving is the first step toward later interpretation.  Without it, nothing can easily be done later.

Another new book

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks created the Digital Revolution

The new tome by Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs: Isaacson will be at the Computer History Museum this next Tuesday nite, there may still be tickets available.

I was a little chary about the Jobs book--Isaacson is a superb, prolific writer with wonderful prose, captivating style, and engrossing stories.   Both books (and his others, about Einstein, Franklin, etc) are eminently readable.

My quibble with the Jobs book was that it was not particularly well researched, nor well balanced, in terms of the Apple story.  Lots of Apple employees and alumni have agreed with me, supplying much energy in their recitations.  The public reception was extraordinary, though, as properly it should have been for this icon of our industry, indeed our world.

The SIG-CIS community--that acronym stands for Special Interest Group-Computers In Society, as part of SHOT, the Society for the History of Technology--was similarly chary about this new book, pointing out (with some glee) errors of commission in some significant (in their view) places.  And I don't disagree with their doting on historical accuracy.

But... this is a terrific tour-de-force, and it should do Silicon Valley proud.  The cover features Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Alan Turing, and the book does a fabulous job of covering the emergence and evolution of our digital age.

I tend to go to the index, and follow streams of names and stories i "know" to see how they are cast in any new book.  Isaacson uses Michael Malone and John Markoff selectively to point out observations re the Valley; he doesn't cite Fred Turner, which is a shame, but he arrives at nearly the same point, in terms of strongly endorsing Stewart Brand and his impact, coupled with Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and what became XeroxPARC.

Get it, read it. love it....

Get Eric Schmidt's new book

Marissa Mayer interviewed Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg of Google tonight at the Computer History Museum, to an overflow crowd.  Smashing!

The topic was their new book, How Google Works, and of course (well, maybe not 'of course') they gave Marissa much credit for creating much of the early Google experience.  It was a rollicking good time, punctuated at the end by a young kid coming on stage, asking a couple of solid questions (like "will Google go into China if their material is censorship is used?").

The show will be up on the CHM YouTube site by the end of the week.  I'll add the url when I get it.

Much solid material, such as "Hiring is too important to leave up to recruiting managers"   "A" players will hire "A" players; "B" players will hire "C" players.

Lots about hiring generalists--the world is moving too fast to hire specialists who will quickly become obsolete, but meanwhile try to protect their 'specialty'.

Hire for passion, smarts, creativity.  "How do you tell a creative from a 'crazy'" was one question. Answer--can't tell but easier to manage crazies than Bozos if you want creativity.

HiPPOs are despised--Highest Paid Person's Opinion.  Great way to kill innovation.

In God we trust; all others bring data.   Show me your data for the meeting; if it's just opinion, we'll use mine.

Essentially a brief for how to create and maintain a high-momentum company--with homage to Bill and Dave and how the early HP Way worked.  Reminded me lots and lots about that early company.

Credentials?

Several asked, re the last post, how do YOU qualify to comment on this topic?

Fair enough.

Amateur status, what is it they say--citizen science?

Actually, aviation and aviation 'incidents' have been an interest for most of my life.  Unable to fly when I enlisted for the Navy because of eyesight, the pilot idea went begging.  My brother Tom did join the Navy, and one tour on a carrier convinced him to shift to the submarine service due to the high number of missing planes that year.

Our neighbor when I was in high school was the VP of engineering for North American Aviation; he stimulated my college choice greatly (Caltech because of JPL).  My uncle was VP of Mfg for Northrup, his oldest son (my first cousin) worked years as a designer for Bill Lear, and then Boeing.  He was cited admiringly by the Boeing VP of Quality at his funeral as 'the man' who blew the whistle on the flawed composite wing structure for the Dreamliner.

My son and my daughter-in-law work for Boeing today.

My ergonomics team at HP was called in to 'help' Boeing when they repeated the idiotic cockpit design on the 757 that had once plagued the 727--putting the afterburner switch next to the engine switch.  The first one cost one plane from LAX to Denver, falling in the ocean in 1969, killing all aboard.  Fifteen years later, a near repeat on the 'new fly-by-wire' plane, the pilot fortunately able to restart the engines less than 1,000 feet above the ocean.  HP and Boeing had interlocking Boards of Directors for years--ergo, our team got the invite to help.

And Bill Hewlett personally got involved with microburst measurements when we had an incident with one of our corporate jets while I was HP's Corporate Engineering director.

I've co-chaired major ACM conferences with Boeing's only Computer Science Fellow, who is one of few industry ACM Fellows as well.  And we're close to Boeing's long-time Safety officer, as well as to NASA folk.

Our god-daughter's grandfather was Jim Nissen, the 5th recipient of celebrated Crystal Eagle award from the Northern Calif Aero Club.  The four who preceded him were Jimmy Doolittle, Chuck Yeager, Stan Hillis, and Bill Lear.  Pretty good company, huh?   Every American astronaut (and me) through 1990 has flown in Jim's restored "Jenny" which is now in the Air Force museum in Utah.

But the most impactful for me was the opportunity to chair the ALPA (AirLine Pilots Association) inquiry after the 9-11 tragedies.  This semi-secret committee included lots of high-level military folk, an Air Force One captain, several spook shop folk (the kind who go by only a first name like George, but at home they're known as Bill), and several security and cyber-security folk.  This led to locked cockpit doors, green light laser regulations, extensive simulator time to learn to fly an airliner with destroyed engines from SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles).  This latter worked for Sully Sullenberger; it failed in Ukraine (if the plane blows up, pretty hard for the best pilot to save it).

Oh, yes, and our Cub Scout den mother was Wrong Way Corrigan's sister.

So, the net is that we've been fortunate to be close to a few of the stories, and that is what fashioned the presentation.  Still, just an avocational interest.

Where is Malaysia 370?

Of course, I don't know either.

But InnovaScapes Institute (ISI) gets some strange requests, and one we got repeatedly this spring was "Where is that Malaysia 370 plane?"     This, coupled with the several conspiracy theories, and my own background (which in most circles, I don't mention) in aviation safety and 'incidents', led me to put a presentation together for 'lay audiences'

I presented this yesterday to an audience of mostly older military types in San Jose, the SIR 21 group.

The reaction was interesting, not unlike the first time I presented to a Palo Alto group a month ago.  Old pilots especially seemed to like it; discussion afterward went for hours.  One phrase, sent to me by a pilot, really resonated:
"Always in accidents the governments and companies lie and cover all this crap up until it leaks out the corners.  Pilots will always pass the true word on to each other even in communist countries it always comes out."

For this post, I'll just hit a couple of highlights

First, even in this day and age, planes get lost.  Something like 83 commercial airline planes have been "LOST" since WW II, lost as in "not found" for some time, if ever.  Amelia Earhart's and Squadron 19 (and the Bermuda Triangle) were the most famous lost planes (though not commercial flights of course), with the largest search teams, until Malaysia 370.  Five planes have been lost since 2001, in Molo Straits, Namibia, Angola, Guyana, and now Malaysia, all remote parts of the globe.

After 75 years, 'we think' we know what happened to Earhart, where the plane landed, and that she survived the wreck only to die marooned when the Navy couldn't decipher her messages.

It took 26 years before Americans learned the true source of the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.  It was Iranian retaliation for the U.S. Vincennes shooting down the Iranian passenger liner, not Gaddafi after all.

After 40 years of sleuthing by the lead director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum with a son of a dead passenger, we still don’t know why Pan Am 7 disappeared on the way to Honolulu in 1957.  Five different theories exist, three of which are engine manfunctions, none of which are mentioned in official FAA doc’s.

Its one thing to know where the plane went down, quite another (black boxes help, but not always) to know WHAT HAPPENED.  It took years, and tens of thousands of pieces of reconstructed blown-up 747,  TWA 800, that was flying out of NYC, to debunk the "Navy missile" conspiracy theory and demonstrate that the empty center fuel tank in fact blew up the plane.

And that’s the message of the presentation.  Pilot error and now terrorism are 80% of the ‘causes’ in most reports.  Our data suggests that more than half are instead plane equipment issues or shoddy instrumentation (on the plane, at the airport, or radar tracking systems).  What else would you expect from an engineer who spent half a lifetime building better instruments?

Pilots tell me that it is 'easy' to blame a dead pilot.  They say that the mistake the pilot often made was to be on that flight!

In general, almost inevitably, the airplane manufacturers and the airlines are quick to look for “pilot error” or terrorists, thus averting the blame and responsibility.  This became the thrust of the presentation, exploring four ‘causes’—weather; “intentional” acts (think Ukraine SAMs, 9-11, Lockerbie); airline folk (pilots, crew, ground support, tower control); or plane issues (ergonomics in the cockpit, mechanical, electrical).  Fires, of course, can be caused by ground crew cargo loading, lightning, or plane equipment malfunction, so these are not always independent variables.

The immediate hue and cry re Malaysia 370 was "pilot suicide" because he was despondent over a friend's court trial, he had a flight simulator on his desk at home (with southern Indian ocean landing practices), and he didn't schedule any lunches with friends the following week.

Then, when the erratic radar trackings (from seven nations, none of which would share info for fear of revealing the effectiveness of their radar  systems) indicated a zigzag path and dramatic altitude shifts, terrorism ideas became rampant.

It took days to reveal that the cargo contents included 400# of lithium batteries, cargo expressly forbidden on any U.S. carrier (although guess which nation consumes the most of these), and another two tons of unspecified goods (thought by the Tom Clancy devotees to be U.S.drone technology captured in Afghanistan by the Taliban and sold to the Chinese).

The misfired cockpit oxygen system on another 777, that burned out the entire cockpit in less than two minutes while sitting on the ground, is also suggestive.  The plane was manufactured two days after the Malaysian plane, and Boeing has now admitted that 200 planes were miswired during that timeframe.  These are more serious recall issues than broken gas feeds for General Motors, although there aren't as many units to go find and fix.

In interests of brevity here, I won’t go on, but might in future posts if anyone is interested.  Call or write—housec1839@gmail.com--or better yet, comment here.  For groups, ISI is open to future presentations.

Mike Malone and the Intel Trinity

Get ahold of Mike Malone's new book, The Intel Trinity.  He spoke yesterday at the Computer History Museum, an eloquent erudite journalist who has covered Silicon Valley for forty years--self-proclaiming that he is probably the last working journalist in the Valley who knew Bob Noyce personally.  Certainly many in the audience did not, although a goodly number held their hands high for thirty, forty, or even fifty years in the Valley semiconductor business.

Mike was at HP in the 70s, and he's now done some twenty books, so writing clearly comes easily to this man, as does a ready wit and urbanity that is refreshing to see in a public setting.  He is an unabashed enthusiast for his topics, no question about that, and he is judicious in selecting the pieces to illumine his point of view.  Makes for delicious reading in the main.

Reviews, from the publisher, are laudatory, even puffery.  But I found one that was more balanced, that might be worth including here, since we tend at InnovaScapes to fret about accuracy of the historical record.  Here it is, with highlighting:

Book review: ‘The Intel Trinity,’ on the men who built Intel, by Michael S. Malone

By Marcus Brauchli  July 18, 2014, Washington Post

Marcus Brauchli is a former executive editor of The Washington Post and managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.

In journalist Michael S. Malone’s telling, the world’s most important company is audaciously innovative, viciously competitive and boundlessly visionary, leaping from success to success as it upends and reshapes industries. If you are 30 or younger, though, you may have trouble guessing this particular technology company’s identity. At the barricades of the mobile revolution, where cellphones and tablets inspire the masses, its name is seldom mentioned. The do-no-wrong industrial insurgent that Malone idolizes in his new Silicon Valley corporate history largely missed out on those movements.

I know this because, while reading Malone’s lively if frequently hyperbolic “The Intel Trinity,” I happened to be at a conference where Intel’s current leader was onstage, explaining its slip-up. “Companies make mistakes,” Brian Krzanich, Intel’s graying and genial chief executive, told an audience of mostly younger technologists in May at the Re/code conference in California. After leading the transformation of computing from mainframes to personal computers to laptops, the company “wanted it to stop there,” Krzanich admitted. “But the market kept moving.”

That, in fact, is the theme that pulses through Malone’s book. In the half-century since Intel’s visionary founders joined the workforce, the pace of technological change has only accelerated, creating — and almost as quickly rendering obsolete — inventions, companies, even industries. For more than a generation, the company that best managed those forces was Intel.

Intel sat “at the center of the world’s economy, the multi-billion-dollar corporation on which the entire electronics revolution would rest,” Malone writes. Far from wanting technology to stop evolving, Intel invested massively in research and development, pushing the boundaries not only of technology but of the technology business.

Its founding engineers helped pioneer the silicon-based memory chips from which California’s storied Silicon Valley drew its name, then assembled the team that pretty much invented the microprocessors that enabled the creation of personal computers and the computer-driven era we live in today. So far ahead of the curve was Intel that it often had to educate its customers in how to deploy its technologies.

In business, too, Intel was an innovator. It offered its users services and customization, not just off-the-shelf, mass-produced products, and understood the importance of cannibalizing its own products to adopt new technologies and create new businesses.

Success brought challenges: Intel outmaneuvered American and Japanese copycat manufacturers, sweated out prolonged economic downcycles, and became a fulcrum of U.S. trade policy for years. Yet it always survived, strengthened.

Businesses, ultimately, are manifestations of their people and especially their leaders. Intel was emphatically so. The vision that drove the company was that of three men, {each} legendary in Silicon Valley, whose intertwined stories form the narrative spine of Malone’s book. “There is . . . something almost biblical about the relationship,” Malone suggests, “an unholy Trinity.”

The company’s founder and the “Father” of Malone’s minor heresy, Robert Noyce, was a charismatic and charming skier, pilot and brilliant engineer who forged Intel’s original team in 1968 from among his colleagues at an earlier technology enterprise he’d created, Fairchild Semiconductor. Chief among them was Gordon Moore, another surpassingly smart engineer, who in 1965 wrote a paper laying out what became known as “Moore’s Law,” the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years. The recognition that processing speeds or memory could increase at that exponential rate enabled Intel to plan and roll out new technologies at a faster pace than its rivals.

Moore also was the guardian of the third of Intel’s great leaders, Andrew Grove, a strong-willed and sometimes irascible Hungarian-born engineer who was brought to Intel after its founding and eventually oversaw the company’s greatest growth. While Noyce and Moore got much credit — and enormous wealth — for founding Intel, it was Grove’s ferocious drive that propelled the company to quickly commercialize new technologies, shed old ones and become dominant in computing.

At the center of the book is the running friction between Noyce and Grove. Grove respected Noyce but disdained his leadership style. “Grove was the brilliant but truculent Son in a perpetual Oedipal battle with Noyce,” Malone writes. They clashed repeatedly; Moore provided the buffer that allowed both men to exercise their wills and Intel to flourish.

Each of these men is worthy of a biography; Grove wrote his own, “Only the Paranoid Survive,” an important and powerful memoir of life in the 20th century. Malone sets this new book apart by focusing on the interactions among the trio, illuminating the frictions inside Intel. He is careful to credit the many other engineers who helped build Intel into the first Silicon Valley company to achieve a stock market value of half a trillion dollars.

Those stories often give the book a discursive, meandering feel that Malone accentuates with declarations of the importance of every matter, great or small. When an Intel customer doesn’t insist on exclusive rights to a new Intel technology, Malone characterizes it as “one of the biggest business mistakes of the century.” The death of Noyce in 1990 was a shock, Malone writes, but then adds: “There has never been as devastating a piece of news before or since in the Valley.”

Malone is a technology enthusiast; indeed, his other book titles seem to leave little space for the importance he ascribes to Intel: “Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company” and “Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane.” Readers may be stymied by Malone’s inside-the-Valley use of techno-jargon that often omits plain-English explanations for some of the most significant advances he describes. (He includes a “Tutorial on Technology” as an appendix, which is useful for understanding where technology is going but less so for where it has been.)

But most problematic for both Malone and Intel is the abbreviated denouement to this book: When Krzanich became chief executive in 2013, after 31 years at the company, Intel had less than 1 percent of the mobile market, the new business segment dominated by companies like Apple and Samsung.

That raises perhaps the most profound unanswered question of the book and of Silicon Valley’s past half-century: How is it that even the most agile and powerful companies falter and lose the cadence of innovation that made them great? Malone doesn’t offer an answer. What he has produced is popular history, the tale of an epoch-defining industrial romp and the three men who led it.