The nature of research -- courtesy Jim Pelkey

Jim Pelkey's 'new book'   The History of Computer Communications" is outstanding, both because it is done from a serious engineer's and investor's standpoint vs. a historian's approach, and because it is a time capsule from twenty-five years ago.

I referenced this earlier, but if you missed that, See http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/7/7.10-ReturnVentureCapital.html 

What I want to call you attention to, though, is the significant interview that Pelkey had with Phil Kaufman, then CEO of Silcion Compilers after a terrific areer at Intel:

JLP:  I hold a view that the research process in the United States is in great disarray.  With ARPA becoming DARPA, and Bell Labs post-divestiture, NSF funding individual professors at universities, but the needs of today of systems projects where you cross disciplines and there are many people and they are big projects, and if we don't start investing in research in a different way, in terms of these information technologies, we're living today off stuff that was done in the '60s and early '70s, for the most part.

PK:  Oh, I agree completely.

JLP: And where are we making the investments today that we're going to see, in 20 years time, that's what's become (unintelligible)?

PK:  I think there's a vast hole to do the kinds of systems, if you will, research that the Bell Labs -- Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Sarnoff Research, those don't exist in the same form today, even if they exist.  The companies that are still doing it are doing much less of it, and much more short term product-oriented.  At the same time, as you say, the government funding is going into one-off kind of things, and mostly researching the past.  A lot of the universities are turning from real research to product development.  I consider that, for example, that Berkeley's done a lot of wonderful stuff in CAD, but they haven't done research.  They've done product development.  They've been a low-cost employee product development team.  That's very nice, but it isn't research, and it isn't really advancing the state of the art, but it's where they can get funding.  Companies will fund them because it's short term.

JLP: I think it's a real issue for us as a society.  I'm going to address it in this book.

PK:  I'll tell you a related issue that you may want to think about, which is one I've been giving a lot of thought to, and that is 'how do companies do research and product development?'  In the US, venture capital drives the disassociation of companies, and new start-up companies and small companies, and the nature of a start-up company is you have to do everything, but you have to build your product from scratch too.  Fifty or 75% of what you put into R&D is building stuff that isn't innovative and isn't part of the essence of the technology you deliver, and has no secondary use because you're a small company and you don't have any other place to put it.  Big companies, where they have some cross-fertilization potential, at least in the US, are notoriously bad at doing it, and I can't say that I know how to do it.  I spent a lot of time at Intel trying to drive synergy, and I'm convinced that's the wrong thing to do, that big companies should be holding companies and at most they should drive communications, but the ones that are doing it best are the vertically integrated Japanese  companies, not the American companies, of reusing things, and the relatively larger companies.  If Mentor develops a schematic editor, they can use it across a very broad products line.  If we develop a schematic editor, we use it across 500 customers.  One of the things that I've been trying to come up with is a way for multiple small companies to share technology, not just technology but real products that are developed, that aren't in their mainstream.

JLP: Right.  I agree.

PK:  And nobody's come up with a way to do that, but I've been trying to work on some things like that, and other efforts --

JLP: Actually, you should get together with Gordon, because Gordon just gave a speech last week that he was telling me about, where he was saying that he wants companies to break up their engineering efforts.  He thinks you only need one fifth the number of engineers doing engineering.  In fact, a lot of engineers are doing enabling things, such as testers and so on.  Those should be shared across companies.

PK:  Absolutely.

JLP: So it's the same vein.  He's going to try to write an article for Spectrum on this issue.

PK:  Well, I've got a paper that I've written and circulated to a number of companies that I call a Technology (unintelligible), on how to try to do things like that.  It was dastardly hard to do, because you've got NIH and management issues.

JLP: One of the issues I address because I'm addressing technology industries is that we, in this country, going to your point, have been very good at building small companies.  We haven't been all that good at building big companies.  If the trend of today continues, we need more big companies in order to be able to compete on this global basis with the pan-European and the Japanese companies, and we're not doing that.  Is that important or not important?

WAS THIS PRESCIENT OR WHAT?  1988 words

So WHICH COMPANIES, PEOPLE made the rapid Internet DEPLOYMENT

My twenty focus groups were each essentially groups of eight to twelve folk, 195 in all

Virtually all of them were professionals--half were designers in the high-tech sector, a quarter are or were executives in high-tech circles, and the final quarter are business people or academics very familiar with our technological age.

In other words, not a David Letterman "man on the street" interview set

The companies they named included a potpourri:

The clear winners were BBN (Bolt, Beranek, and Newman), CERN, Netscape, RAND, and XeroxPARC

A second group included IBM, Microsoft, Synoptics, WorldCom, Adobe, 3Com, Apple and DEC

Universities and societies got named a lot: UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, MN, Utah, Maryland, Cornell, Wisconsin, and Illinois

A third group was AT&T, A/OL, CompuServe, Telenet, Bridge Networks, Vitalink, and Equatorial Communications (I had not heard that name in years!)

Companies with single mentions included Cisco, Cray, Disney, and HP

The people named were almost a 'who's who':

Vint Cerf was a clear winner; Doug Engelbart was 2nd; Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Metcalfe, and Larry Roberts tied for third, just ahead of Bob Kahn.  All of these are well-known inventors of the infrastructure, but 'deployment'?

Steve Jobs, John Lasseter, Michael Eisner, Paul Baran, J.C.Lickliter, and Ivan Sutherland each drew several votes.

Al Gore got mentioned, as did Len Kleinrock, Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, Irwin Jacobs, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Ed Teller, and Bill Gates.

No one from HP was named.  The lone person who cited it had no name to go with it.

No one from Cisco was named.  The lone person who cited Cisco as a company was asked "who" at Cisco.  The answer: "Cisco was headed by a man and a woman; I don't know their names, but she was always grumpy.” 


 

The 'story' behind the posits

Posit #1, that the Internet is an epochal shift for civilization

James Fellows, an erudite Atlantic Monthly contributor, conducted a survey of "The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs since the Wheel," published in the November 2013 Atlantic Monthly, pp. 56-68

His panel of a dozen experts included Leslie Berlin, John Doerr, George Dyson, Walt Isaacson, Joi Ito, and Padmasree Warrior--indeed a prestigious grouping.

They concluded that the Internet ranked 9th, behind (in order) vaccination, the internal combustion engine, paper, optical lenses, semiconductor technology, penicillin, electricity, and the printing press.

It was well ahead of airplanes, refrigeration, the personal computer, the automobile, making steel, nuclear fusion, the telephone, radio or television.

Hummn, quite a list of what makes our society work, huh?

NO ARGUMENT THAT IT IS A BIG DEAL, RIGHT?


Posit #2, it happened OVERNIGHT

November 17, 1988 was the date of the first contact from America to Europe via 'an Internet'

The Internet Society says in 1991, there were 900 operational networks in the world on the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee released the WWW URL definitions in 1993 from CERN

Internet Society founded in 1993

Netscape went public in August 1995

October 24, 1995, the Federal Networking Council (USA) defined "Internet" as the official name

The Internet Society says that in 1996, there were 50,000 operational networks WW on the Internet

According to the Internet Society, January 1, 1999, there were 50,000,000 operational networks in 206 of the 248 countries of the world on the Internet

Dec 31, 2000:  360 Million users, one-third in the USA

Dec 31, 2012: 2.406 Billion users, one-eighth in the USA (80% of population); Europe has 63%, Asia 27%, and Africa 16% penetration.  Overall, 34% of the world's population is using the Internet

NO ARGUMENT THAT IT HAPPENED "OVERNIGHT", RIGHT?

Compare this to television in America, for example.  Demonstrated in 1927, offered for sale in 1937, 2,000 sets sold by 1940; 9 TV stations in 8 cities by 1945; 3.6 M sets by 1950; first national broadcast October 1951; 21 M sets end of 1953.

Who made the Internet "DEPLOY" so fast?

Two posits:
1. the Internet is one of the epochal events in civilization's history
2. It happened "overnight"

Two questions:
A. Name three companies most responsible for this
B. Name five people most responsible for this

I posited these two points, and asked these two questions, of twenty ad hoc focus groups in 2013.

Write down YOUR answers, and we'll talk about 'my results' in the next post

Infrastructure creation takes LOTS of folk

There's a great belief on the part of journalists and analysts that "the great man theory of evolution" is true.  Enough that the books about 'treat companies' such as IBM, Intel, Cisco, Boeing, and HP, tend to focus on the leadership (see the latest re Zuckerberg).  And, in many respects, they are correct.

The recent movie, Lincoln, or the insightful Saving Mr. Banks, certainly give us perspective that that ineluctable quality of bold leadership matters.

But it is also true that minions are valuable, and very often they are key.  Take Intel for example.  Intel's 'corporate history' is mostly told through stories about its founders, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, and its energetic forceful leader Andy Grove.   Once in a while, the invention of the microcomputer by Ted Hoff and some others is told parenthetically.

The really big story usually told (Grive himself popularized this version) is that Intel (read Intel leadership) missed the significance of the micro processor, and when the Japanese onslaught came on strong in 1985 and created a crisis, Grove was smart engouh and bold enough to talk Gordon into switching horses, so to speak.

What this story fails to outline clearly is that the handwriting had been on the wall at Intel for seven years, and legions of folk soldiered on without top management support -- in fact, with opprobrium actually -- to have the micro 'ready' for its time in the sun.   Bill Davidow, Phil Kaufman, Dave House (no relation to me, although we joke that he's my older brother), Stirling Hou and many many others endured, and after a mere fifteen years, they were 'heard'.  But you never see that story in print, do you?

The paper by the Internet Society mentioned in the two previous posts does a good job of outlining the fact that it wasn't just Al Gore who invented the Internet, but also the fact that it wasn't just Cerf, Kahn and a few cohorts either.  It was myriads of folk, at lots of places.

The key thing was the conceptual design of the Internet was handled somewhat differently--it actually was conceived to be 'inclusive' of lots of uncoordinated efforts, purposely.  When's the last time you heard of that as a major design principle?

Infrastructure creation is not a simple task

The development of the Internet is one of those Infrastructure Creations that by now has affected at least half of the world's population directly, and nearly everyone indirectly.

One advantage the creators had was that they were dealing in a near vacuum rather than modifying or adapting older communication networks.  Thus, they didn't try to run the Internet (at first) on radio or television networks, nor for that matter on the telephone networks.  Even so, the design was not easy.

For insight into the difficulty, I'd recommend a brief (20 pp) paper, titled "A brief history of the Internet" written by eight of the original designers.  You can see it at  

http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet

While it is a great tour through some of the issues, it lacks the "first person" angst that often accompanies such work.  Especially the frustrations when you 'know you are right, but no one is listening' or worse, others are actively trying to sabotage your work for personal gain.

In this vein, I'd like to recommend a 'new' web-based 'book' called "The history of Computer Communications: 1968-1988" by Jim Pelkey.

You can access it directly from http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/.  

I first met Pelkey in 1984 (propitious year, don't you think, with the Apple MacIntosh launch on January 23rd of that year, thirty years ago).  He was the new CEO of Sorcim, a company building a very fast spreadsheet to compete with Visicalc (doomed due to Lotus 1-2-3 hitting the street almost simultaneously).  Sorcim was a name derived from reversing the spelling of MICROS, which appeared in the mirrored image of a magazine cover on the airplane windowpane for the founder Richard Frank.

Pelkey couldn't grasp, as a novice Venture Capitalist, what all the hysteria was in the 1986/87 timeframe, over networks, and in particular where to put his investments.  So he launched a personal quest, to interview lots of folk in the maelstrom and see if that gave any clues.

The result was 85 interviews, which are just now becoming available for wider readership.  They are a true testament to the value of getting the info 'from the horse's mouth'.  See for example the interview with Phil Kaufman, who was an unknown collaborator with Bob Metcalfe and Gordon Bell on the new Ethernet standard in the early 80's.   

Kaufman died prematurely of a heart attack on a trip to Japan for his company Silicon Compilers not long after this interview.  He is recalled today by the EDA Industry Award in his name for the best designers of CAE and EDA equipment in the world -- an infrastructure world so arcane that 99.99% of the world has no clue what it is about, even though at least 70% of our material goods are produced by its tools.

The interview reveals some very intriguing insights, in particular about the flawed "standards" process that 'the world' trusts, called IEEE standards, and how large corporations take full advantage of the mythology about this process.  Enough that IBM nearly blocked the Internet standard, a story not often seen in print, but quite true for those of us who lived it.  

Infrastructure failures make headlines

When the San Bruno gas explosion killed several folk and destroyed scores of homes near the San Francisco airport three years ago, it launched an investigation into "how could this happen?"  The results weren't pretty, bespeaking a woeful lack of maintenance and attention to long0standing issues.

When the Christmas season featured, among other things, a breach of security for 40 million Target customers via credit card number theft, it launched an investigation of "how could this happen?"

When the ObamaCare website went live in September 2013, and traffic snafus, design flaws, and other software gremlins hit, it launched a political onslaught and investigation into "how could this happen?"

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Infrastructure--how things actually operate 'behind the scenes'--never is very sexy, seldom gets adequate funding, and rarely wins plaudits if done well.  Let it fail, though, and all hell breaks loose.

Infrastructure design and deployment is hard work, low recognition (except for negatives), and of necessity designed to be a frustrating, highly interactive and complex task for all but the simplest tasks.

The rewards are very seldom measured in terms of stock options, cover stories, or hero badges--quite unlike expectations that starter kids at Facebook or Twitter might hold.

Why would anyone sign up?

For the answer to that question, there is a superb article, written by eight of the original Internet designers (Cerf, Kahn, et al) at  

http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet

It describes the enthusiasm, the drive, the dedication and the 'noble goals' of the creators in a way that I think would be good material for teachers wishing to have some positive stories about 'why STEM'