Hyperlinks vs. the web

In the previous post on the 1968 Mother of all Demos by Doug Engelbart and company, I mentioned stumbling on the fact that Andries van Dam and Ted Nelson had put together HES, which is generally regarded as the first hypertext system, the year before.

All the parts of that were familiar. I've written extensively, though not always favorably, about Nelson's later project, Xanadu. Foley, van Dam et. al.'s Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice was on the shelf at the first place I coded for money, and I'm pretty sure I've run across the idea of hypertext at some point over the years. What I hadn't realized was that Nelson and van Dam had worked together, and that hypertext went back quite that far.

To be fair, I wasn't exactly shocked that hypertext dated to 1967, particularly in the context of Engelbart & co.'s demo, which included what were recognizably hyperlinks. What did catch my attention was that all the building blocks of Web 1.0 were in place in 1968, twenty-three years before the first actual web servers appeared in 1991:

• the concept of hyperlinks and hypertext
• the realization of that concept in running code
• connectivity between computers in different physical locations (ARPANET itself would come along a bit later, but computers were already talking to each other)
• interactive graphic displays
• the mouse

The bullet point I didn't quite add is file servers, but FTP dates to 1971. I haven't dug up solid evidence that there was such a thing as a file server in 1968, but I certainly wouldn't bet against it. If you prefer to put the "Web 1.0 could just as well have happened" point at 1971 and say it was only twenty years later that it actually happened, fine.

What took so long? According to van Dam's account, the people who saw the Mother of all Demos were generally impressed, but the overall reaction was to say "Wow, that was some demo" and then get back to work. Was this a failure of the imagination, that the computer researchers of the time couldn't wrap their heads around something that wasn't 80-column punched cards, even if they'd seen it with their own eyes?

Possibly, but there were also more mundane concerns. That list of pieces in place comes with a few disclaimers:

• Connectivity was generally at 1200 Baud, or approximately one millionth of a gigabit per second. This will deliver text faster than you can read it, but it amounts to a megabyte every two minutes. You can actually fit quite a bit of information into a megabyte, and 1.5Mb/s T1 lines were available, (for a hefty charge, generally to institutions or large corporations), but you're not going to run YouTube or Netflix on the bandwidth available at the time.
• Interactive graphic displays were a thing, but they were normally vector-based (think Asteroids, if you've heard of that) and in any case they were expensive specialized equipment. Graphic displays (bitmapped) didn't become commonplace until the 80s. Even then they weren't cheap and they looked absolutely primitive by today's standards

I think it's fair to say that in 1968 you could have put something together that looked quite a bit like Web 1.0, but it would have been a curiosity: slow, expensive and without anywhere near enough content to make for a compelling experience.

The first actual web servers were intended as an easier way to get to the content that had accumulated on various FTP/Gopher/UUCP/... servers over the years, which was getting to the point where it was hard to just know where something you were interested in was located. Not too long after that (AltaVista came along in 1995), there were enough index pages that it was hard to keep track of where a good index for what you were looking for was, much less the data itself, and web search was born.

So it wasn't simply a matter of the world turning its back on the wonderful potential of Engelbart's NES and Nelson and van Dam's HES and then suddenly waking up in 1991 to realize what they should have known all along. Things were happening in the meantime:

• Computing power, storage and bandwidth were increasing exponentially (as in, actually exponentially, at a more-or-less constant proportion per unit time, and not just "by a lot")
• As both a driving cause and an effect, the number of people with access to computing power, and the amount of data they wanted stored, also increased exponentially
• People continued to experiment with ways of organizing information and navigating complex webs of connections (1987's HyperCard comes to mind, but it's not the only example)

I think this is a common thread in technology in general: Things take a while to develop. It's not enough just to have a good concept, or even a working realization of it. You generally need a certain amount of infrastructure and a growing need that your new concept will meet, and some partial successes along the way.

Some other examples that come to mind:

• SketchPad, which anticipated several major developments, particularly the Graphical User Interface, was written in 1963, GUIs weren't really widespread until the 1980s
• The object-oriented language Simula came out in 1962 and SmallTalk in 1972. Objective-C was introduced in 1984, but OO languages didn't really get major traction until the mid 1990s
• The concept of a neural network dates back to 1943, at least. Perceptrons were introduced in 1969. Hopfield networks were a topic of research in the 1980s. Transformers were proposed in 2017, now eight years ago. ChatGPT came out five years later.

It shouldn't be surprising that concepts run ahead of implementation. Concepts are a lot easier to come up with. More interesting is how we get from (some) concepts to widespread implementation, and which concepts get there.

The future still isn't what it used to be: This whole "web" thing

It's worth keeping in mind that the building blocks of today's web, particularly HTTP and HTML, were developed by academic researchers. One thing that academic researchers have to do, a lot, is follow references, because most academic work builds on, critiques and otherwise refers to existing work.

Let's take a moment to appreciate what that meant before the web came along. Suppose you're reading a reference work and you run across a reference like this:

4. Ibid, 28-3

That is, you've just run across a passage like this totally made-up example:

It is also known that the shells of tropical snails vary widely in their patterning⁴.

That little raised 4 tells you to skip to the bottom of the page and find footnote 4, which says "Ibid, 28-3", which means "look in the same place as the previous footnote, on pages 28 through 33". So you scan up through the footnotes and find

3. Ibid, 17

OK, fine ... keep going

2. McBiologistface, Notes on Tropical Snails, 12-4

OK, this is the something previously referenced, in particular something written by McBiologistface (likely the eminent Biologist McBiologistface, but perhaps the lesser-known relative General Scientist McBiologistface). Keep going ...

1. McBiologistface, Something Else About Tropical Snails, 254

OK, looks like this person wrote at least two books on tropical snails. The one we're looking for must be referenced in a previous chapter [it should also be listed in the References section at the end --D.H. Mar 2026]. Ah, here it is:

7. McBiologistface, Biologist, Notes on Tropical Snails (Hoople: University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople Press, 1945), 32-5

Great. Now we know which McBiologistFace it was, and which edition of which book published by which publisher. Now all we have to do is track down a copy of that book, and open it to ... let's see, what was that original reference? ... oh yes, page 28. The publisher and publication date are at least potentially important since different editions might have different page numberings, or even different content.

To be fair,  "McBiologistface, Notes on Tropical Snails" from reference 2 is probably enough to find the book in the card catalog at the library, and if a reference is "Ibid", you may already have the book and have it open from following a previous reference to it. It's also quite possible that your department or office has copies of many of the books and journals that are likely to be referenced.

Nonetheless, thinking of the tasks I mentioned when describing the Olden Days -- navigating an unfamiliar place, communicating by phone, streaming entertainment and searching up information -- simply following a reference from one book or article to another could be more work than any of them.

Even answering a question like "where was the Touch-Tone™ phone invented" would have been easier, assuming you didn't already have a copy of Notes on Tropical Snails on hand: go to the library, walk right to the easily-located reference section that you've already been to, pull out the 'T' volume of one of the encyclopedias, flip to Telephone and chances are your answer is right there (or you could just ask someone who would know).

To find the reference on snails, you'll have to look up the book in the card catalog, note down its location in the stacks, go there and scan through the books on those shelves until you find the book itself (and then open it and flip to the right page, but you already know that from the reference). This is all assuming there's a copy of the book on the shelves that no one's checked out (who knows, maybe there's been a sudden interest in tropical snails in your town). Otherwise, you could call around to the local bookstores, or your colleagues and friends, to see if anyone has a copy. If not, your favorite bookstore could special-order a copy from the publisher, and with luck it would be there in a few days (but maybe much longer).

Chasing a link in an HTML document is more or less instant. You can probably see the appeal.

My point here is that the interlinked nature of the web, that ability to click on a link, immediately see what's on the other end and easily get back to where you were, was an absolute game-changer for the sort of people who created the early web. Your own milage may vary.

To make this work, you need a few key pieces

• A way of referencing data that's available on the network (URLs)
• A way of embedding URLs in a body of text, similar to the way footnotes are embedded in ordinary text (HTML)
• Ideally, a standard way of accessing something referenced by a URL (HTTP)

I say "ideally", because it was already possible to access data on the web using protocols like FTP and Gopher, and you could reference those with a URL. Nonetheless, having a integrated suite of {URL, HTML, HTTP} working together fairly seamlessly meant that http:// URLs (or later, https://) quickly came to dominate.

You also need one more thing, namely that there should actually be something on the other end of the link (it's OK if links are sometimes dangling or become broken, but that should be the fairly rare exception). By the time the web standards were developed, there was already enough interesting data and text on the internet to make links useful. To some extent, the early web was just an easier way to get at this kind of information. If you had the pieces, you could easily pull together an HTML page with a collection of links to useful stuff on your server, stuff like interesting files you could fetch via FTP, with a little bit of text to explain what was going on, and anyone else could use that.

The truly webby part of the web, the network of links between documents, is still around, of course, but as far as I can tell it's not a particularly important part of most people's web experience. Links are more a way of getting to content -- follow a link from a search result, or follow a reference from an AI-generated summary to see whether the AI knows what it's talking about -- but following links between pieces of content is not a particularly important part of the web experience. Some articles include carefully selected links to other material, but a lot don't. Personally, I've mostly stopped doing it so much, because it's time-consuming, though these recent Field Notes posts have a lot more linkage than usual.

One sort of link that I do follow quite a bit is the "related article" link in a magazine or news source -- articles by the same author or on the same topic, or just to stuff that their server thinks you might find interesting, or that the publisher is trying to promote. But again, this seems more like navigating to something. The articles themselves largely stand alone, and I generally finish one article before moving on to the next. A truly webby link, like a footnote before it, links from some specific piece of text to something that's directly related to it.

And, of course, I do click on ad links, though usually by mistake since you just can't get away from them.

Realizing this, I think, is a big reason that this blog went mostly quiet for a couple of years. If the webby part of the web is really only of interest to a few people, except in a few special cases like sharing social media content and browsing Wikipedia, why write field notes about it, particularly if the blog writer doesn't find social media particularly appealing?

Conversely, this latest spate of posts is largely the result of relaxing a bit about what the "web" is and talking about ... dunno, maybe "the online experience" in general? Or just "internet-related stuff that doesn't really seem to fit on the other blog?"

Whatever you call it, I seem to be enjoying writing about it again. 

[Naturally, this is the last post for several months, followed by another (so far) months-long gap. Still enjoying the writing, but ... life --D.H. 2026]

The future still isn't what it used to be: Vannevar Bush

(According to Blogger, this is the 700th post on this blog, which seems like a completely arbitrary milestone to note, but I noticed it nonetheless, so now you get to. You're welcome.)

Vannevar Bush casts something of a long shadow. He held several high-level technology-related posts in the FDR and Truman administrations, had a long and distinguished academic career at MIT and elsewhere, and won several prestigious awards, including the National Medal of Science. His students included Claude Shannon, whose work in information theory is still directly relevant, and Frederick Terman, who was influential in the development of what we now call Silicon Valley (I used to work fairly near Terman Drive in Palo Alto).

Bush is also often credited with anticipating the World-Wide Web in his Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. Since I've been comparing early visions of the Web with what actually happened, I thought I'd take a look. I've linked to the ACM version rather than the Atlantic's version, which may or may not even be online, since the ACM version highlights the relevant passages. Though there's a Wikipedia page on the piece, I've deliberately skipped it in favor of Bush's original text (with the ACM's highlights).

Two things jump out immediately, neither directly relevant to the web:

• The language is relentlessly gendered. Men do science. Girls [sic] sit in front of keyboards typing in data for men of science to use in their work. A mathematician is a particular kind of man, technology has improved man's life, and so forth. Yes, this is 1945, and we expect a certain amount of this, but from what I can tell Bush's style stands out even for the time. I mention this mainly as a heads-up for anyone who wants to go back and read the original piece -- which I do nonetheless recommend.
• There is an awful lot of technical detail about technologies that would be obsolete within a couple of decades, and in several cases nearly fossilized by the dawn of the Internet in the 1970s. Bush speculates in detail about microphotography, facsimile machines, punch cards, analog computers, vacuum tubes, photocells and on and on for pages. Yes, all of these still existed in the 1970s (I spent many an hour browsing old newspapers and magazines on microfilm as a kid), but digital technology would make most if not all of them irrelevant before much longer. As far as predicting the technology underpinning the web, Bush's record is nearly perfect: If he speculated about it, it almost certainly isn't relevant to today's web.

Two thoughts on this. First, it's almost impossible to speculate about the future without mentioning at least something that will be hopelessly out of date by the time that future arrives. In our own time, all we have are the tools and mental models of the world of that time. I don't fault Bush for thinking about the future in terms of photographic storage, and I don't this takes anything away from his thoughts on the "Memex", which is what people are referring to when they talk about Bush anticipating the web.

I just wish he hadn't done nearly so much of it. Alan Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence spends two sentences on the idea of using a teleprinter so that it's not obvious whether there's a human or machine on the other end of the conversation, and one of those sentences just says that this is only one possible approach. That seems about right for that paper. In Bush's case, I could see a few paragraphs about how to store large amounts of information (for those days, at least) on film or magnetic media, and so forth. The article would have been much shorter, but no less interesting.

Second it's worth noting how many things were possible with mid 1900s technology. You could convert, both ways, between sound, image and video (in the sense of moving images) on the one hand and electrical signals on the other. You could store electrical signals magnetically. You could communicate them over a distance. You could store digital information in a variety of forms, including the famous punched cards, but also magnetically.

There were ways to produce synthesized speech and read printed text. Selecting machines could do boolean queries on data (Bush gives the example of "all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish"). Telephone switching networks could connect any of millions of phones to any other in about the time it took to dial (and less time than it sometimes takes my phone to set up a call using my WiFi). Logic gates existed. For that matter, the first general-purpose digital computer, the ENIAC, existed in 1945 and Bush would certainly have known about its development.

In other words, even in 1945, Bush isn't drawing on a blank canvas. He's trying to pull existing pieces of technology together in a new way in order to deal with what was, even at the time, an overwhelming surplus of information. The gist of the argument is "If we make these existing technologies smaller, faster and cheaper, and put them together in this particular way, we can make it easier to deal with all this information."

The particular problem Bush is really interested in isn't so much storing information as retrieving it ("selecting" as Bush says). This is totally understandable for a national science adviser who had until recently been working on one of the largest technological efforts to date (the Manhattan Project). Bush cites Gregor Mendel's work having been essentially unknown until decades after the fact as just one example of a significant advance nearly being lost because no one knew about it, even though it was there to be found. Bush's desire to prevent this sort of thing in the future is palpable.

Bush mentions traditional indexing systems that can find items by successively narrowing down the search space (everything starting with 'F', everything within that with second letter 'i' ... ah, here it is, Field Notes on the Web), but he's much more interested in following a trail of connections from one document to another. That is, he's envisioning a vast collection of documents traversable by following links between them. That's the world-wide web. Ok, we're done.

Except ...

Bush sees the Memex as literally a piece of furniture, looking pretty much like a desk but with a keyboard attached along with various projection screens and a few other attachments. Inside it is a store of microfilmed documents together with some writable film, which takes up a small portion of the space under the desk, and a whole bunch of machinery to be named later, taking up most of the space.

Associated with each document is a writable area containing some number of code spaces, each of which can hold the index code of a document. There's also a top-level code book to get you started, and when you add a new document, you add it to the code book. To be honest, this seems a bit tedious.

To link two documents together, you pull them both up, one on one projection screen and the other on the other, and press a button. This writes the index code for each document in the other's next open code space. The next time you pull up either of the documents, you can select a code space and pull up the document with that code.

Codes are meant to have two parts: a human-readable text code and a "positional" numeric code (probably binary or maybe decimal). Linking this post to Bush's article might add "Bush-as-we-may-think" to a code space for this post, along with (somewhere offscreen) the numeric index for Bush's article, and "Field-notes-future-ramblings-Bush" to a code space on Bush's article (along with the numeric code for this post). At that point you've got one link in a presumably much larger web.  Actually, you have two links, or one-bidirectional link if you prefer. Not quite Xanadu's transclusion, but arguably closer than what we actually have.

Pretty webby, except ... coupla things ...

For one thing, this is all happening on my Memex. My copy of this post is linked with my copy of Bush's article. Yours remains untouched. If there's a way of copying either content or links from one Memex to another, I didn't catch it. Bush's description of how document linking works is hand-wavy enough that it wouldn't be particularly more hand-wavy to talk about a syncing mechanism (and/or an update mechanism), but I doubt Bush was thinking in that direction.

Bush seems to be thinking more about a memory aid for an individual person (or possibly a household or small office/laboratory). Functionally, it's a personal library with much larger capacity and the ability to leave trails among documents. It's certainly an interesting idea, but it misses the "world-wide" part. When I link to the ACM's version of Bush's paper, the link is from my blog to the ACM's site. If you write something and link it to Bush's paper, we're pointing at the same thing, not separate copies of it, and we're pointing to a thing that might be stored anywhere in the world (and someplace else next time we access it).

In the same post I mentioned above, I talk about a couple of features that make the web the web, particularly that a link can be dangling -- pointing to nothing -- and it can become broken -- you pointed at a page, but that page is no longer there (early posts on this blog are full of these, though at the time it wasn't clear whether rotting links would be an issue as storage got cheaper; they are). There's also some ambiguity as to what exactly a link is pointing to. If I point to the front page of a news site, for example, the contents on the other end of that link will probably be different tomorrow. In other cases, it's worth going to some effort to ensure the contents don't change significantly.

These may seem like bugs at first glance, but for the most part, they're features, because the flexibility they provide allows the web to be decoupled. I can do what I like with my site without caring or even knowing what links to it. Since a Memex is a closed system, none of this really applies. On the one hand, it's not a problem, but on the other hand, it's not a problem because a Memex is not a distributed system, which the web as we know it very much is.

Finally, the mechanism of linking is noticeably different from what HTML does. You have a pair of links between documents (or maybe pages within documents, given that that's what's on the screen when you press the "link" button?). An HTML link is between a particular piece of the source document to, in the general case, a particular anchor on the destination document. To be fair, this doesn't seem like an essential difference. You could imagine a Memex with a linking mechanism that goes from a piece of one document to a piece of another, which would be much more like an HTML link (and, arguably, more like a Xanadu transclusion).

[Really, though, an HTML link points to whatever the server on the other end serves up in response to that particular URL. The resulting page is often, one way or another, maintaining live connections to any number of other servers and updating its appearance accordingly. In writing the post, I implicitly assumed that everything was static text, since that was the world Bush was dealing in. The dynamic nature of real web resources is a whole separate dimension. The point here is that even without that Memex isn't really the Web -- D.H. April 2025]

So did Vannevar Bush anticipate the web by nearly half a century?

I think the fair answer is "not really", because the distributed, dynamic nature of the web is critical.

Did he anticipate the idea of an interconnected web of documents? I think the fair answer is "sorta". Again, actual web links are one-directional and non-intrusive. You can link from document A to document B without doing anything at all to document B or its associated metadata. You don't need a backlink and you generally won't have one.

This one-way form of link was not a new idea. Documents have been referencing each other forever. Bush's notion of linking is different from an HTML link, and since an HTML link is structurally the same as a reference in a footnote in a book, it's different from that as well.

In other words, the original idea in Bush's work is more an evolutionary dead end than an innovation. A pretty interesting dead end, but a dead end just the same.

Postscript:

There's one more thing that I'd been meaning to mention but, embarrassingly enough, forgot to: search. Bush is quite right in saying that people access information by content, but in the Memex world everything eventually boils down to an index number. You access document 12345, not "any documents mentioning Memex" or whatever.

Search is probably the aspect of the web with the least precedent in mid-1900s technology. There were ways to attach index numbers to things, or even content tags, and retrieve them, with a minimum of human intervention. Bush goes into those at length. But if you wanted to get to something by what was in it, you needed a person for that, if only to add indexing information. Indeed, Memex is aimed directly at making it easier for a human to do that task, by making it easy to leave a trail of breadcrumbs a human could easily follow.

It would be almost a half-century before documents could be easily accessed by way of what was in them.

Oh, and also ... in Bush's vision, linking documents together would be a frequent activity for anyone using a Memex. In today's web, not so much, except, I think, in the particular case of re-whatevering a piece of social media content. I think the reason for that is also search (see this early post for a take on that).

The future still isn't what it used to be: Tog

In 1994, so about 30 years ago, UX designer Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini's Tog on Software Design was published with this introduction. I wrote a post about it a mere 15 years later with a take on which predictions had and hadn't panned out. Another 15 years having passed, this seems as good a time as ever to take another look.

My first post included several direct quotes, which had the advantage of showing Tognazzini's actual words, but the disadvantage of leaving out some of them. This time around, I'm going to try summarizing the main point of each paragraph, with a few direct quotes for statements that seem particularly notable. Please have a look at the Tog's original page, as well. Unlike many old links on this blog, it still works, and kudos for that.

Tog's main points, as I see them, in the order originally written, were:

• Phones, fiber and computers are [in 1994] about to converge. The whole world will be wired and national boundaries will no longer matter. Governments are trying to control this, but it's not going to work.
• In particular, the Clipper Chip is a fool's errand because people can do their own encryption on top of it. Individuals will have access to strong encryption while banks and other institutions will be forced to use weak, government-approved encryption.
• For example, the government of Singapore banned Wired magazine for an unfavorable article, but an online version was available immediately. "Traffic on the Internet cannot be selectively stopped without stopping the Internet itself"
• Intellectual property laws can't keep up with new forms that build on putting together bits of existing content "as graphic designers and artists generate new art from old, snipping bits and pieces into a new creative whole [...] we are also seeing the emergence of a new and powerful form of expression, as works grow, change, and divide, with each new artist adding to these living collages of color, form, and action"
• There will be increasing repression as corporate lawyers try to stop this. But this will end as corporations find ways to monetize content by having lots of people pay a little instead of a few people paying a lot [licensing fees at the time could run into the thousands of dollars] "As the revolution continues, our society will enjoy a blossoming of creative expression the likes of which the world has never seen."
• While everyone's attention is focused on script kiddies, corporations will sneak around "America's boardrooms and bedrooms", destroying any illusion of privacy.
• Security is also an illusion, but "The trend will be reversed as the network is finally made safe, both for business and for individuals, but it will be accomplished by new technology, new social custom, and new approaches to law."
• The previous computer revolution, in the 1980s, resulted in a completely unexpected result: self-published paper zines. However [in 1994] it's hard to get distribution. Cyberspace [sic] will fix that, and creators will no longer need publishers in order to be heard. "[R]eaders will be faced with a bewildering array of unrefereed, often inaccurate (to put it mildly), works"
• Tablets with high-resolution, paper-white displays will put an end to physical bookstores.
• Retail will see increasing pressure from "mail-order, as people shop comfortably and safely in the privacy of their own homes from electronic, interactive catalogs"
• "More and more corporations are embracing telecommuting, freeing their workers from the drudgery of the morning commute"
• Schools will come to accept "that their job is to help students learn how to research, how to organize, how to cooperate, create, and think" and textbooks "will be swept away by the tide of rough, raw, real knowledge pouring forth from the Cyberspace spigot"
• The term "information superhighway" is obsolete, because it doesn't do justice to Cyberspace, which will be "just as sensory, just as real, just as compelling as the physical universe"
• A new economy will arise, based on barter and anonymous currencies that no government will be able to touch [this was written over a decade before the Bitcoin paper came out].
• Initially, there will be digital haves and have-nots, but this will improve quickly as hardware becomes cheaper. The real problem is that the internet of the 1990s was built by mostly male hackers for their own use. There needs to be an "an easier, softer way" to access it, and only then will it see widespread adoption.
• It's crucial to supplant the obsolete operating systems of the 1990s -- UNIX, Windows and Mac -- with object-oriented technology. Even 15 years after bitmapped displays were widely available [i.e., the first Macintosh came out in 1984], computers are barely shedding their old teletype-based look. We can't afford to wait another 15 years for OO to become widespread.
• If all this is going to work, we need coordinated long-term strategies instead of each major player doing their own thing and hoping it all works out.

Honestly, I don't think my take on this has changed greatly in the past 15 years, because I think Tog's take is just as true as it was 15 years ago, or when it was written, even. That is, some parts are true and some parts are way off base, and which parts those are hasn't changed much. And, of course, it's likely that my opinions haven't changed greatly in the past 15 years.

Instead of comparing this post to the previous one, I'd like to look at the same themes from (I hope) a somewhat different angle. Last time around, I opined that the predictions that missed were mainly the result of assuming that a new development that's on the upswing will continue that way until it replaces everything that came before. I still think that's true, but what stands out to me more this time around is the apparent motivation behind the predictions.

Tog seems mostly to be grappling with the idea that computing technology of the 90s was poised to fundamentally overhaul our social structures. It should be clear to even the occasional reader of this blog (I'm pretty sure there are at least some) that I'm on the skeptical side of this one, but what really comes through in Tog's writing is a strong desire for this to be true, and in particular ways:

National boundaries will be obsolete. Government attempts to rein in technology will fail. Publishers will be irrelevant as entirely new forms of creativity emerge. Schools will change their entire mission. We will escape our physical bonds by working and living in a Cyberspace that's only distinguishable from the real world by its being more vibrant and vivid. OO will fundamentally change the way software is developed and open up whole new possibilities. Corporations and other major players will have to learn to work together in whole new ways.

No boundaries. No gatekeepers. No government interference. No physical bounds at all. New possibilities. New forms of expression. New ways of working. If you zoom out to that level, I don't think it would be much trouble to find a similar set of predictions from the 1960s, or the 1860s, or as far back as you want to go.

Or the 2020s, for that matter.

But national boundaries are still here. Reserve currencies are still around. Banking regulations still matter, even in the crypto world. Publishers, studios and record labels are still gatekeepers. To the extent schooling has changed, technology hasn't been a primary force (and remote schooling certainly did not replace students physically going to class). Telecommuting and remote work exist, but they don't dominate, they only really make sense for some professions and they don't mean jacking into a Snow Crash or Neuromancer virtual world, even though one of the largest corporations in the world has rebranded itself around exactly that vision.

Within this, a few particulars seem worth particular notice.

Tog wasn't the only one musing about new forms based on quoting existing material [the summary above doesn't mention sampling/quoting explicitly, but I'm pretty sure that's where all this was aimed at]. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was all about that, and by the time Tog was writing audio sampling had found its way from 1970s hip hop into the mainstream, eventually giving rise to whole new genres.

But this was neither a new idea nor anything revolutionary (see these old posts for more detail). Quotations and allusions have been around forever. It's more a matter of how they're used. Sample-based sound fonts are widely-used, for example, but the whole point of most of them is to imitate live instruments as closely and unobtrusively as possible. In practice, sampling is quite often done in support of existing forms.

On the other hand, answer songs, which have been around forever, are all about the reference to a known song. It's common for an answer song to use the original tune or quote the original lyric, but it doesn't have to. The point is the reference to an existing work, regardless of how that reference is made.

A sample of the Amen break might be a deliberate reference that the audience is meant to recognize -- even if they most likely recognize it from other samples of the break -- or it might be reshaped or reprocessed beyond all recognition, or maybe some of both.

In short, there mere act of sampling or quoting is neither necessary nor sufficient for the creation of a new form. To the extent that there's even such a thing as a truly new form, people create them because that's what creative people do. Some new forms may make use of new technology.

I think "new form" is somewhat of a red herring anyway. I can think of several examples of encountering something wildly new, only to later understand its deep and direct connections to what came before. An album that sounded like it was from another planet suddenly made a new kind of sense after I'd heard a different album from decades before. And then it turns out that the songwriter behind that one had studied poetry in college and cut their teeth in Tin Pan Alley (I'm deliberately being a bit coy about which particular albums these might be, because this is just one example and my claim here is that the particulars don't really matter).

The newness was real -- nothing quite like either album had been produced before -- but so were the connections. And a lot of the newness was newness to me. As exciting as that sensation may be, it tends to dull a bit as you get more and more of the whole picture. But that's fine. The connections are just as interesting.

It's easy to get excited about something new and to want the world to look like the new thing. I think this is particularly easy for technologists, since our whole gig is to try to make new and (ideally) better things.

Tog in particular played a key role in developing Apple's early UIs (the term user experience (UX) was just coming into usage when Tog published Tog on Software Design). Apple products were, by and large, much easier to use than MS-DOS PCs. It's not hard to understand someone who'd helped make that happen wanting to sweep away obsolete rules and systems. Given that Windows was announced in 1985, the year after the famous 1984 Macintosh ad, it's not hard to understand the feeling that this was actually happening in real time. The ad itself does a great job of conveying the desire to change the world.

The world, for its part, has its own opinions.

Before I go, I wanted to touch on the predictions that did pan out.

The Clipper Chip did, in fact, fall into oblivion, not long after Tog was writing about it. Tog was hardly a Cassandra here, though. If anything, the Clipper Chip was a great example of how a group of people really, really wanting something to happen doesn't necessarily make it happen. The idea that you can use end-to-end encryption to get around an insecure transport layer, whether that insecurity is accidental or a deliberate back door, is old. Arguably, it's ancient, but in any case PGP, for all its flaws, had been around for a few years by 1994. Even government agencies seem to have thrown in the towel on this one in recent years.

Overall, there is a pattern of yes ... but.

• Corporations did, of course, figure out how to make money by charging a bit at a time, mostly by running ads or by charging for subscriptions ... but neither of these is a new business model (in-app purchases are an interesting case, though [Insert Coin to continue ...]).
• New case law and social conventions have developed around digital property ... but these look a lot like adaptations of existing law and conventions rather than something wholly new
• Corporations have collected huge amounts of personal data about people, some of it, like genetic data, very personal indeed ... but it's hard to argue that "the internet has finally been made safe" from this as predicted. In fact ...
• Security on the internet did indeed become a nightmare ... and it's still a nightmare
• Zines morphed into blogs ... but even during the heyday of blogs, most of them went unread, and the same is true for podcasts, social media channels and so on today ("zines morphed into blogs" seems like one of those test sentences linguists use to show that we can understand a certain portion of language even if the words are totally made up)
• Tablets did happen ... but they'd been a staple of science fiction for decades, and Apple itself had been working on the idea for a while by 1994 (the Newton came out in 1993), so this was more a matter of Tog asserting that eventually some kind of tablet would take off. Again, an assertion like that doesn't necessarily mean it will happen on a large scale, but it wasn't exactly a shot in the dark ... and, of course, bookstores are still around.
• Online retail has had a huge impact ... but as I said the first time around, the term "mail order" is a big hint that this was more a shift in the mix of how goods are delivered (the original post snarkily mentioned WebVan, eToys and Pets.com, all of which were long gone by that time)
• Telecommuting is a thing ... but it's also not a thing
• "Information superhighway" stopped being a cool thing to say, if it ever was ... but (as I snarked the first time around) "cyberspace" also stopped being a cool thing to say, if it ever was
• Cryptocurrencies happened, which seems striking since the Bitcoin paper was over a decade in the future ... but as to a "new economy [...] based on barter and anonymous currencies that no government will be able to touch" ... I've beaten this one pretty much into the ground here, so you be the judge
• Object-oriented platforms have become mainstream ... but ... I'm not going to wade into the discussion of why software is the way it is, at least not here, but it's safe to say there are ills that the advent of OO platforms has not cured.

And then there are a few points where Tog's original post contains contradictory ideas because, I think, the underlying reality contains them as well:

• The operating systems that Tog complained about (UNIX, Windows and Mac)  are still around, but  in a Ship of Theseus sort of way (see this followup post from the time -- just to muddy the waters, today's MacOS is a mashup of the original and UNIX by way of BSD and NeXTSTEP). So take your pick: Tog was wrong since they're still around, Tog was right since they've all been completely restructured over time, or some of each
• In some sense, the internet knows no boundaries, but the Great Firewall shows no sign of going away and other regimes have found ways to severely restrict access. One way to look at it is that by default the internet knows no boundaries, but it can in practice if the local regime works hard to make that happen. This doesn't seem that much different from the earlier mass media, particularly TV, radio and print
• The contrast between "often inaccurate (to put it mildly)" web publishers and "raw real knowledge" was jarring the first time around, and it's still jarring. The actual web/internet has been a mixture of both more or less from the outset.
• Similarly, the tension between an internet built for geeks by geeks and an internet built for the whole world has been around from early days, and it's still around. Likewise for the underlying social issues around who gets access to technology and who pays the costs. Underneath this, particularly now that so many people are online, is the question of how much technology reflects society and how much it shapes society.

As I said above, I don't think my take on all this has changed much. I think I've mellowed on how I feel about the missed predictions, from "this is just horribly wrongheaded" to more like "this is a particularly clear example of something we all do", but what I think hasn't changed is the feeling that, however much I may disagree with many of the points, Tog is worth engaging with, by virtue of putting forth a strong and clear vision of the world, backed up by examples.

Space Reliability Engineering

In a previous post on the Apollo 11 mission, I emphasized the role of software architecture, and the architect Margaret Hamilton in particular, in ensuring the success of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.  I stand by that, including the assessment of the whole thing as "awesome" in the literal sense, but as usual there's more to the story.

Since that non-particularly-webby post was on Field Notes, so is this one.  What follows is mostly taken from the BBC's excellent if majestically paced podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon [I hope to go back and recheck the details directly at some point, but searching through a dozen or so hours of podcast is time-consuming and I don't know if there's a transcript available -- D.H.], which in turn draws heavily on NASA's Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

I've also had a look at Ars Technica's No, a "checklist error" did not almost derail the Apollo 11 mission, which takes issue with Hamilton's characterization of the incident and also credits Hal Laning as a co-author of the Executive portion of the guidance software which ultimately saved the day (to me, the main point Hamilton was making was that the executive saved the day, regardless of the exact cause of the 1202 code).

Before getting too far into this, it's worth reiterating just how new computing was at the time.  The term "software engineer" didn't exist (Hamilton coined it during the project -- Paul Niquette claims to have coined the term "software" itself and I see no reason to doubt him).  There wasn't any established job title for what we now call software engineers.  The purchase order for the navigation computer, which was the very first order in the whole Apollo project, didn't mention software, programming or anything of the sort.  The computer was another piece of equipment to be made to work just like an engine, window, gyroscope or whatever.  Like them it would have to be installed and have whatever other things done to it to make it functional.  Like "programming" (whatever that was).

In a way, this was a feature rather than a bug.  The Apollo spacecraft have been referred to, with some justification, as the first fly-by-wire vehicles.  The navigational computer was an unknown quantity.  At least one astronaut promised to turn the thing off at the first opportunity.  Flying was for pilots, not computers.

This didn't happen, of course.  Instead, as the podcast describes so well, control shifted back and forth between human and computer depending on the needs of the mission at the time, but it was far from obvious at the beginning that this would be the case.

Because the computer wasn't trusted implicitly, but treated as just another unknown to be dealt with, -- in other words, another risk to be mitigated -- ensuring its successful operation was seen as a matter of engineering, just like making sure that the engines were efficient and reliable, and not a matter of computer science.  This goes a long way toward explaining the self-monitoring design of the software.

Mitigating the risk of using the computer included figuring out how to make it as foolproof as possible for the astronauts to operate.  The astronauts would be wearing spacesuits with bulky gloves, so they wouldn't exactly be swiping left or right, even if the hardware of the time could have supported it.  Basically you had a numeric display and a bunch of buttons.  The solution was to break the commands down to a verb and a noun (or perhaps more accurately a predicate and argument), each expressed numerically.  It would be a ridiculous interface today.  At the time it was a highly effective use of limited resources [I don't recall the name of the designer who came up with this. It's in the podcast --D.H.].

But the only way to really know if an interface will work is to try it out with real users.  Both the astronauts and the mission control staff needed to practice the whole operation as realistically as possible, including the operation of the computer.  This was for a number of reasons, particularly to learn how the controls and indicators worked, to be prepared for as many contingencies as possible and to try to flush out unforeseen potential problems.  The crew and mission control conducted many of these simulations and they were generally regarded as just as demanding and draining as the real thing, perhaps moreso.

It was during one of the simulations that the computer displayed a status code that no one had ever seen before and therefore didn't know how to react to.  After the session was over, flight director Gene Kranz instructed guidance software expert Jack Garman to look up and memorize every possible code and determine what course of action to take when it came up.  This would take a lot of time searching through the source code, with the launch date imminent, but it had to be done and it was.  Garmin produced a handwritten list of every code and what to do about it.

As a result, when the code 1202 came up with the final opportunity to turn back fast approaching, capsule communicator (CAPCOM) Charlie Duke was able to turn to guidance controller Steve Bales, who could turn to Garman and determine that the code was OK if it didn't happen continuously.  There's a bit of wiggle room in what constitutes "continuously", but knowing that the code wasn't critical was enough to keep the mission on track.  Eventually, Buzz Aldrin noticed that the code only seemed to happen when a particular radar unit was being monitored.  Mission Control took over the monitoring and the code stopped happening.


I now work for a company that has to keep large fleets of computers running to support services that billions of people use daily.  If a major Google service is down for five minutes, it's headline news, often on multiple continents.  It's not the same as making sure a plane or a spaceship lands safely or a hospital doesn't lose power during a hurricane, but it's still high-stakes engineering.

There is a whole profession, Site Reliability Engineer, or SRE for short, dedicated to keeping the wheels turning.  These are highly-skilled people who would have little problem doing my job instead of theirs if they preferred to.  Many of their tools -- monitoring, redundancy, contingency planning, risk analysis, and so on -- can trace their lineage through the Apollo program.  I say "through" because the concepts themselves are considerably older than space travel, but it's remarkable how many of them were not just employed, but significantly advanced, as a consequence of the effort to send people to the moon and bring them back.

One tool in particular, Garman's list of codes, played a key role at a that critical juncture.  Today we would call it a playbook.  Anyone who's been on call for a service has used one (I know I have).



In the end, due to a bit of extra velocity imparted during the maneuver to extract the lunar module and dock it to the command module, the lunar module ended up overshooting its intended landing place.  In order to avoid large boulders and steep slopes in the area they were now approaching, Neil Armstrong ended up flying the module by hand in order to find a good landing spot, aided by a switch to increase or decrease the rate of descent.

The controls were similar to those of a helicopter, except the helicopter was flying sideways through (essentially) a vacuum over the surface of the moon, steered by precisely aimed rocket thrusts while continuing to descend, and was made of material approximately the thickness of a soda can which could have been punctured by a good jab with a ball-point pen.  So not really like a helicopter at all.

The Eagle landed with eighteen seconds of fuel to spare.  It helps to have a really, really good pilot.

Bombshell revelations about Hedy Lamarr (sorry, couldn't resist)

A while ago I posted about the role of actor/inventor Hedy Lamarr in the development of the "frequency hopping" communication technology now used in cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth and various military applications, among others.  Now (well, since last year) there's a whole movie about it: Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.  In fact, there's actually something of a cottage industry in Lamarr-related productions, including books, plays, magazine articles and not a few blog posts.

The movie goes into detail on Lamarr's life, from her childhood in Vienna to her Hollywood career, her relationship with aviation magnate Howard Hughes (who provided access to his company's chemists and engineers for her personal projects), her now-famous patent with George Antheil, her reclusive later days and her eventual recognition for her technical contributions.  There are fresh interviews with friends, admirers, children and grandchildren along with archival interviews of Lamarr herself, altogether providing a well-rounded view of a lively mind.

Bombshell and the Hedy Lamarr revival in general have given long-overdue appreciation to someone who until recently was most recognized for her work in an industry concerned nearly exclusively with her looks, despite her efforts to find more challenging roles and her ultimately unsuccessful attempts to break into producing.  My one quibble with the film concerns the impact of her patent.  Because geek.

It is clear that US Navy contractors used the patent directly in the development of a communication system among ships, planes and sonobuoys and that a related system was used during the naval blockade in the Cuban missile crisis.  At least some of that work was done before the patent expired, lending support to Lamarr's claim that she was due the customary payment for the use of her and Antheil's invention.

It's also clear that Antheil contributed significantly to the patent, particularly because he had experience in synchronizing player pianos.  The scheme used 88 frequencies, one for each key on a piano, and needed the ship's radio and the torpedo's to stay in sync.  Three guesses how this was accomplished.  Nonetheless, the initial idea of frequency hopping was Lamarr's and it was she who actively recruited Antheil for assistance with the practical design.

This was a real, significant contribution to communications, and one that was put to practical use, albeit not as originally designed, including in one of the most critical moments of the 20th century.  Neither was it a fluke.  Lamarr had a lifelong interest in what we now call STEM and this was not her only invention, just the most successful.  From what I've seen I have no doubt at all of her geek cred.

However, we should be careful not to go too far, as least not without providing a bit of perspective.  The film itself doesn't go so far as to say Lamarr invented WiFi.  That would simply not be accurate, though that hasn't stopped the occasional web site from making just that claim.  However, it does heavily imply that frequency hopping plays a major role in, for example, the security of military satellites, and it explicitly calls out WiFi, bluetooth and cell phones to claim that Lamarr's invention touches a huge swath of modern-day humanity.

Yes, but ... No one person invented WiFi, which includes everything from the use of the frequency spectrum to the handshaking and security protocols, an implementation of IP (internet protocol) and the specification of metadata such as the SSID.  Likewise, Lamarr's is not the only patent or invention concerning frequency hopping.  None other than Nikola Tesla filed an early patent describing it.  Wikipedia has a summary of other developments of the concept, including use by the German military in  World War I, well before Lamarr and Antheil's patent.

WiFi certainly doesn't use piano rolls to select frequencies.  Technology has marched on in the decades since then.  If we're going to credit the general concept of frequency hopping, we should recognize its full history, not just Lamarr's contribution.  Likewise for frequency hopping in the context of Bluetooth and CDMA in cell phones.

As to security, while the patent was originally filed for a "secret communication system", frequency hopping doesn't provide meaningful security against modern attackers.  Any real security is provided by encryption systems built on usual suspects like DES and RSA, which operate on completely different principles and were of course developed completely separately.  To see this, look no further than WiFi, whose original security was notoriously weak, even though it included both frequency hopping and an encryption layer on top of that.  Neither that layer nor the later improvements have anything to do with frequency hopping.

On the other hand, another of Lamarr's original motivations was to circumvent jamming -- flooding a frequency with enough noise to drown out any real communication.  Frequency hopping with a shared key -- the gist of the patent -- is still effective for that.  If you don't know which of several dozen frequencies the actual signal is on, you have jam all of them, which requires proportionately more power and might not even be practical in some situations.  That's very much alive, and important in military applications, but it's not a form of secrecy and it has little to do with WiFi or bluetooth, except that switching WiFi or Bluetooth frequencies can avoid accidental interference from other devices.


By all accounts Hedy Lamarr was an impressive person: talented, highly intelligent, diligent, creative and in many respects ahead of her times.  Bombshell does a fine job conveying this, and, probably more importantly, the often tragic tension between who she was and who most of the world wanted her to be.  It is also forthright about her flaws and failings and it even does a decent job with the technical details, even considering the critiques above.  All this is well worth recognizing and celebrating.  Putting Lamarr and Antheil's patent in proper perspective does nothing to diminish this, even if it takes away the easy narrative of Lamarr the unsung hero of the mobile revolution.

Field notes off the web

In St. Louis, Henry Goldkamp spends his weekends on the streets writing poetry for passersby, using a Smith-Corona manual typewriter.

I find this really cool, if only for the very concept, and so did St. Louis's Riverfront Times.

Goldkamp has gone one step further, though, and installed about 40 typewriters, with paper, at various places around the city, inviting St. Louisans to answer the question "What the hell is St. Louis thinking?"

Now, I have to admit, something in the back of my tech-saturated head was thinking "Hey, that would make a cool project, put a bunch of keyboards around the city, pipe the results back to a server somewhere and show them on a web page in real time ..."

Um, no.  We already have that, more or less.  It's called Twitter.

What Goldkamp is doing is getting people to interact with technology that, to many of them, comes from another age, almost as though from another planet.  "How do I work this thing?" seems to be a common response.  Having learned to type on some combination of IBM Selectric, Smith-Corona and my grandfather's manual Underwood (I loved that thing), I have to chuckle a bit, but by the same token I can understand why it might be daunting at first.

Besides having to fuss with paper and the carriage return, and mash on the keys to get the typebars to move, the most distinctive feature of a typewriter as opposed to a computer keyboard is that you can't delete anything.  There's a backspace key, but that just moves the paper one space to the right.  About the best you can do is type Xs over what you already typed (on the other hand, you can have fun combining letters to make little icons).  If you were writing professionally, you'd generally type double-spaced (i.e., with a blank line after each line of words), mark up the results with a pencil, literally cut and paste to rearrange, and then retype the whole thing for the next draft.

So if you're sitting at one of Goldkamp's typewriters, expressing your thoughts, you're making a record of every typo and every false start,  all in the order it came out, on a nice, tangible piece of paper that you produced yourself.  At least at first, it will be the only copy of those words in the world, and if someone wants to read it, they'll have to come see it.

Pretty much the antithesis of publishing on the web, and pretty much the way things were for around a hundred years until the "Personal Computer" came along.


Goldkamp is by no means a technophobe.  Among other things, he runs the web site freshpoetrystl.org,  where you can see "A selection of poems that turned out okay", such a typically Midwestern way of putting it, and one of the best page titles I've ever seen.   For my money, the poems I looked at did come out okay, if not better.

Hedwig and the Mobile Web

I had no idea of this until I ran across it in a Sporcle quiz:  Actress Hedy Lamarr, best known for her Hollywood roles in the 40s and 50s, and inspiration for Anne Hathaway's interpretation of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, was also co-holder of a patent for "spectrum hopping" technology that eventually came to be used in WiFi, Bluetooth and CDMA.  The actual names on the patent are Hedy Kiesler Markey (Lamarr's legal name at the time) and avant-garde composer George Anthiel, a neighbor of hers who developed a means of controlling multiple player pianos.

This doesn't seem to be the first patent for such technology.  Earlier work by Otto Blackwell et. al. uses essentially the same idea.  Both use multiple frequencies, and both use a shared key to determine how to shift between frequencies.  The main difference appears to be that Blackwell uses telegraph tape as a keying mechanism while Lamarr and Antheil use player piano rolls.  However, there is little doubt that Lamarr's contributions to the invention were real and that the invention is significant.

It's interesting that both patents are presented as secret communication systems, as someone listening on only one frequency would only get part of the message.  However, it doesn't seem like it would take long for an enemy to hit on the idea of listening on more than one frequency and combining the signals.  So maybe I'm missing something [if power consumption isn't an issue, you could fill all the bands with padding -- anything that statistically looked like the real signal -- which would make the combined signal much less useful].  Today we use spread spectrum technology to increase bandwidth or decrease "power flux density" -- which I assume means about what it says.

It's also worth noting that Lamarr and Antheil didn't benefit significantly from their invention, which was not used in practice until after the patent had expired.  Lamarr did receive stock in a wireless technology company two years before her death, but it's not clear whether that came to anything.  Having made and spent millions over the course of her career, Lamarr spent much of her later years broke, and was twice arrested for shoplifting.

There's an app for that web site

(To whoever posted the last three comments -- not that there's even the slimmest chance you'll read this -- no, I do not want to buy French sunglasses from you.  Quel dommage.)

Ah, the late 90s.  We knew everything.  We knew that phones, TVs and PCs were going to "converge" until there was no real difference between them.  We knew that the web was exploding and was going to keep exploding.  "Broadband", that is, speeds faster than 56kb, was going to be everywhere.  We knew that mobile computing was going to be big and that the web would necessarily look different on a phone as opposed to a big monitor with a keyboard and mouse.

Honest.  I remember people talking about all this in the hallways and in the restaurants that always seemed to have at least two VCs interfacing animatedly in the booth behind you, before I left the Valley.

And we were right.  Unfortunately, we were wrong about a few of things as well, like whether this was all going to happen "right now, at internet speed" or over the course of decades.  And whether a company had to actually show a profit to be worth a gazillion bucks.  And this idea that in order to have half a chance in this blindingly fast new world, you had to become the "first mover" no matter the cost.  And buildings like this.  I mean, who would want to work there?


Now that web-and-video-enabled phones with decent bandwidth are commonplace, what does the web look like on them?  Well, if you actually try to use your phone's browser, it looks pretty unimpressive.  Pages come up in tiny print.  If you try to zoom in so you can actually read them, they may or may not reformat so as not to spill over the edge of the screen.  Selecting links or navigating to the right text box can be pot luck.  In all, pretty dismal.

Not that there haven't been efforts to make web pages look and feel differently if the browser is running on a phone.  There certainly have been, and again, I recall some of those efforts from back in the day.  But that's often not what happens.  What happens instead, often, is an app.

I can read this blog on a phone browser, if I want to, and it looks OK, because Blogger has machinery in place to present it in "feed" form, without all the formatting of the full web version.  This is exactly in line with the "one web site for all browsers" model, but it takes considerable extra effort.  If I go to a random web site, including major ones, I may or may not arrive at something useful.  At the end of the day, phones are just too different from the big-screen/mouse/keyboard setup.

To deal with the small screen, limited keyboard facilities and other peculiarities, phones have to do things significantly differently:

• Much less text fits on the screen and typing is often cumbersome, so graphics play a larger visual role.
• The layout changes, often radically.  Elements appear and disappear depending on where attention is focused.  Buttons are more common than links.  Input elements like buttons and text boxes tend to have reserved chunks of real estate, as opposed to being part of a big page that scrolls.
• A touch screen favors gestures like swiping, pinch/spread for zooming out or in, long press instead of some altered flavor of click (right-click, shift-click, control-alt-meta-cokebottle-click ...), and so forth.
• Autocomplete is even more important.
• A phone is more apt to lose and regain connectivity, so it often makes sense to cache results deliberately, as opposed to counting on some generic caching layer to hold on to whatever happens to be around at the moment.
• Phones are mobile, so physical location can play a much bigger role.  Not a lot of turn-by-turn GPS web pages out there.
• Phones are phones.  You might switch from listening to a song to taking a call at any moment.  To some extent different apps on the phone have to cooperate to make this happen smoothly.

Put this all together and it's going to be next to impossible to maintain a web site that can automatically look good on all the major browsers and all the major phone platforms.  A better solution is to separate the information in the web site from its presentation and develop the PC/laptop presentation more or less separately from the phone presentation.

That explains why a good portion of apps are essentially web sites redone for the phone.  As long as the separation is done reasonably cleanly, this is the right call.  A weather web site and a weather phone app ideally share the same raw weather information, and probably a fair bit of common elements like icons for "sunny" and "fair to partly cloudy", but the web designer doesn't need to figure out how to recognize and handle a swipe gesture and the phone designer can dispense with a lot of web markup machinery.

It took me a while to pick up on this, not because it's that hard to notice but because I'm a little slow that way.  "Apps", huh?  Sure are a lot of them, and a lot that sound like web sites.  What's the point?  Must be some sort of marketing gimmick.  But of course apps are not a gimmick at all.

Dennis Ritchie, 1941 - 2011

I have no intention of turning this blog into an obituaries column, and no desire to see "celebrity deaths come in threes" spill over into the tech world, but having noted the passing of Steve Jobs I feel obliged to note the passing of Dennis Ritchie as well.

You may or may not have heard of him before.  It took the major news outlets a while to pick up the story, and even then it wasn't front page.  For hours the main public source was colleague Rob Pike's Google+ page.  That's not too surprising.  CEO of major corporations and eminent computer scientist are two completely different gigs.  Nonetheless, Ritchie had as profound an effect on the Web As We Know It as anyone else, even though his groundbreaking work predates the web by a good measure.

It's fair to say that the web as we know it would not exist if not for Unix.  The first web server ran on NeXTSTEP,  which traces its roots to Unix [and, in fact, NeXT was run by the late Steve Jobs -- tech is a small world at times -- D.H. Nov 2018].  A huge number of present-day web servers, large and small, run on Linux/GNU which, even though the Linux kernel was developed from scratch and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix", provide an environment that's firmly in the Unix lineage.  The HTTP protocol the web runs on has its roots in the older internet protocols and belongs to a school of development in which Unix played a major role.

Ritchie was one of the original developers of Unix.

The Unix operating system, the Linux kernel, many of the GNU tools and countless other useful things (and at least one lame hack) are written in the C language, which is also one of the bases for C++, C#, Objective C and Java, among others.  All in all, C and its descendants account for a large chunk of the software that makes the web run, and for years, before the ANSI C standard, the de facto standard for the language was a book universally called "K&R" after its authors, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.  That flavor of the language is still called "K&R C".

Ritchie continued to do significant work throughout his life and won various high honors, including the Association for Computing Machinery's top honor, the Turing award, and the US National Medal of Technology.  He was head of the Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.  He may not have been a cultural icon, but in the world of software geekery he cast a long shadow.

RIP

NEW TECHNOLOGY LOOKS ODDLY FAMILIAR STOP

My phone is not particularly well suited to texting, but for various reasons I've found myself doing more of it lately.  Even beyond the basic problem of typing on a chiclet keyboard with fingers that did some of their first typing on an Underwood manual, there are a couple of challenges.

For one, I'm used to writing complete sentences, so I find myself compulsively and pointlessly going back and fixing spelling mistakes, checking punctuation and so forth.  Mind, I don't have anything against the usual abbreviations and casual spellings. I doubt it's a sign that the language has gone to pot or that Kids These Days don't learn anything.  More likely it's a sign that full and careful spelling is just not worth the effort if you can get your message across more quickly without it.

The upshot is that I text much, much more slowly than I write.  I'd guess at least four times as slowly and very likely closer to eight or ten [re-reading in 2015, I note that I'm able to text much faster now, with a smartphone and keyboard app, and the character limit is much less visible.  I think my texting is somewhat less terse now, but the overall point of texting technology influencing texting style still stands, I think -- D.H.].  An order of magnitude in quantity generally means a change in quality and this is no different.  Working at such a slow speed, I find every word counts, as typing another is just too much bother.

Side note: Once I was at a conference where computer graphics legend Jim Blinn presented his first ray-traced picture.  Ray-tracing is a technique that carefully follows rays of light through every pixel of the picture, as opposed to the classic "polygon pushing" technique, which Blinn helped pioneer and which is still in wide use today because of its speed.  Polygon pushing determines which surfaces are visible and draws them (more or less directly), saving a bunch of time.  Blinn claimed that one of the nice aspects of ray-tracing was that since it was so slow, around eight hours per frame in that case, as I recall, you had plenty of time to think about what was going to be in the image.

Just so, slowing down to text gives much more time to think about a short message.  I'm sure the situation is different for experienced texters, but even then another factor comes into play: SMS's draconianly (and more or less artificially) short message length.  If you're tweeting, it doesn't matter if you're sitting at your desk typing full steam ahead, or picking out words while squinting at a cell phone, or rattling away with thumbs of lightning.  140 bytes is 140 bytes.

Way back in the early days of electronic communication networks, people sending messages faced a similar problem.  I'm not aware of any particular length restriction on telegraph messages, but for decades telegraph messages had to be transmitted, by hand, in morse code.  As a result every word was expensive -- and punctuation was conveyed in words, notably STOP for a period.  To cope with this, customers developed a concise "telegraphic" style in order to make every word count.

Technology doesn't just enable.  It also constrains, and the effects of such constraint can be just as interesting.

What's this year's Rorschach blot?

Continuing the trip down Silicon Valley memory lane ... the other day I was talking with someone else who'd been around during the madness about a job interview they'd had. Paraphrasing very heavily, it went something like this:

Applicant: So it looks like you need another round of funding. How were you thinking of getting that?

Interviewer: Well, we were thinking of going to the VCs with some sort of web play.

Applicant: What kind of web play?

Interviewer: Um, we'll figure that out.

Applicant: OK, thank you for your time.

These days we can all have a good laugh over those silly dot-com startups thinking all you had to do was say "web" (or put e- or i- in front of your name or, of course, .com at the end) and the world would beat a path to your doorstep. What exactly was "the web"? No one had had much of a handle on that at all and as a result it could be anything you wanted to be. Of course, we know better now. The web is ... hmm, still not really sure ... maybe I'll write a blog about trying to figure it out ...

So why did my spidey sense tingle every time I heard "social networking" for a while? Probably because it sounded like the same kind of Rorschach blot -- anything you wanted it to be. Of course, now we know better. "Social networking" means "Facebook and Twitter".

OK, I know that's not fair, or even true, but when the local drugstore is proud to tell you you can fan it or follow it, you can be sure that those brands have achieved a certain level of prominence.

Maybe I'm just slow, or addled by too many days on the Peninsula, but I'm not sure what the all-purpose trend is this year -- or if it's not quite here yet, what it's going to be. But I'm sure it's out there.

Silicon valley, then and now

There is a strip of land between the 101 and the Bay, from the boundary of Moffett Field north a ways (and when I say "north", I mean "west", of course). I don't know its history intimately but, from having visited the area intermittently since the early 80s and having spent a good chunk of the 90s living nearby, it seems to have gone through three major stages:

1. Upstart companies, riding the wave of silicon miracles, moved in and made the biggest, boldest mark they possibly could. Glass and steel buildings rose, their curves and odd angles shouting "I am not a box!" Rents and property values went through the roof, but who cared?
2. The wave broke, leaving a glut of empty not-boxes and an economic hangover the likes of which would not be seen again for, oh, at least a few years.
3. The Valley licked its wounds and regrouped. A new generation arose and what had we here? A bunch of pretty cool buildings available at reasonable rates. The buildings stirred back to life.

The Boom has left its indelible stamp on the Valley. Even the new construction these days could, for the most part, have gone up ten years ago and still fit right in, had only the engine not run out of steam. But now both that new construction and those buildings that had proclaimed their new-and-differentness back in the day have, to my eye at least, a comforting, almost nostalgic look. Moving in may have been a coldly economic decision, like buying so much dark fiber to light up, but there's also just that hint of the 21st-century boutique law firm setting up shop in an old Victorian house.

Think of it as recycling, putting the byproducts of the manic energy of those times to useful work. Just so, the overheated "everything's different now" vibe that pervaded the region seems to have died away, leaving room for a steady stream of commercially viable improvements and maybe even the occasional boom-era fever dream come true.

Granted it's always tricky to tell how much the times have changed and how much oneself has changed. Maybe it's really the same as it ever was; maybe it's still all different now. I really don't know. All I know is that we're all a few years older now.

And, one hopes, a bit wiser.

Via Appia or I-95?

In a previous post I had been about to assert that truly disruptive technologies only come along rarely, and then cite the automobile as a classic example. But my spidey sense started to tingle. Just what was the disruption?

Intuitively, it's difficult to look at, say, a satellite photo of the US eastern seaboard and claim that the automobile hasn't been disruptive. On the other hand, anyone who's ever tried to navigate, say, central London in a car knows that the even the automobile hasn't completely swept aside everything that came before.

But wait. Is it the automobile that's been disruptive, or the paved road? The pattern of commerce and (other) empire-building spurring roads spurring towns and cities spurring commerce and empire-building goes back at least to the Romans. Even paving with tar goes back a long way, to 8th century Baghdad, according to Wikipedia. In Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin reports macadamised roads in Australia in the 1830s, half a century before Benz's patent.

Along the same lines, it was a long time before automobiles surpassed trains. In the US, one could argue that it took the interstate system -- more and much better paved roads -- to really get American car culture going, and to this day it is possible to live comfortably in major metropolises (albeit mostly outside the US) without access to a car.

Again, there's no way to claim the automobile hasn't had a major disruptive effect, but the simple narrative of "the automobile changed everything" just doesn't hold up.

Likewise, was it the internet that changed everything, or the web, or fiber optics, or Moore's law, or developments in software engineering, or ...? The answer is probably "all of the above, and more."

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

On February 22, 1980, in the early evening, the US watched its hockey team beat a Soviet team that had utterly dominated the international game. The Miracle on Ice, they still call it.

I remember watching that game. What I didn't remember is that the actual game had been over for the better part of an hour before most of us saw it. More than that, most people watching didn't know the outcome. I'm pretty sure I didn't.

It's hard to imagine such a thing happening today. Today, the game would be live, if only on some affiliated channel. In 1980, your ABC station was your ABC station and that was about it. They weren't about to preempt their regular programming to show the home team's inevitable crushing defeat.

Today, even if you missed the game, chances are someone would text you, or email you, or post something on Twitter, or on Facebook, or you would see the results online, or whatever. In 1980 if you were too far from the Canadian border to catch the game live, well, maybe someone might call you.

Today's generation lives in real time on the net. And yet, in a different way, it's the 1980s world that lived in real time. There wasn't TiVo. Sure, you could tape shows on your VCR, and people did, but it was a hassle (anyone remember VCR+?). Basically, if you didn't happen to be there to watch, you missed it. If you didn't catch what someone said on the radio, there wasn't going to be a transcript or podcast online. If you stepped away to answer a call of nature at a crucial point, well, you missed it. Rewind live TV? That's a contradiction in terms, right?

I'm not trying to wax nostalgic here about how it was so much better in the old days or how Kids These Days just don't know how good they've got it because all this modern technology has rotted their brains. I like being able to look up scores and transcripts online and time-shift TV without juggling video tapes. Rather, my point is that enough technological change has accumulated in the last 30 years for media to have developed a noticeably different flavor. One can argue over better or worse.

Another example: ABC aired the Olympic games under its famous Wide World of Sports banner. Viewers of a certain age will recall its trademark introduction: "mumble mumble blah blah yada yada ... The thrill of victory! And the agony of defeat!" and a spectacular wipeout on skis. And maybe some other stuff. I forget.

Wikipedia points out that while ABC would vary the images for the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat was illustrated, for decades, by that clip of Slovenian ski jumper Vinko Bogataj losing his balance at the bottom of the ramp and tumbling into the crowd (fortunately, he suffered only a minor concussion and went on to successfully  coach younger jumpers -- "OK, guys, now don't do it this way ...").

Two interesting things here: For a while, the web had a fairly patchy memory. If it happened after WWW became a household word, chances are you could find something about it. If it was textbook history, someone might have a site on it. But if it happened in the decades before the web, you probably weren't going to find it.

Now that we've got Wikipedia and everyone has uploaded their old videos to YouTube, the web's memory has cleared up considerably. I wasn't at all surprised to find a clip of the WWOS intro. Ten years ago, I would have expected not to. Next time you're visiting the early 80s, take heart. If you missed something notable, no problem. Just wait 30 years or so and it'll be on the web.

The other interesting thing is that for years, Vinko Bogataj was famous. Anyone who'd ever watched WWOS would remember that wipeout. Years later, Muhammad Ali would ask Bogataj for his autograph.

Bogataj  was famous, but no one knew his name. Moreover, he had no idea he was famous until ABC called him do do an anniversary show (ironically enough, he was involved in a minor car accident on the way [or at least on the way to some ABC interview]). Today's unfortunate skier can be absolutely certain that the footage will be on YouTube within the few seconds it takes for the medical crew to arrive.

And conversely, how did I find out Bogataj's name? I searched for "Agony of Defeat" on Wikipedia and it redirected me to Bogataj's page. As well it should.

"You can google it"

At the store the other day I overheard a sales pitch for some wondrous kitchen product. "Our product's motors last twenty to thirty years," said the lady. "You can google it."

Meanwhile, in the run-up to the XXI Winter Olympic games, Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie and company have pulled together a (mostly) new crop of celebrities to record a 25th anniversary version of We Are The World to benefit Haiti. You can download it to contribute.

A while ago, I noticed that "Call or click today" has replaced "Operators are standing by" as the tagline for legion upon legion of infomercials.

Some combination of these and other cases like them has finally crystallized something that's been floating in my head throughout the not-so-disruptive-technology thread on this blog: There's a crucial difference between pervasive and disruptive. If you're going into business, pervasiveness is a much better goal.  People don't want their lives disrupted. They want them improved.

New technology certainly can and does disrupt particular sectors. If you're a recording artist, particularly an established artist used to selling music on physical media, the shift to downloading must be worrisome. If you're a major record label it's terrifying. But if you're a consumer, it's just another way to get music. Mind, I'm going on anecdotal evidence here -- if you're actually a recording artist I'd love to hear your story (I'm pretty sure I've already heard what the labels have to say).

Stepping back a bit, I claim new technologies are much more likely to become pervasive than disruptive, if indeed they do either (videophones, anyone? [Well ... five years down the line videophones, in at least some sense, are pretty pervasive -- D.H. May 2015]).

Postscript: While I've tried to consistently capitalize Google as a proper name, I can't bring myself to capitalize it as a verb, however much that might displease Google's trademark department. Googling has become as pervasive as, say, xeroxing.