Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

Meshing the Network: Let’s Go To The Hop

Published February 7, 2010 by cgerrish

Everything seems to begin in the middle and then spiral out to a temporal beginning. Whenever I begin to think about wireless communication technology and the Network, I always end up contemplating the mystery of Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr and composer George Antheil did the conceptual work on frequency-hopping spread-spectrum wireless communications in 1941. They were awarded a patent for their work in 1942 (Lamarr under her married name at the time, Markey).

Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones. Similar patents had been granted to others earlier, such as in Germany in 1935 to Telefunken engineers Paul Kotowski and Kurt Dannehl who also received U.S. Patent 2,158,662 and U.S. Patent 2,211,132 in 1939 and 1940. Blackwell, Martin and Vernam’s Secrecy Communication System patent from 1920 (1598673) does seem to lay the communications groundwork for Kiesler and Antheil’s patent which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.

Hopping along the spectrum from Lamarr’s time to the present, it’s the iPad that continues to bring the computing environment into focus. Where mobile and wireless were considered secondary modes of use, we now understand them as primary modes. The laptop has moved from the category of portable to that of transportable. And while it will physically fit on your lap, it’s now clear that the laptop is better suited to a table or desk. It’s the iPad that fits comfortably into your lap and stands ready to use as soon as you pick it up. While the desktop computer is a wired machine, and the laptop can either be wired or wireless— the iPad is purely wireless. Purely mobile, purely wireless.

As this new device (the iPad as the definition of a general category) begins its diffusion into the wild, our focus will turn to the availability of the over-the-air Network. This is the natural habitat of the iPad; it lives in the places where there’s wireless network connectivity. In our homes we can set up a cozy nest for the iPad with lots of wireless signal. But once we step out of the door, we’re at the mercy of the fates. With iPad, as with the iPhone, we’re largely dependent on AT&T’s GSM network. And for other devices, it will be other carriers. While there’s a strong focus on ‘coverage’ by cellular network carriers by both users and the networks themselves— we haven’t given the supplementary wifi network the same scrutiny.

For wifi connectivity, we look to a patchwork of hotspots. We scan for signal, looking to see if there’s open network where we can get a connection. Maybe I can get it in that cafe up the street. I seem to remember that park around the corner had public wifi. And that hotel? The wifi there was as slow as molasses in January. Oh, and don’t even get me started about the wifi at that tech conference, everybody jumped on it— and it collapsed. Nobody even got a taste.

The iPad implies that a coherent wifi network will grow up in the places where people need it. A meshed Wifi environment looms in front of us as an opportunity. When Google sponsors free wifi on Virgin airlines flights, and AT&T sponsors free wifi at McDonald’s franchises, you see the beginnings of a huge advertising surface emerging around us.

As this mesh of wifi forms around the heavily trafficked pathways of our lives, we’ll want to take advantage of the hops spread across the spectrum— the ones that Hedy Lamarr imagined. We’ll want to hop seamlessly from wifi network to wifi network as we move from this store to that one. From this museum to that cafe. And we’ll expect the cellular network to fill in the gaps. Optimizing these hops for signal strength, cost of bandwidth and local discounts, offers and transaction capability will give the iPad, and iPhone, a home in the world.

Now, of course, we’d like that experience without commercial interruption. But there’s a ready business model that we already understand: on the channels that we pay a subscription fee, we won’t see commercials. On the channels where we don’t directly pay a fee, we’ll watch commercials– or trade data and gestures, for access. The key is the hand-off to the next local environment, the smooth hop to the next connection— meshing the networks together into a seamless experience. And where we used to see a difference between network providers and broadcasters, in a two-way broadcasting system— those differences begin to dissolve.

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a row of pizza joints jammed right next to each other on a block in Manhattan. As you look at them from left to right, you see the signs in their windows. The first one says: “Best Pizza in New York City!”; the second one blares: “Best Pizza in the USA!”; the third one proclaims: “Best Pizza in the World!”; the fourth one tops them all with: “Best Pizza in the Universe!”; and with the fifth pizza joint we see the proprietor standing out front smiling, and the sign in his window says: “Best Pizza on this Block.”

Competing in this new environment won’t mean spanning the globe with network coverage, rather it’s the microcaster with the best bundle of services, offers, and connectivity in real time, in the spot where you’re standing right now, who will win the day.

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iPad and the new Puritanism

Published February 3, 2010 by cgerrish

The framing of the debate in advance of the availability of the iPad device has centered around control of the words “freedom, choice and health.” The reactionary forces claim the iPad will be detrimental to all three. Within minutes of the conclusion of Steve Jobs’s presentation, the swiftboating of the iPad was under way. Our freedoms are being curtailed; our choices limited and the health of the ecosystem is threatened. The iPad is a deviation from the one true path.

Another vector of dissatisfaction involves the paternity of the iPad. One look at its features and cognitive dissonance sets in among its detractors. Surely a tablet computer is the child of the laptop– what happened to all the ports, the keyboard; where’s the operating system? This Jobs fellow has disfigured the child, removing ports to satisfy some twisted personal vision— and, no doubt, because he hates our freedoms.

But the iPad is the child of the iPhone, not the laptop. There never was a physical keyboard, the ports are the same and so is the operating system. You can’t remove a port that was never there. The child resembles its parent in every way. Although, one must admit, it’s quite unusual for the child to be larger than the parent. Brian Dear, who has criticisms of his own, may have captured the seed of the idea in an interaction between Steve Jobs and Alan Kay:

…Steve announced the iPhone for the first time to the public. After the event, Alan recalled Steve walking up to him to show him the new iPhone in person. He asked Alan, “So, did we build something worth criticizing?” Alan recalls telling him sure, but if you could just make the screen 5″ by 8″, you would take over the world. Steve’s eyes apparently lit up.

The iPad is definitely worth criticizing. And what can you say about a product when both people who love it, and those who hate it, admit they must buy it? Its significance is big enough that simply withholding attention and comment will have little effect on the course of events. You’ll have to pick the device up and touch the glass.

In advance of holding one in my hands, there are two areas I’d like to explore where it looks like the iPad will open doors and make new connections possible.

While we attribute much of the success of the human species to our brains, we owe an equal amount to the dexterity and power of our hands. While the power of thought enables us to apply levels of abstraction to the world; it’s the fine motor control over our hands that allows us to bring these ideas into the world. Apple made a significant design decision when they chose the hand over the stylus, the scrollwheel, the trackball and the physical keyboard. Our fingertip touching the glass makes a direct connection to the virtual controls. This is both a technical and an emotional interaction point. The pleasure derived from the multi-touch interface with real-time responsiveness will quickly make it the most desirable and the most used.

The larger multi-touch interaction surface of the iPad will open the door to a whole range of personal computing gestures. It’s likely that electronic gaming will lead the way, and this is where users will try out thousands of new gestures — some will rise to the top and become defacto standards. Here the opposable thumb, the power grip and the precision grip will expand their repertoire to include the pinch, the spread, the swipe, the twist and others. And the accelerometer expands this interaction model into three dimensions.

And while Apple isn’t the only company whose worked extensively on these new interaction models, they get first mover advantage for introducing the tablet computer in 2007 and calling it a telephone. Creating a product in the lab is one thing, but putting a product on the street and getting uptake is another entirely. We’re seeing the new digital network joined to the original digital network.

Another kind of interaction that the iPad will change is the technology-mediated consultation. In these scenarios, typically the client gives the professional a bunch of personal data. That data is entered into a laptop or a desktop, numbers are crunched, reports formatted and then presented to the client in a meeting. The technology introduces large breaks into the human interaction. Melanie Rodier in her post for Wall Street & Technology asked whether the iPad has a place in the capital markets:

“I see the laptop as not a good collaborative tool,�? he explains. A laptop computer acts as a barrier between the adviser and client, since it is only one person (presumably the adviser) who will handle the keyboard, hit the return key and flip the computer round to face the client.

On the other hand, with an iPad, you can reach over and touch the screen, instead of having to navigate with a button or a mouse. “With the iPad, an adviser could navigate better, sweep pages across, look at a client’s financial plan and statements, and work more collaboratively side by side. It’s a subtle difference. The touch-screen means you can sit on the same side of the table, work as a partner,�? Dannemiller adds.

This kind of change isn’t necessarily in the algorithms used to crunch the data, but rather in the human interaction— the human transaction between the parties. The bond between the consultant and client is strengthened, as is the connection between the client and her data. The tablet format changes the sheer physicality of the interaction. The affordances, or action possibilities, of the consultation are no longer dominated or broken by the technical mediation. The devices recede to allow the people to connect.

The new Puritans have sprung up to save us all from this new impure device. Somehow I’m reminded of the early reaction to Elvis Presley, or when Dylan went electric. The iPad has abandoned the folk movement, it’s sold out, it’s left the one true path of protest music. The iPad smiles and looks askance. “Well, I just think of myself as a song and dance man. You know…”

The Puritans have coalesced around the mantra of “open.” For the Web, HTML5 is the sacred book— although it is unfinished, and there are still many sects within the fold. A specification isn’t a platform, so HTML5 must extend its control through the major denominations: Webkit, Gecko, Trident, KHTML and Presto. When we say, for instance, that HTML5 supports the H.264 video codec, what we’re really saying is that a runtime plugin for that media type must ship with all orthodox HTML layout engines. On this point of scripture, the Gecko sect has reservations. Runtimes outside the Holy stack are strictly the devil’s work.

But purity is just a myth. Dylan’s electric music had elements of the folk song; and his folk songs had elements of rock and roll. At bottom the “closed” iPhone OS was built up from the open source Darwin operating system. And Darwin had its roots in Berkeley Unix. If you want to build an “open” iPhone OS, you can take the same raw materials and knock yourself out.

The real question is what does it take to break through? To create a new kind of computing experience, not in the labs, but in people’s homes, in the cafes, schools and businesses. The answer isn’t in feature sets, ports or adhering to technical religious dogma. When you pick the device up, does it make you want to dance? I know that the puritans have forbidden dance. They’ve given us stern warnings about what will happen if we dance with this new partner. But when you put your fingers on the glass, do you feel a tingling in your toes?

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Surfing The Waves of Technology

Published January 26, 2010 by cgerrish

The company vilified by some as being too closed to be successful in the long run has— in the long run, defined and distributed the dominant model for human-computer interaction. The reality is that all products that brandish the so-called open systems label are operating within the parameters set by Apple.

And while it’s certainly true that Apple didn’t create any of these interaction modes out of whole cloth, they codified them, shipped and sold the products that have turned them into defacto standards.

A de facto standard is a custom, convention, product, or system that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (such as early entrance to the market). De facto is a Latin phrase meaning “concerning the fact” or “in practice”.

In the beautiful silence emanating from Apple prior to the January 27, 2010 announcements a curious thing has happened. The full attention of the technical intelligensia has been focused on what’s missing from our personal and social computing experience. The announcements will be an interesting test of the ‘wisdom of the crowds.’ Theoretically, the predictions and analysis of the thousands of individuals writing about what will be announced could be distilled into either exactly the device Apple intends to release, or a blueprint for an even better device. My bet is that we will be surprised.

Of course, we can point to Xerox Parc, or Doug Engelbart, and say none of these things are new. But moving ideas from the lab to the street is a matter of knowing which dots to connect. In an interview, Jobs talks about recognizing the valuable waves of technology:

“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.�?

In order to connect dots, you need to be in a position to do so. Sometimes we tend to overlook the core skill set that Apple has amassed. Here’s Jobs talking about what Apple does:

“Well, Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: We do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we’re really good at packaging that all together into a product. We’re the only people left in the computer industry that do that. And we’re really the only people in the consumer-electronics industry that go deep in software in consumer products. So those talents can be used to make personal computers, and they can also be used to make things like iPods. And we’re doing both, and we’ll find out what the future holds.�?

So, while we live in an era of “organizing without organizations,” can we expect distributed organizations harnessing the crowd to produce, sell and ship products at the same level as Apple? Crowds have a difficult time indicating what should be left out— and this is a key to superior industrial design. Here’s Job’s on Apple’s design process:

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.�?

In 2007, Apple changed its name from Apple Computer to Apple. In some sense, this signaled the end of the era of the personal computer. The computer has begun its migration and blending into other devices— some existing, others yet to be invented. Here’s Jobs on where the revolution is going:

“I know, it’s not fair. But I think the question is a very simple one, which is how much of the really revolutionary things people are going to do in the next five years are done on the PCs or how much of it is really focused on the post-PC devices. And there’s a real temptation to focus it on the post-PC devices because it’s a clean slate and because they’re more focused devices and because, you know, they don’t have the legacy of these zillions of apps that have to run in zillions of markets.�?

While there have been tablet computers for quite a long time, they were primarily designed as an evolution of the personal computer. In thinking about Apple’s announcement, the previous frame of reference is wrong— just as it is for those who believe the iPhone is a telephone. In looking at what’s missing from our social computing environment, we think we know the set of dots that need to be connected. But if we sit with the problem long enough, a whole new set of dots will come into focus. Here’s Jobs on vision and design:

“There’s a phrase in Buddhism,�?Beginner’s mind.�? It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.�?

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PLATO: The Seed Of The Social Computing Fabric

Published January 25, 2010 by cgerrish

Plato, the philosopher, captured the sense of the Socratic Dialogue as a process of exploration and teaching. Dialogue becomes the medium through which philosophical thinking is distributed. The computer system called PLATO created a social computing fabric through which educational experiences were allowed to unfold.

The preliminary discussions about what would eventually become the PLATO system began in the shadow of the cold war and the 1957 launch of sputnik. The first PLATO system was launched in 1960 and operated on the Illiac 1 computer at the University of Illinois. Eventually the PLATO system would evolve through four architectures. The system that enabled what we would recognize as social computing was launched as the 60s rambled to a close:

In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer’s orange plasma display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512×512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen.

It was also possible to connect the terminal to peripheral devices. One such peripheral was the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind (named after inventor Sherwin Gooch), a synthesizer that offered 4 voice music synthesis to provide sound in PLATO courseware. This was later supplanted on the PLATO V terminal by the Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer, which had 16 voices that could be programmed individually or combined to make more complex sounds. This allowed for what today is known as multimedia experiences.

Recently PLATO was thrust into my attention again through Jon Udell’s conversation with Brian Dear about the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the system via ITconversations:

Jon Udell / Brian Dear on PLATO
Plato Turns 50

Brian Dear is working on a book on PLATO and is involved in PLATO HISTORY, remembering the future, the celebration of this innovative system at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Dear began using the system in 1979. In an excerpt from a conversation on the WELL, Dear describes how PLATO planted the seed of social computing:

PLATO was the first computer system, network really, that scaled with lots of people. It was bigger than ARPANET at least for a while, with many capabilities at a level of usage that we wouldn’t see until the 1990s. A PLATO user didn’t use a computer, they “belonged” to the system. It was a community. For me, I was drawn immediately to this sense that a computer wasn’t for number-crunching or lonely things like word processing, spreadsheets, or video games, the way Apples, Commodores, etc were being used, but it was a “place” where you could meet, interact, stay in touch, get answers to questions, and share and make discoveries.

While PLATO is not well known, even among the current set of social technologists, there are some interesting threads and connections to the current story of our networked real-time computing environment. When we think of the roots of modern computing, we look to Xerox Parc and Doug Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center, but as personal computing expands into social computing, PLATO deserves a place in that pantheon. From the undependable Wikipedia entry we see the connections forming:

Early in 1972, researchers from Xerox PARC were given a tour of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. At this time they were shown parts of the system such as the Show Display application generator for pictures on PLATO (later translated into a graphics-draw program on the Xerox Star workstation), and the Charset Editor for “painting” new characters (later translated into a “Doodle” program at PARC), and the Term Talk and Monitor Mode communications program. Many of the new technologies they saw were adopted and improved upon when these researchers returned to Palo Alto, California. They subsequently transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple Inc..

The direct link from Plato to the present future of computing runs through a young man from Chicago who began attending the University of Illinois in 1973. Abandoning the punch cards that were the staple of computer science at the time, he was drawn like a moth to the glowing orange gas-plasma screens in CERL (the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory).

Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, threw himself into the world of Plato. In fact, Plato Notes, was a strong influence on Lotus Notes. Ozzie has understood software from the beginning as operating in a networked social computing environment. But more than that, it gave Ozzie insight into the potential for human contact through this new medium:

One incident in particular introduced Ozzie to the magic that comes when people connect via computer. He had taken a part-time assignment helping a professor finish writing some courseware. The prof lived on the other side of town, so Ozzie collaborated with him remotely. Ozzie came to know and like his boss, save for one annoyance. “He was the worst typist ever,” Ozzie says. “He was very eloquent on email, but on Term Talk it was just dit-dit-dit, sometimes an error, but agonizingly slow.” At the end of the project, the man threw a party at his house, and Ozzie discovered the reason for the typing problem: The professor was a quadriplegic and had been entering text by holding a stick in his teeth and poking it at the keyboard. Ozzie was floored. “I remember really questioning my own attitudes,” Ozzie says. “I had been communicating with him mind to mind.

During the day, the Plato system was dedicated to the task of educating students, but after 10pm the programmers and users were allowed to play on the system.

The Plato system is still alive and has been transplanted to the World Wide Web. You can find it at:

www.cyber1.org

For those of you in the Bay Area, the 50th Anniversary of Plato will be celebrated at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on June 2nd and 3rd, 2010. Dr. Donald Bitzer, the founder of Plato, and Ray Ozzie will be in attendance. I’ll definitely be there to help remember the future of computing.

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