The mother of all demos

This should matter to non-Geeks.

This is about history and context.

Before Genesis

Much has been said about Openness and Freedom of Choice lately. Steve Jobs talked about his “Thoughts on Flash,” followed by Adobe’s “Flash and Creative Freedom,” and finally, Google, who recently discovered the Internet (re)launching a War with Apple through playful cleverness, taking the serious humorously, and their humor seriously is in keeping with Hacker culture and in so doing, the forms have been obeyed.

It can easily be misleading what “Openness” really is. To understand Open Source, Open Systems, and this seemingly endless “war” to achieve “openness,” and to gain an appreciation of it, one must go back in time to before the beginning.

It wasn’t even the dawn of time. The late 1950s was when computers first appeared in American universities. Computer science wasn’t even being studied yet.

Steven Levy wrote in his book “Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution” that in those days, people crafted computer programs off punch cards— stiff pieces of paper whose presence or absence of holes represented digital information that the computers of the time understood. To run them, they had to hand them over to a venerable priesthood who stood guard before the Machine.

It was arcane.

The first hackers were from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Those MIT guys were hobbyists who, when presented a closed door, found ways to open that door. They would form a network of informants and spies. When someone missed a spot on the machine, they would take their place.

In everything that they did, those early hackers started a tradition that would continue on. It would bind every hacker, in every stripe. Curiosity about how things worked and how to make them better would be a tradition that would glue all hackers in every generation.

This pre-history would sow the seeds of what the Internet is, what open source is, and how software development is done. This pre-history would sow the seeds of Hacker culture and the governing philosophy of the Internet.

In 1962, Doug Engelbart wrote a paper entitled, "Augmenting Human Intellect: a conceptual framework." he wrote:

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

The first computer mouse as demoed by Douglas Engelbart On December 9, 1968, Doug Engelbart gave what we know today as a keynote presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) at the Convention Center in San Francisco. It was a glimpse of how things would be.

The flier described it as a session devoted to a computer-based, interactive, multiconsole display system. They were investigating the principles computer aids could augment intellectual capability. It was the “mother of all Demos,” and it featured the computer mouse, hypertext, and email, just to name a few technologies that has since been created and of which, today is taken for granted and some merely obsolete.

Fast forward to 1969.

Genesis

A lot happened in 1969.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was very much nascent.

ARPANET was the proto-Internet. It was the Internet predecessor.

ARPANET used the ability to group content, type or structure--data--into "blocks" called "packets." Imagine packets to be a group of letters and packages of all sorts that your local courier would bundle together because they will all end up in the same building. Each bundle is what the courier could carry in his vehicle and would represent one trip to the building. That same analogy works for the network.

During the same year, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and their colleagues over at Bell Labs wrote Unix, an operating system. Dennis Ritchie would eventually write C programming language, which was uniquely portable and improvable.

By 1973, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn would develop the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP), which is the basic communications protocol used on the Internet today. The novel idea was that instead of the network being in charge of the reliability of the data, the hosts were given that distinction.

Also in that year the Unix kernel would be rewritten in C binding UNIX and C because the more people learned C, the more they experimented with what they could do with Unix. It also helped that in the 1970s, Unix was distributed to the academe for free.

In 1975, a Request for Comments (RFC 681), “Network UNIX,” was published. RFC 681 presented several interesting capabilities of Unix as a mini-host for the ARPA network. Loosely translated, it meant that Unix’s time-sharing capabilities were most excellent. It wouldn’t be until the marriage of TCP/IP and Unix, however, that the world would really rock.

The birth of Unix led to the Unix Philosophy.

Doug McIlroy summed up in “A Quarter Century of Unix” this bottom-up, pragmatic approach as “Write programs that do one thing, and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”

Ken Thompson in 1978 wrote in UNIX Implementation about the design consideration that went into UNIX,

“What is or is not implemented in the kernel represents both a great responsibility and a great power. It is a soap-box platform on 'the way things should be done.' Even so, if 'the way' is too radical, no one will follow it. Every important decision was weighed carefully. Throughout, simplicity has been substituted for efficiency. Complex algorithms are used only if their complexity can be localized.”

Running in parallel to these events, there were significant development in hardware and networking technology. This all happened in the late '60s and into the '70s. This was a time when the government, big corporations, and universities were mainly the ones who owned computers.

ARPANET, Unix, C, and the hacker culture that spawned around those technologies would be important building blocks for the Internet. The next shift would happen in the late 1970s when hobbyists started to build their own personal computers.

The Altair and Apple I

It was 1975 and it was the time of the Altair 8800. It was a minicomputer do-it-yourself kit. The concept was much like the white boxes found in current computer stores. The Altair though was archaic. It had LEDs and toggle switches on its front panel. To do anything, one needed add-ons like keyboards and such.

In July 1976, the Apple I was launched at a starting price of US$666.66. The man who did it was Steve Wozniak, the other Steve of Apple, Inc. The difference between the Apple I and the Altair was that Apple I was a fully assembled circuit board.

The Altair and the Apple I were technological milestones and by the late '70s, the Apple II would begin its long running production run.

The hardware was important but the problem of software would persist.

Homebrew Computer Club

The middle of the '70s saw monumental milestones in the commercial sphere. Whereas ARPANET was something a few people had, it wasn’t mainstream. It belonged to the realm of academics and government. It was still a time when a mobile phone in the 2000s would be more powerful than the computers of the era.

The creation of the Homebrew Computer Club was an important cornerstone in personal computing. Their founding tenet was to make a computer available in every home. Some of the smartest and most influential computer industrialists were veterans of Homebrew, notably Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

In his book iWoz, Steve Wozniak described his time with Homebrew. He spent many meetings simply showing and publishing his design so that people would be able to get to it and make their own.

Problem was, either they didn’t have the time to do it themselves or lacked the technical skills to do it. That’s when Jobs and Woz started production on Apple I.

In 1976, Bill Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists. Reading it would give you a sense that software piracy existed then.

“The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive,” Gates wrote. “Two surprising things are apparent, however. 1) most of these ‘users’ never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent of Altair BASIC less than $2 an hour.”

Gates goes on to write, “Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?”

Irate, Gates continued, “Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.”

Gates’ BASIC was sold to Altair’s maker, MITS, under a royalty agreement. The problem was, as the hardware got sold, too few copies of the software did.

Jim Warren in reaction to Gates’ open letter, wrote in July of 1976, “There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning 'ripping off' software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won't be 'stolen'."

It was later discovered that Bill Gates and Paul Allen had used Harvard’s PDP-10 mainframe, which was owned by the Department of Defense’s DARPA, to write the disputed software. Harvard was reportedly irate that Allen, who was not a student at Harvard at the time, had gotten to use the facility and that a student had used the facilities for commercial purposes.

This was the 1970s. Unix was freely given to universities and academics, by anti-trust edict. AT&T was never allowed to sell its Unix software and by giving it away, set the seeds that would help transform the world two decades later.

The startling dichotomy of Gates’ belief and that of hobbyists would continue on. The Unix philosophy, and Hacker Culture and Ethics, was still growing and its influence at this point in time was just beginning.

The Lesson of Apple II and the IBM PC

By the late 1970s saw the beginning of the personal computer. Slowly, consumers were able to own a computer. Woz would build the first Apple computer and Steve Jobs would sell it. They sold nearly 200 Apple I machines.

In 1977, the Apple II was introduced to the world. The Apple II, as Wired put it, “the first and last retail computer designed by a single person.” Production of the Apple II series ended in 1993 and Apple sold between five to six million unites.

The Apple II was one of the most popular computers of its time. Its popularity rode on a few things. It was sold not as a kit, but as an appliance. Business users and middle class loved it for the popular VisiCalc spreadsheet program. The expansion capabilities of the Apple II opened possibilities for third parties to create an ecosystem around it.

The open architecture of the Apple II allowed third parties to develop devices attached to it. In fact, the first Apple II shipped with complete schematic of the entire computer’s circuitry. It also contained the entire source for the ROM monitor what Woz wrote. This open architecture allowed enterprising hackers to create add-ons for the Apple II. Even clones of the Apple II were built.

IBM ran with the IBM PC with the same open architecture. Clones were built. Billions of dollars' worth of industry grew around the open architecture of the IBM PC. Peripheral makers of all sorts, parts manufacturers, white box makers, and industries sprang up because of the Openness surrounding the IBM PC.

The story of the Altair, of Apple I, of Apple II and IBM PC, the rise of the Unix philosophy, the hacker culture, of ARPANET and TCP/IP and the story of Homebrew, were all part of the evolution that was happening.

The open architecture in hardware was an essential building block in the massive proliferation of computers and the commoditizing of hardware that the world finds itself in today. It was a piece of the puzzle that helped spawn an industry, and made the mission of Homebrew a reality: a computer in every home.

There is a salient lesson too. While it was an open architecture that allowed wizards of Homebrew, there is something important that must be noted. It was what Woz and Jobs learned.

Not everyone is created equal.

It took focus. It took passion. It took vision to build in order to create an industry.

Woz was a talented guy. He was a prodigy. Even if he wrote the diagram and printed out all the stuff he knew and gave it for free, which was what happened with Apple I and Apple II--- it didn’t mean everyone could take that design and manufacture. Some did, and it resulted in an industry of not only third-party devices, but a whole industry of clones.

The IBM PC built on that. The open architecture helped the commoditizing of hardware that has led to the creation of an ecosystem more valuable than the architecture itself.

The sharing of this technology enriched the world.

Was that enough?

The world was still a long way away from the dream that was the mother of all demos.

This was Reflections on Openness, part 1: the Mother of all demos.

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Copy of Mother of Demos session flier via Coding in Paradise.

Image of punch card is in the public domain.

Unix family tree, some rights reserved.

Image of Altair 8080, some rights reserved.

Image of Apple I, some rights reserved.

Image of Apple II, some rights reserved.

Image of IBM PC, some rights reserved.