Archive of posts with tag 'Tech History'
Western Electric Plant. Cicero, IL.
Western Electric was the captive equipment arm of the Bell System and produced the majority of the telephones and related equipment used in the U.S. for almost 100 years.
Early ARPANET Protocols →
October 13, 2022 • #This was an interesting post with background on the design of the original ARPANET protocols, and the layering architecture developed by its creators.
The IMPs (Interface Message Processors) were the key to interconnecting original four ARPANET sites with a mechanism to allow message interchange between systems that couldn’t speak the same language. They needed a “translator” to sit between each site’s system and the other sites to convert messages into universally-interpretable formats. The entire architecture of ARPANET was an interesting proto-network architecture that’s uniqueness (run by a single entity, BBN / ARPA) allowed it some rigidity in the root protocol design and hierarchy. As TCP/IP was being developed, it needed to support a “network of networks” (the Internet):
The ARPANET protocols were all later supplanted by the TCP/IP protocols (with the exception of Telnet and FTP, which were easily adapted to run on top of TCP). Whereas the ARPANET protocols were all based on the assumption that the network was built and administered by a single entity (BBN), the TCP/IP protocol suite was designed for an inter-net, a network of networks where everything would be more fluid and unreliable. That led to some of the more immediately obvious differences between our modern protocol suite and the ARPANET protocols, such as how we now distinguish between a Network layer and a Transport layer. The Transport layer-like functionality that in the ARPANET was partly implemented by the IMPs is now the sole responsibility of the hosts at the network edge.
Hardcore Software →
February 17, 2021 • #Steven Sinofsky is writing a book on his time at Microsoft and the rise of the PC. He joined Microsoft during its ascendancy in 1989, starting as a software engineer and moving up to leading product on Office for most of his time with the company.
So far the first few parts of the book are excellent, as expected. Sinofsky was instrumental in so many of Microsoft’s key product businesses. He’s written so much great stuff on his blog over the years.
I’m eating up each chapter as he puts them up. Here’s a great bit about his offer to come work at Microsoft in 1989, and a call from Bill Gates himself working the college recruitment phones:
“Hi, Steve, this is Bill Gates.”
“Hello. Thank you for calling, and so sorry for the confusion. I thought a friend of mine…”
“So, David gave me this list of like ten people and I’m supposed to call all of them and convince them to work at Microsoft. You should come work at Microsoft. Do you have any questions?” (I always thought this was the best part of the call—him telling me he was just cranking through a list. Transparency.)
“I’m definitely excited and thinking about it. I don’t really have any questions.”
“Well, why haven’t you accepted yet? You have a good offer.”
“I’m considering other things. I have been really interested in government service.”
“Government? That’s for when you’re old and stupid.”
(No, really, he said that.)
“At Microsoft we have amazing things going on in multimedia. Have you seen all the things we are doing with CD-ROMs and video? We are going to make a whole encyclopedia on a CD-ROM, 650 megabytes with videos, maps, quizzes, and more.”
“I haven’t. I use a Macintosh and workstations. I used MS-DOS at my summer job and Windows 1.0, but it was pretty slow.”
“Well, Microsoft makes more money on Macintoshes than Apple does because of our apps—our word prosser [sic], Word, is super good. OS/2 runs in protect mode, which the Mac does not do. Do you have any more questions?”
“Not really.”
“I’m glad we got to talk. The offer is super good. Bye.”
How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos →
August 6, 2020 • #This is an oral history of the famous Mother of All Demos, wherein Doug Engelbart unveiled a half-dozen technologies including the mouse, screencasting, the NLS, hypertext, windowing, and more. It’s an excerpt from Adam Fisher’s Valley of Genius.
Bob Taylor: ”The mouse was created by NASA funding. Remember when NASA was advertising Tang as its big contribution to the civilized world? Well, there was a better example, but they didn’t know about it.”