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 Is
history bunk..? We’ve heard a lot about the comparison of the net phenomenon with railways, the motor industry and even the South Sea Bubble, but I don’t recall much analysis looking at the more recent events of early micro computing boom during the 70-80s to see what we might transfer to predict the next phase of net progress. With the gloss well and truly off internet mania, and the autobiography of its most high profile disaster (Boo Hoo) going on sale, now is a good time to see if there are parallels to be drawn. One thing is obvious about the early micro
age; although in 1965 Moore’s famous
law said that CPU power would double every 12 months, it
was the applications and software that ended up driving the market
for hardware; and the hardware that restrained the ultimate
capabilities of software. Let’s review the landmarks in software. In the beginning there was word processing, which was natural at the time, since it was the means by which programs themselves were being written. Prior to that, did we really poke holes in bits of cardboard that were sent in weekly batches for some distant mainframe to reject with a cursory rude note? Yes, we really did; and kids today have no idea etc. (unless they are Linux aficionados and eager to explore the delightful Vi). The first business
microprocessor-powered computers were focussed on word processing.
Who recalls the Memorite, Wang or Diamond word processors..?
WYSIWYG was a long way from being possible thanks to the crude
display technologies that were only barely ahead of teletype
terminals. The sheer cunningness of a cursor addressable terminal
screen was something everyone gathered around to witness until
well into the 80s, although the way ahead for directly addressable
video memory had been apparent from the earliest Sinclair home
computers. Everything in the early days was proprietary –
software only ran on one family of hardware – and the term
“compatible” had yet to be coined. In the networking
world, there is an obvious parallel: the work done with
proprietary transport standards that came complete with the
proprietary hardware implementations – products like Novell’s
IPX, Arcnet, Transnet and Microsoft’s NetBios lived in a world
of their own and were not interested in anything like
interoperability with competitors’ solutions. Memorite, Wang and
Diamond word processors were “turn key” products where the
software was dependent on custom hardware; but the grand daddy of
“portable” word processing appeared in 1979: Micropro’s
WordStar – an application that could be installed to cope with
different cursor addressable screens, which meant that it ran on
hardware from different manufacturers who were started to adhere
to a portable standard, the CP/M operating system, which Digital
Research had introduced in 1976. Hardware manufacturers were
obliged to compete, and the competitive issue became how cost
effectively each would run the “standard software”. Portability
liberated the software industry and the floodgates opened. Next up
was Ashton Tate’s dBASE database authoring language, then the
Supercalc spreadsheet. Until the spreadsheet, the notion of being
able to do “What-if parallel mathematics” had not existed in
the world of linear calculation. And whilst all manner of attempts
have been made to refine the idea, today’s Excel would be
instantly obvious to the user of the original VisiCalc. This was
the first application that really could only have been devised
with a computer in mind – it was not a simple electronic version
of an existing idea. A net parallel is
again obvious: the adoption of the open TCP/IP provided a
transportable standard that could be implemented on any hardware
and any operating system. Commercial Ethernet adapters appeared in
1981 – and in the same way that CP/M was bad news for the likes
of Wang, TCP/IP was bad news for those of proprietary bent like
Novell; but great news for the rest of us. Suddenly all sorts of
different networks could interoperate and single dial up
connection was all that was required to connect to just about any
computer network on the planet. With such universal application,
there was no way back, and thank heavens TC/IP remains a public
open standards, and is not in the control of any one commercial
interest. Back on the
microcomputer timeline, Digital Research was king of the operating
system castle, and apparently impregnable. CP/M had cut it’s
teeth on 8-bit CPUs – notably powered by the Intel 8080 and the
Zilog Z80 – then gave way to MSDOS on the 16 bit 8088 for a
simple act of marketing when IBM introduced the original IBM PC in
1981. This was an ancient technology that was in many ways
retrograde, but it was a standard that again set the software
developers free from complex compatibility issue, and with the IBM
PC, Microsoft took full advantage of Digital Research hubris, and
snuck MSDOS past CP/M as the standard. However, the net is
not free from monopolists. Cisco Systems boasts that it’s
switches and routers power 90% on the Internet. However, the
operating system of the Cisco hardware is based closely on Unix,
and there are many examples of Unix-powered routing and switching
solutions that keep alive the possibility of maintaining a wholly
open Internet. The PC and net
stories combine at the point at which software became the most
important issue. Web browsing became the focal issue. Netscape had
been the “CP/M” of browsing – first, and believed itself to
be impregnable. But then once again, it was stalked and strangled
by Microsoft. But the limiting factor of the net is not CPU
cycles, it’s bandwidth, and Moore’s Law does not take into
account luddite telecom businesses and easily mislead governments,
so we are now in the relatively uncharted waters of economics. So what next for
the net? The bad news is that railways, the motor industry, and
the PC business were once vibrant markets that enjoyed the
diversity of thousands of creative participants – and all ended
up being controlled by virtual cartels and monopolies. Maybe the
same writing on the net wall was apparent early on if you wanted
to look for it, why should there be more than one web site
offering to sell books? Answer: if that one site really can do an
OK job of it – globally – then there is no reason for another
to exist. Clearly a more
interesting future for the net lies in doing what the spreadsheet
did for micro hardware – namely doing something that is not a
simple conversion of an existing idea. An exchange site like eBay
fits that profile, because it creates and empowers a market of
hundreds of thousands individual participants. Whilst all previous
“advances” have tended to marginalize the individual, the net
is the first that may actually distribute power back to the
creative individual, so maybe it’s not surprising that we are
only just starting to work out what that really means. |