Computing for peace....

Does computing play a role in achieving peace, or has it made things worse? In a way, I guess you can say it has made things worse, but at the same time, those same technologies that play a vital part in defence (strangely enough, this is always called "defence", no country admits to having "attcking" armed forces, despite that fact that someone really has to start) has also often benefited society largely.

Although the question is difficult, as compting is so mixed up with outher technological advances in the 20th century, and to a large extent also irrelevant, i.e. computing just will not go away, you can also think of what computing has done in the name of peace and democracy.

Today, Internet, Mobile phones and other messaging systems are being used to drive democratic movements. You might argue that this is also benefiting the evil forces in the same way, and this is true, but here I am about to write about an event in history which was a bit different.

There has always been those who are believers in a cause and a means, to the extent that they, at least seen in hindsight, look incredibly naivë. One such person is H. G. Wells, the well-known "father of Science Fiction", and the author of such well-known novels such as The War of the Worlds, which is usually rememberd for the famous Radio Broadcast in 1938, read by Orson Welles, that caused panic among the listeners, believing that this was for real.

Now, what does this have to do with Computing and Peace you ask? Well, H. G. Wells has. In the 19th Century, the world saw many "universal geniuses", many more than today. Two reasons for were:

• It hadn't been the case before, as before the encyclopedia (invented, if you wish, in the 18th century), it was difficult to find the data you needed to ebcome a genius, and in oarticular books became more readily available.
• It didn't happen in the next centrury, because as science progressed at break-neck speed in the 19th century, it became real difficult to be an expert in more than a limited number of areas. In the 19th centry, most people with enough time, money (which means most people were out) and the intelligence of a reasonably smart squirrel, could become a genius in some field, just by picking up an encyclopedia.

But there were other views on the encyclopedia than to create loads of world geniuses, and really smart squirrels. No the ambition was set higher than that. Actually, the Encyclopedia was a centerpiece of the Age of Enlightment of the 18th century. The radical, at the time, idea behind the encyclopedia was that if people were knowledged, they would live in peace. Call it naivë, but this was an important part of the ideas at the time.

By the early 20th century, the amount of knowledge of our world had exploded. The encyclopedia, which once could hold a significant fraction of the knowledge of the world was now not able to keep up, for a couple of reasons:

• There was just much knowledge to keep in even a large encyclopedia.
• The advances in science was getting faster, and printing of encyclopedias just couldn't keep up with the pace of scientific research.
• There is just so much data you can pack into the brain of even a very smart squirrel.

So who was there, in the early 29th centrury, to pick up the ideas from the Age of Enlightment? Well, I'm afraid it was, in those days, largely socialists and liberals. Looking at what socialism represented in the early 20th century is interesting, it was an enormous mish mash of different kind of ideas. A rather common theme was the unity of people around the world, one way or the other. This sounds like a weird thing today, I know, but I'm just relating facts here (any complaints can be addressed to my assistant squirrel). H. G. Wells was a socialist, largely, and was an admirerer of Lenin, although less impressed by Stalin. I'm not sure this is a good thing, and where this blogpost is heading now...

Anyway, H. G. Wells picked up the political idea of the encyclopedia, i.e. if we all have knowledge, there will be peace (yeah, right). And H. G. Wells had an idea for solving the issues with the encyclopedia (expect the one involving squirrels, that still remains to be fixed). The idea was that instead of having all that vast amount of knowledge packed in expensive and cumbersome books, give people immediate access to all knowledge in the world by more modern means of communication.

The idea was conceived by Wells in the 1930s (no, this is not a typo), and the idea he had was for a metal clearinghouse for the mind. Also, he determined that this data need not be concentrated in one place, it might well be in the form of a network. You see where I'm getting with this? The idea was that this network would consitute a World Brain (exclduing the squirrel brains).

Now, you might thing that this is just something from a crazed out froot loop of Sci-Fi author. He probably was receiving death rays from his neighbour at regular intervals also. Nope, that isn't so, not at all. In 1937, Wells toured the US with his "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" talk, it was broadcast in Radio and Wells also presented his idea to President Squirrel, no, sorry, President Roosevelt.

What was the result? Well, not much really. The World Brain idea might have influenced by Vannevar Bush when he was working on his idea for a Memex, and Bush in turn influenced most aspects of how we know and work with computers these days.

The closest thing to a World Brain today, as Wells saw it, is probably Wikipedia. For example, this is a quote by Wells on how the Would Brain would work: "A great number of workers would be engaged ... perfecting the index of human knowledge..."

/Karlsson

Why do we interact with computers the way we do?

Well, I can tell you, I think the answer will a surprise to some of you. Do you like Greateful Dead? Hey, they are part of the story, at least according to some (I have research the subject by reading a bunch of books, but I have not myself interviewed anyone or done any actual research, but that said, I think my sources are credible).

The first real invention that brought things close to todays computers was the flip-flop in the 1920's, this set the scene for binary computers. But this flip-flop was electromechanical, made for relays and such, and although easier to work with than mechanical parts and pretty reliable, it was just to slow and complex, not to mention expensive.

So now we have digital computers, but still rather slow and clunky. We want electronic computers. But electronic in the 1930's and 1940's meant tubes. Which are WAY faster than relays, but a lot less reliable. Despite this, computers were built using tubes, 1000s of them. And they worked, to the surprise of many in those days. In 1946, ENIAC was up and running.

Now, ENIAC was WAY fast (in those days at least), but the problem was, what do you do with them. On the grand scale, there were two lines of thought here:

• Office automation - A silly term, but I use it anyway, and not even close to how we know office automation today, with spreadsheets, databases and word processors. Rather, this was batch oriented processing of tax and insurance forms, banking, to an extent airline bookings and so on.
• Pure number crunching - This was something new. Not that computers could do them, but that they could do them at such a breathtaking speed, leaving even the best mathematician behind.

But the deal was this: For the first use, the traditional IBM-mainly equipment with punched cards and semi-automated procedures worked fine. For the latter use, there was only so many things to do, mainly in defence.

But the scientists and semi-scientists and the techo-press in the 1950s, completely techo-fied and without any kind of second thoughts to technology. Technology can solve ANY problem! (Like DDT, yeah right. Typical 1950s. Like 1999 - 2001, ANYTHING can be sold on the net, including dog-food. Yeah right).

After a while though, the general view, among most scientists and the public and the press was that in the future we would see tow uses:

• Batch oriented office automation, as I have already described. This was boring and uninteresting, and no one cared much, but it needed to be done. But punched cards could do the job as well, so here the technology wasn't really adding much.
• Artificial Intelligence - No, I am not talking about a myself on a late night after a truckload of beers, that is just Artificial. No, this was something that the scientists, the press and the public got 100% hooked on. The giant super brain! (Again, this is most definitively not me after that load of beer, ask any woman in the vicinity).

The Giant Superbrain was the concept of future computing, no doubt. You just tell it want you want done, and it does it for you, using some robots and things. We now know that things didn't turn out like this, the Giant Superbrain is still far away.

But between these tow uses of computer power, in the 1950's was envision... Nothing. Well, there was a group of people with a different idea. One where the vision was computing that we humans interacted with, to get more knowledge computing power, but that we control. Note that in the two main projected uses, interaction with the "user" was either non-existing or typically plain-language, just as with a normal person (again except me on a late night then).

This third group of people, thinking of the computer and Augmenting the human bran was actually on to something. And they were not alone. The defence had a problem with soldiers that just got tired of fighting (the Korea had more or less just ended). Also, when tired, they acted irrational and did not do a good "soldier job" in short. Along came, no, not the transistor and not a truckload of Vitamin-B rich beverages, but LSD.

LSD in the 1950's was not considered a recreational drug, but something that could help, or again Augment, the human brain. The same way as the small group, lead by no one else than the inventor of, among many other things, the mouse, Doug Engelbart, was looking to Augment the human using computers. And although one means of augmentation was chemical and one was electronic, the group that was experimenting with LSD, in a true psychedelic environment with flashing light and all that, was linking up with Engelbarts group. One reason was that these two groups were both located in the Valley, that was not yet Silicon Valley.

The LSD group were testing LSD on people in weirdo environments, apparently Engelbart tried it also, but it backfired on him and he would not do it more than once. These "Acid tests" as they were called, were supported for a long time by US Army, and also by, (hey, this is getting really weird now), L Run Hubbard! And house band at the Acid Tests were the highest ranking psychedelia band in SF at the time, the Dead!

The two groups were close for a long while, but eventually the Acids tests stopped, as the results weren't were consistent, and the drug had been found to have negative issues also (you didn't expect that, did you? The defence getting into a new technology that backfires on them).

In the end, Doug Engelbart want on to invent much of the computer as we see it today, from a user interface technology POV. An influence wes, to a large extent, Vannevar Bush (more on him later). But Engelbart never got much credibility for his work and never made any money on it. But most of how we interact with computer can be traced back to Bush, Engelbart orTed Nelson.

And remember that just using a terminal to interact with a computer was something unheard of in the 1950s when this happened, and no one envisioned that to happen anyway. The computer had to be kept busy all the time, with by processing income tax report and controlling the robot that was cleaning the house. But waiting for a user to press the next key in the URL he is looking for on the internet? No way!

/Karlsson

Introduction to my Computer History blog

I am a software guy, I admit that, but I have also worked with Hardware, way back. The reason I say this is that most history on Computers are related to hardware, and there is some good reason this is so. Mainly, the history of computer hardware is older, much older, than the history on Software.

This said though, Software and the Software industry is old enough (speaking of software as an entity of it's own, not related to Hardware, it is approaching 50 years) to start telling the History of software.

But for myself, even though I am a Software guy, Computer Hardware has at the moment a much more intriguing and interesting history. Being a MySQLer though, I will make an attempt to blog about as much Software History as I can. And I can tell you I have a few interesting stories on the issue of computer, and computing, history up my sleeves, including Software history. But I am not a researcher in the field myself, I just read on stuff, as much as I can actually, and there are some good books on the history of software coming out.

What are my sources then? I try to collect and read as much as I can. IEEE publishes a magazine on computer history, and there are a bunch of books on the subject. Among the books, I can see three kinds of books that provide me with material:

• Books on the explicit subject of Computer History. This is obvious, and I have a bunch of these books.
• Books on specific attributes of computing. These are books that do not set out to document computer history, but do so anyway. Examples are books on .com era, books about the crypto computers during the war and books on the Unix crowd and other similar subjects.
• Thirdly, we have biographies and such books. Some of these are very specific, such as books on IBM, books about Eniac and on DEC, Sun etc.

All these books are valuable, I own a bunch of them and I like to read and talk on them. I am preparing a talk on Computer History now, and as this is still early days in this particular subject, and it is still difficult to see all the implications of what happened, I will present this in a different manner (a manner that suits blogging quite well, incidentally). I plan to have a script and a talk on a bunch of subjects, each talk around 20 minutes or so, and then provide these as mini-dramas. I know this might not be scientific for enough for everybody, but my aim is to make this interesting for a larger crowd, not to smooch a few scientists.

So, now you know what I am about to blog about here, broadly. And before I finish up, any stories, suggestions, facts, fun ideas etc. that you have on this subject, let me hear them, I am open for suggestion.

And before I leave you, I will end with a tip for my next blog post on this subject. Drugs, today, illegal, the US army and the completely insane and innocent view on the technology of the 1950's. That's a subject for you!

/Karlsson