Baby's 60th Birthday

Radar's predictive sense is drawn from the 'wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst' as we seek to collectively surface the emerging trends of the technology sector. However, from time to time, it's appropriate to look back at the milestones that have shaped the digital industries which we all inhabit.

One of these milestones falls tommorow in the Northern city of Manchester, Great Britain, as the city honours the sixtieth anniversary of the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, the world's first stored-program computer, affectionately known as 'Baby'. Baby executed its first program on 21st June 1948, as part of an experiment utilising four cathode-ray tubes (the Williams-Kiilburn tube) as storage devices, incidentally also enabling random access to this stored memory. The program itself, was was designed to find the highest factor of 2¹⁸, taking almost an hour and 3.5m operations to establish a solution.

A replica of Baby was revealed in 1998, celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, and is located at Manchester's Museum of Science & Industry, coincidentally the venue for this week's b.TWEEN conference of the UK's creative and digital industries.

The implications of Baby's inception were profound, not only enabling the storage of data, but also program code and the means to process it electronically; all the characteristics of what we take for granted as a computational machine. The Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, where Baby was born, was subsequently party to many other firsts, including the floating point machine, transistor-based computers and virtual memory. Along with the University of Bradford (my home town!), forty miles east over the Pennine Mountains, these universities were amongst the first to teach computer science in the UK.

It's no coincidence that this region of the UK was at the forefront of technology - during the Victorian era, the cities of Northern England were the 'Silicon Valley' of the Industrial Revolution. Manchester has long been a global influencer culturally, economically and technologically.

Places such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield are undergoing a modern renaissance with an explosion of grassroots geekery, BarCamps, coworking communties, OpenCoffee meetups, tech conferences, even a Google office and the emergence of regional venture capitalists and startup culture. These may be the weak signals of an emerging technology hub - can this region produce another Baby?

You can find out more about Baby's background, specifications and its inventors at the 60th anniversary celebratory site - www.digital60.org and also watch the BBC's original news coverage.

(Coincidentally, George Dyson's TED 2003 talk on the Birth Of The Computer was just posted a few days ago).

You Become what You Disrupt - (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users.

This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop.

The problem is that it's not particularly clear at what point a disruptive innovation becomes a utility. As innovators it's important that we recognize that this point will arrive and prepare for it. I believe that we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the technologies we create, and to take responsibility for protecting people who come to rely on those technologies to live their daily lives. When we fail to do that, we may find ourselves being cast as either fools or villains who must be regulated and controlled.

Ultimately, I think we will evolve a set of safety standards very similar to building codes. For instance, it appears that a multi-datacenter strategy would have prevented the GrandCentral outage. (As I've said many times before: Datacenters are a Single Point of Failure!)

Cofounder Craig Walker writes: "I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service."

Will better industry standards, best-practices, and independent certifying authorities emerge for these new utilities without innovation-stifling regulation? I hope so.

(continue reading)

Everything I Knew About Metcalfe's Law Turns Out To Be Wrong

In the recent Release 2.0, which covers the next generation of CRM, I invoke Metcalfe's Law, which I've always understood to state that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users on the system."

Well, maybe not. Release 2.0 subscriber Simeon Simeonov, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, sent me a kind letter about the issue, but he says I got Metcalfe's Law wrong.

I also heard, and repeated, Metcalfe’s Law this way many times until I learned that the statement of the law had nothing to do with users. It’s not even about nodes per se. The original formulation was more subtle and had to do with the nature of the exchange between devices. Bob Metcalfe is one of my partners at Polaris so I got the straight scoop a few years ago, including seeing the copy of the original transparency that Bob used when he talked about what George Gilder later on called Metcalfe’s Law. Another thing that very few people know is that Bob was talking about very small network sizes--nothing like the size of the Net. I blogged about this in 2006. It would be really cool if you can use the platform you have to help set the record straight.

Consider it done.

The Industry Standard is back. Why?

The Industry Standard ably chronicled -- and, eventually, mirrored -- the Internet boom that began a decade ago and died a few years later. (Disclosure: Despite its occasional excesses, I am honored to have been associated with the magazine.) After years of noticing that thestandard.com was still receiving ample traffic and -- with one brief exception a few years back -- not doing much about it, IDG, which was the Standard's lead investor and picked up the carcass in bankruptcy court, has relaunched the site this week.

The new site is, to these eyes, an unintentional parody of Web 2.0 features. Rather than mere advertising, it has a more high-end sponsorship model (i.e., one pay-for-it-all advertiser), it seeks to create a community (you have to sign in to enjoy the more interesting features), it combines aggregation and a sliver of original material with a "wisdom of crowds" prediction market, and it appears to have a bare-bone staff. And, of course, to keep costs really low, this time the brand is online-only.

I'm not sure what's being accomplished here, aside from the modest monetization of a dormant but still semipopular URL. It's an attempt to revive a once-very-popular name, synonymous with original content, with as little original content as IDG can get away with. Maybe that will change.

Recently someone I hadn’t been in touch with for more than 20 years found me on Facebook and suggested we "reconnect." But if we really wanted to "reconnect," whatever that means, we might have done so at least once during the previous two decades. That’s how I feel about The Standard coming back: it’s too late, its time has passed. The new site should rise or fall on the basis of its own achievement, not on those of an entirely different team a boom and a bust ago.

Marcel Proust, Alpha Geek

Tim recently sent around a recommendation for The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage's enjoyable look at a decidedly pre-Silicon Valley tech boom, although the inflated promises of that period (i.e., the telegraph will bring about world peace) remind us of some of the more outlandish dotcom-era claims.

Tim's note about Standage's book (which I recommend as well) provides a good reminder of how each new generation brings new technologies, but each generation seems to recreate older technologies as well. Streaming media, for example, reminds me of a service I enjoyed as an elementary-school student in the '70s, when I would dial a phone number (and I mean that literally; touch-tone dialing had yet to come to my part of New Jersey) and listen to a radio station on our hard-wired AT&T-owned phone for as long as I could get away with it.

Turns out I was no trailblazer, as I've learned from my holiday-week reading, William C. Carter's generous and rigorous biography of novelist Marcel Proust. In Marcel Proust: A Life, Carter writes that, in 1911, "Proust subscribed to a new service that brought opera, concerts, and plays into the home. For a fee of sixty francs a month, the subscriber received a theatrophone, a large black ear-trumpet connected through telephone to eight Paris theaters and concert halls... Although the sound quality was often poor, the instrument was a great boon to someone like Proust, who loved opera and the theater but who rarely felt well enough to attend performances. He often listened, even when the sound was so bad he could barely hear the words." Sounds a bit like RealAudio 1.0, circa 1995.

So, gentle readers, do you have any thoughts on what from 100 years ago might be the hot new technology of 2008?