More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Von Neumann, for his part, was a figure of the sort that many in the post-Vietnam generation find all but incomprehensible: a genuinely kind, outgoing, and supremely rational man who was also a grimly determined Cold Warrior.
Lick likewise echoed Wiener as he worried about technology’s potential for harm: “If all the Industrial Revolution accomplished was to turn people into drones in a factory,” he was sometimes heard to say, “then what was the point?”
Even at age twenty-six, he was cool, formal, and remote, always the chief, never one of the boys.
Lick expected his students to work very, very hard; he had nothing but contempt for laziness and no time to waste on sloppy work or sloppy thinking.
Programming was for everyone, he insisted, not just the science and engineering majors. It was a fundamental intellectual skill, like mathematics or English composition. The point of his course was not merely to teach students how to write in Fortran or Algol, Perlis maintained, but also to teach them how to think about processes of all kinds—how to describe them, how to analyze them, and how to build up complex processes out of simpler ones.
Even such a simple externalized model as a flow diagram or an outline—because it can be seen by all the communicators—serves as a focus for discussion. It changes the nature of communication: When communicators have no such common framework, they merely make speeches at each other; but when they have a manipulable model before them, they utter a few words, point, sketch, nod, or object.”
true to his antimicromanagement principles, the ARPA director met with his newest recruit maybe once a month or so to see how things were going, and then otherwise left him in a state of what Lick laughingly (and gratefully) called benign neglect.
The ARPA director took pride in the notion that someone with a good idea could get a million dollars within a day. Taylor had just gotten his million in twenty minutes.
People would cheer you on even if they didn’t agree with you, just because they loved the fact that you were good. It was like in tennis, when somebody beats you with a great shot: you congratulate them. That was the spirit that made the ARPA community work.
“IMP guys,” as they took to calling themselves, were anything but formal. “We all sat in offices that were right next to each other,” remembers Dave Walden, “and we worked together constantly. I don’t remember such a thing as a weekly progress meeting. We probably were more in tune with progress than that; we probably did it hourly.”
To Lick, of course, the obvious solution to the software crisis was to apply more and better interactive computing, à la Dynamic Modeling. But to programmers who worked in the commercial sector—which was to say, most programmers—the answer was very different. In their world, software was a product to be gotten out the door, on time and within budget. So their instinctive reaction was to adopt an industrial approach, with an ever-increasing emphasis on planning, discipline, documentation, coordination, and control.
“On the frontier,” he had written in 1965, “man must often chart his course by stars he has never seen. Rarely does one recognize or discover a complex problem, formulate it, and lay out a procedure that will solve it—all in one great flash of insight.”7 When the systems are truly complex, in short, programming has to be a process of exploration and discovery. That had been the whole point of interactive languages such as Lisp, as well as interactive-design tools such as Sketchpad: they made it easy to explore new solutions by making it easy to formulate and then reformulate ideas on the fly.
In company after company, you saw the numbers guys trying to justify the cost of research by demanding results in the form of new products this quarter, next quarter, and every quarter after that. And that was fine, says Goldman, if all you cared about was calculating cost/benefit ratios and building a slightly better widget. But if the medical community had tried to conquer polio that way, we wouldn’t have gotten a vaccine that stopped the epidemic in its tracks, because that vaccine was discovered only after years of failure, frustration, and blind alleys, none of which could have been
...more
Thanks to some overly meddlesome management by the company’s parent firm, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation of New York, one group of employees after another started striking out on their own, eventually creating some fifty spin-off companies.
“Bob did have an enormous desire for control,” says Gary Starkweather. “Yet he was also one of the best managers I ever knew, because unlike some half-time researcher with a yen for power, he realized that his job was management. He took it seriously. And he knew how to handle people.”
His idea was that he was there essentially to manage the personalities, to keep people from killing each other.”
The Dynabook, he called it. “I remembered Aldus Manutius who forty years after the printing press put the book into its modern dimensions by making it fit into saddlebags,” he wrote. By the same logic, the Dynabook would have to be no larger than a notebook. “Now it was easy to know what to do next. I built a cardboard model of it to see what it would look and feel like, and poured in lead pellets to see how light it would have to be (less than two pounds). I put a keyboard on it as well as a stylus
Foreshadowing of the iPhone. I think this book was released before the iPhone.
Instead of a closed system, Kahn realized—that is, a single Arpanet dependent on a single operator—you would now have an open system, a network of networks that could, in principle, accommodate anyone.
Early example of open-closed principle.
good case can be made that nothing fundamental about computing really changed between PARC’s 1970s golden age and the end of the 1990s, when the explosive growth of the Internet and mobile computing finally began a new paradigm shift.
the new recruits did give the Xerox management a much-needed overhaul, and they did keep the company from choking on its own growth. But that actually became a big part of the problem: success reinforced their own worst instincts. Talk about subservience to Plan—these were numbers guys, who thought that letting people pursue wild and crazy ideas was tantamount to letting them play in a sandbox; who thought that nothing was real until they could reduce it to entries on a spreadsheet;
“In the early days,” notes Vint Cerf, “ARPA could build a community because ARPA could afford to support everybody. But when there is scarcity, you don’t have community; all you have is survival.”
his commitment to “group cohesion” and “a common goal” smelled a little too much like intellectual fascism.
“The future,” he wrote, “is not to be won by making a lot of minor technological advances and moving them immediately into the Services.”
He did not underestimate the private sector’s ability to innovate, Lick insisted; rather, he questioned its ability to cooperate, especially for the sake of some ill-defined “electronic commons” whose payoff was nebulous, iffy, and still ten to twenty years away.
“What none of us was thinking was that there would be millions of people out there who would be perfectly happy with the McDonald’s hamburger approach: they didn’t know it wasn’t real food.”
“Why hasn’t this company brought this to market?” Jobs famously shouted, waving his arms around while his engineers did their best to ignore him and focus on how the system worked. “What’s going on here? I don’t get it!”
“I tell people I didn’t get rich inventing Ethernet,” he says with a laugh. “I got rich selling it!”
it’s a long-term, continuing expense. And government doesn’t do that well. Government runs by fad and fashion. Sooner or later funding for NSFnet was going to dry up,
Mesh, or Information Mesh, sounded too much like “mess.”
