The History of Computing By cover art

The History of Computing

By: Charles Edge
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  • Summary

  • Computers touch all most every aspect of our lives today. We take the way they work for granted and the unsung heroes who built the technology, protocols, philosophies, and circuit boards, patched them all together - and sometimes willed amazingness out of nothing. Not in this podcast. Welcome to the History of Computing. Let's get our nerd on!
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Episodes
  • Lotus: From Yoga to Software

    Lotus: From Yoga to Software
    Jun 27 2023
    Nelumbo nucifera, or the sacred lotus, is a plant that grows in flood plains, rivers, and deltas. Their seeds can remain dormant for years and when floods come along, blossom into a colony of plants and flowers. Some of the oldest seeds can be found in China, where they’re known to represent longevity. No surprise, given their level of nitrition and connection to the waters that irrigated crops by then. They also grow in far away lands, all the way to India and out to Australia. The flower is sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism, and further back in ancient Egypt. Padmasana is a Sanskrit term meaning lotus, or Padma, and Asana, or posture. The Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley civilization shows a diety in what’s widely considered the first documented yoga pose, from around 2,500 BCE. 2,700 years later (give or take a century), the Hindu author and mystic Patanjali wrote a work referred to as the Yoga Sutras. Here he outlined the original asanas, or sitting yoga poses. The Rig Veda, from around 1,500 BCE, is the oldest currently known Vedic text. It is also the first to use the word “yoga”. It describes songs, rituals, and mantras the Brahmans of the day used - as well as the Padma. Further Vedic texts explore how the lotus grew out of Lord Vishnu with Brahma in the center. He created the Universe out of lotus petals. Lakshmi went on to grow out of a lotus from Vishnu as well. It was only natural that humans would attempt to align their own meditation practices with the beautiful meditatios of the lotus. By the 300s, art and coins showed people in the lotus position. It was described in texts that survive from the 8th century. Over the centuries contradictions in texts were clarified in a period known as Classical Yoga, then Tantra and and Hatha Yoga were developed and codified in the Post-Classical Yoga age, and as empires grew and India became a part of the British empire, Yoga began to travel to the west in the late 1800s. By 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave lectures at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.  More practicioners meant more systems of yoga. Yogendra brought asanas to the United States in 1919, as more Indians migrated to the United States. Babaji’s kriya yoga arrived in Boston in 1920. Then, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes, the United States tightened immigration in the 1920s and people had to go to India to get more training. Theos Bernard’s Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience brought some of that knowledge home when he came back in 1947. Indra Devi opened a yoga studio in Hollywood and wrote books for housewives. She brought a whole system, or branch home. Walt and Magana Baptiste opened a studio in San Francisco. Swamis began to come to the US and more schools were opened. Richard Hittleman began to teach yoga in New York and began to teach on television in 1961. He was one of the first to seperate the religious aspect from the health benefits. By 1965, the immigration quotas were removed and a wave of teachers came to the US to teach yoga. The Beatles went to India in 1966 and 1968, and for many Transcendental Meditation took root, which has now grown to over a thousand training centers and over 40,000 teachers. Swamis opened meditation centers, institutes, started magazines, and even magazines. Yoga became so big that Rupert Holmes even poked fun of it in his song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” in 1979. Yoga had become part of the counter-culture, and the generation that followed represented a backlash of sorts. A common theme of the rise of personal computers is that the early pioneers were a part of that counter-culture. Mitch Kapor graduated high school in 1967, just in time to be one of the best examples of that. Kapor built his own calculator in as a kid before going to camp to get his first exposure to programming on a Bendix. His high school got one of the 1620 IBM minicomputers and he got the bug. He went off to Yale at 16 and learned to program in APL and then found Computer Lib by Ted Nelson and learned BASIC. Then he discovered the Apple II.  Kapor did some programming for $5 per hour as a consultant, started the first east coast Apple User Group, and did some work around town. There are generations of people who did and do this kind of consulting, although now the rates are far higher. He met a grad student through the user group named Eric Rosenfeld who was working on his dissertation and needed some help programming, so Kapor wrote a little tool that took the idea of statistical analysis from the Time Shared Reactive Online Library, or TROLL, and ported it to the microcomputer, which he called Tiny Troll.  Then he enrolled in the MBA program at MIT. He got a chance to see VisiCalc and meet Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who introduced him to the team at Personal Software. Personal Software was founded by Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings when they published Microchips for the KIM-1 computer. That led to ports for the 1977 Trinity ...
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    24 mins
  • Section 230 and the Concept of Internet Exceptionalism

    Section 230 and the Concept of Internet Exceptionalism
    Jun 5 2023
    We covered computer and internet copyright law in a previous episode. That type of law began with interpretations that tried to take the technology out of cases so they could be interpreted as though what was being protected was a printed work, or at least it did for a time. But when it came to the internet, laws, case law, and their knock-on effects, the body of jurisprudence work began to diverge.  Safe Harbor mostly refers to the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, or OCILLA for short, was a law passed in the late 1980s that  shields online portals and internet service providers from copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is one form of immunity, but more was needed. Section 230 was another law that protects those same organizations from being sued for 3rd party content uploaded on their sites. That’s the law Trump wanted overturned during his final year in office but given that the EU has Directive 2000/31/EC, Australia has the Defamation Act of 2005, Italy has the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000, and lots of other countries like England and Germany have had courts find similarly, it is now part of being an Internet company. Although the future of “big tech” cases (and the damage many claim is being done to democracy) may find it refined or limited. That’s because the concept of Internet Exceptionalism itself is being reconsidered now that the internet is here to stay. Internet Exceptionalism is a term that notes that laws that diverge from precedents for other forms of media distribution. For example, a newspaper can be sued for liable or defamation, but a website is mostly shielded from such suits because the internet is different. Pages are available instantly, changes be made instantly, and the reach is far greater than ever before. The internet has arguably become the greatest tool to spread democracy and yet potentially one of its biggest threats. Which some might have argued about newspapers, magazines, and other forms of print media in centuries past. The very idea of Internet Exceptionalism has eclipsed the original intent. Chris Cox and Ron Widen initially intended to help fledgling Internet Service Providers (ISPs) jumpstart content on the internet. The internet had been privatized in 1995 and companies like CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy were already under fire for the content on their closed networks. Cubby v CompuServe in 1991 had found that online providers weren’t considered publishers of content and couldn’t be held liable for free speech practiced on their platforms in part because they did not exercise editorial control of that content. Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy found that Prodigy did have editorial control (and in fact advertised themselves as having a better service because of it) and so could be found liable like a newspaper would. Cox and Widen were one of the few conservative and liberal pairs of lawmakers who could get along in the decisive era when Newt Gingrich came to power and tried to block everything Bill Clinton tried to do.  Yet there were aspects of the United States that were changing outside of politics. Congress spent years negotiating a telecommunications overhaul bill that came to be known as The Telecommunications Act of 1996. New technology led to new options. Some saw content they found to be indecent and so the Communications Decency Act (or Title V of the Telecommunications Act) was passed in 1996, but in Reno v ACLU found to be a violation of the first amendment, and struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997. Section 230 of that act was specifically about the preservation of free speech and so severed from the act and stood alone. It would be adjudicated time and time and eventually became an impenetrable shield that protects online providers from the need to scan every message posted to a service to see if it would get them sued. Keep in mind that society itself was changing quickly in the early 1990s. Tipper Gore wanted to slap a label on music to warn parents that it had explicit lyrics. The “Satanic Panic” as it’s called by history reused tropes such as cannibalism and child murder to give the moral majority an excuse to try to restrict that which they did not understand. Conservative and progressive politics have always been a 2 steps forward and 1 step back truce. Heavy metal would seem like nothin’ once parents heard the lyrics of gagster rap.  But Section 230 continued on. It stated that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” It only took 27 words to change the world. They said that the people that host the content can’t be sued for the content because, as courts interpreted it, it’s free speech. Think of a public forum like a hall on a college campus that might restrict one group from speaking and so suppress speech or censer a group. Now, Section 230 didn...
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    19 mins
  • Bluetooth: From Kings to Personal Area Networks

    Bluetooth: From Kings to Personal Area Networks
    May 17 2023
    Bluetooth The King Ragnar Lodbrok was a legendary Norse king, conquering parts of Denmark and Sweden. And if we’re to believe the songs, he led some of the best raids against the Franks and the the loose patchwork of nations Charlemagne put together called the Holy Roman Empire.  We use the term legendary as the stories of Ragnar were passed down orally and don’t necessarily reconcile with other written events. In other words, it’s likely that the man in the songs sung by the bards of old are likely in fact a composite of deeds from many a different hero of the norse.   Ragnar supposedly died in a pit of snakes at the hands of the Northumbrian king and his six sons formed a Great Heathen Army to avenge their father. His sons ravaged modern England int he wake of their fathers death before becoming leaders of various lands they either inherited or conquered. One of those sons, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, returned home to rule his lands and had children, including Harthacnut. He in turn had a son named Gorm.  Gorm the Old was a Danish king who lived to be nearly 60 in a time when life expectancy for most was about half that. Gorm raised a Jelling stone in honor of his wife Thyra. As did his son, in the honor of his wife. That stone is carved with runes that say: “King Haraldr ordered this monument made in memory of Gormr, his father, and in memory of Thyrvé, his mother; that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.” That stone was erected by a Danish king named Herald Gormsson. He converted to Christianity as part of a treaty with the Holy Roman Emperor of the day. He united the tribes of Denmark into a kingdom. One that would go on to expand the reach and reign of the line. Just as Bluetooth would unite devices. Even the logo is a combination of runes that make up his initials HB. Once united, their descendants would go on to rule Denmark, Norway, and England. For a time. Just as Bluetooth would go on to be an important wireless protocol. For a time.  Personal Area Networks Many early devices shipped with infrared so people could use a mouse or keyboard. But those never seemed to work so great. And computers with a mouse and keyboard and drawing pad and camera and Zip drive and everything else meant that not only did devices have to be connected to sync but they also had to pull a lot of power and create an even bigger mess on our desks.  What the world needed instead was an inexpensive chip that could communicate wirelessly and not pull a massive amount of power since some would be in constant communication. And if we needed a power cord then might as well just use USB or those RS-232 interfaces (serial ports) that were initially developed in 1960 - that were slow and cumbersome. And we could call this a Personal Area Network, or PAN.  The Palm Pilot was popular, but docking and pluging in that serial port was not exactly optimal. Yet every ATX motherboard had a port or two. So a Bluetooth Special Interest Group was formed to conceive and manage the standard in 1988 and while initially had half a dozen companies now has over 30,000. The initial development started in the late 1990s with Ericcson. It would use short-range UHF radio waves in the 2.402 GHz and 2.48 GHz bands to exchange data with computers and cell phones, which were evolving into mobile devices at the time. The technology was initially showcased at COMDEX in 1999. Within a couple of years there were phones that could sync, kits for cars, headsets, and chips that could be put into devices - or cards or USB adapters, to get a device to sync 721 Kbps. We could add 2 to 8 Bluetooth secondary devices that paired to our primary. They then frequency hopped using their Bluetooth device address provided by the primary, which sends a radio signal to secondaries with a range of addresses to use. The secondaries then respond with the frequency and clock state. And unlike a lot of other wireless technologies, it just kinda’ worked. And life seemed good. Bluetooth went to the IEEE, which had assigned networking the 802 standard with Ethernet being 802.3 and Wi-Fi being 802.11. So Personal Area Networks became 802.15, with Bluetooth 1.1 becoming 802.15.1. And the first phone shipped in 2001, the Sony Ericsson T39.  Bluetooth 2 came in 2005 and gave us 2.1 Mbps speeds and increased the range from 10 to 30 meters. By then, over 5 million devices were shipping every week. More devices mean we have a larger attack surface space. And security researchers were certainly knocking at the door. Bluetooth 2.1 added secure simple pairing. Then Bluetooth 3 in 2009 bringing those speeds up to 24 Mbps and once connected allowing Wi-Fi to pick up connections once established. But we were trading speed for energy and this wasn’t really the direction Bluetooth needed to go. Even if a billion devices had shipped by the end of 2006. Bluetooth 4 The mobility era was upon us and it was increasingly important, ...
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    13 mins
World
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