I’ve always enjoyed first person accounts of the beginning of the computer age. What was it like to be there? How did people view new technologies before they became part of our everyday lives? I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite magazine articles that capture that feeling. My previous blog post on The First Computer Interface captures that sentiment and here are 5 more. Most of the articles are on Kevin Kelly’s list of Best Magazine Articles Ever (with the exception of  Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000).  Here are five articles about the beginning of…

• Silicon Valley (The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce by Tom Wolfe, Esquire Magazine, December 1983) Robert Noyce founded two of the most important startups in Silicon Valley — Intel and its predecessor Fairchild Semiconductor. Tom Wolfe (yes, that Tom Wolfe) wrote about Noyce exporting the Midwestern Congregationalist ethic to create the modern culture of Silicon Valley. Noyce believed in a strict meritocracy. Wolfe writes “Noyce’s idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him…. When they first moved into the building, Noyce worked at an old, scratched, secondhand metal desk. As the company expanded, Noyce kept the same desk, and new stenographers, just hired, were given desks that were not only newer but bigger and better than his.” At the same time that Noyce was founding Silicon Valley, another set of small town Midwesterners were sending men into space. After the success of the Apollo 11 mission, NASA’s administrator, Tom Paine, happened to remark in conversation: “This was the triumph of the squares.” This may have been the first reference to geeks conquering the earth (and space).
• Hacking (Secrets of the Little Blue Box by Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire, 10/1971) The original hackers were called “phone phreaks.” These were kids who figured out a weakness in the AT&T telephone system that they could exploit. By putting a 2600 hertz tone to their mouthpiece, they could trick the phone company into giving them free calls. The most famous of the phone phreaks was John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) who discovered that a whistle given away in the children’s cereal gave off the magic tone. He also taught Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak how to phone phreak. The phone hackers exemplified the original hacker ethic — to explore a giant system to see how  it worked. Of course, like modern hackers, some got a little carried away by the exploration. By the end of the article Rosenbaum writes a little bit about many of the phone phreaks started getting into computer hacking — which was quite a feat in 1971. There was a great documentary on the history of hacking from Captain Crunch to Steve Wozniak to Kevin Mitnick that does a great “where are they now” of hacking.
• Video Games (Spacewar by Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone, 11/7/1972) Stewart Brand wrote a fantastic piece on Spacewar — the world’s first video game. Spacewar was written before anyone had  thought about putting graphics on a computer. Its hardware didn’t even have a multiply or divide function. Brand talks about the computer geeks at Stanford and MIT who were writing the first computer programs meant to be used by other people (as opposed to writing programs to solve a specific numeric problem.) One of the most entertaining program names was a word processing system called “Expensive Typewriter.” At the time, the intranet only had 20 computers but people were starting to understand that if it took hold, this would be the transformation of the news and recording industries. As a side note, there is computer code at the end of the article — probably the only time code was ever published in Rolling Stone magazine.
• Microsoft (Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000, Bro Uttal, Fortune, 7/21/1984) You don’t hear much about Bill Gates these days — a man who seems focused on his privacy. The Guardian published an interview with Gates this summer where the most interesting tidbit was that his children liked to tease him by singing the song Billionaire by Bruno Mars. But Microsoft was a very different company in 1984, when a 30 year old Bill Gates invited Fortune Magazine to spend five months with him while they went through their IPO. This is one of the few journalistic tales of an IPO ever written. The editor’s note reads “I doubt that a story like this has been published before or is likely to be done again.” It’s amazing to see an early Microsoft where Bill Gates used part of the $1.6 million cash he made on the offering to pay off a $150,000 mortgage. He also decided to keep the stock’s initial IPO value below $500MM which he felt was uncomfortably high. But the most interesting insight that Uttal has into the young Gates is that he was “something of a ladies’ man and a fiendishly fast driver who has racked up speeding tickets even in the sluggish Mercedes diesel he bought to restrain himself.” 
• Blogging: (You’ve Got Blog, Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 11/13/2000) When I first read this article in 2000, I was introduced me to many things “Blog” including the word “Blog” and “Blogger” as well as some of the original bloggers: Evhead, Megnut and Kottke.org. Kottke.org is still one of my favorite blogs after a decade. Like many start ups, Blogger was a side project that was written over a weekend. Pyra (their parent company) was supposed to be making project management software. It’s interesting to see how early bloggers were the mavericks of modern social networking (though some ideas like putting themselves on webcams 24/7 have thankfully gone away). Blogs made it easier for “regular” people to post — and Social Networking makes it even easier. Facebook in many ways is just the extension of that — allowing everyone to have their own webpage. 

As an added bonus, it’s worth reading the book Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson. Po gives a wonderful history on what it was like to be part of the Silicon Valley tech boom of the late 90’s. Po’s book was so compelling that it pulled many newcomers to the Valley. He felt slightly bad about this after the bust and started apologizing.  

Errol Morris, the famous documentary director of The Thin Blue Line and other films wrote a great piece in the New York Times called Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5). As it turns out, Morris’s brother, Noel Morris, worked at MIT on CTSS, which was the predecessor of Multics, which was the predecessor of Unix, which was the predecessor of all the computers that run the internet as well as the Mac OS. Noel was also the person who (along with Tom Van Vleck) wrote the first email program on CTSS.

Morris writes an homage to his brother that looks at some of the very early history of the human computer interface design. In fact, CTSS was the first human computer interface to really exist. These were typewriters jury rigged to a computer to allow interactive input. Before that, programmers had to write programs on punch cards which wasn’t much of an interface at all. Fernando Corbato, one of the founders of time sharing computing systems describes frustrating computers were at the time:

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Back in the early ‘60s, computers were getting bigger. And were expensive. So people resorted to a scheme called batch processing. It was like taking your clothes to the laundromat. You’d take your job in, and leave it in the input bins. The staff people would prerecord it onto these magnetic tapes. The magnetic tapes would be run by the computer. And then, the output would be printed. This cycle would take at best, several hours, or at worst, 24 hours. And it was maddening, because when you’re working on a complicated program, you can make a trivial slip-up — you left out a comma or something — and the program would crash. It was maddening. People are not perfect. You would try very hard to be careful, but you didn’t always make it. You’d design a program. You’d program it. And then you’d have to debug it and get it to work right. A process that could take, literally, a week, weeks, months — 

But visionaries like J. C. R. Licklider realized that computers could be more than a processing device but an extension of a person’s abilities. His paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis” with one of the first descriptions of the interdependence that humans and computers would eventually have:

The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorum. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it get its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership…

Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses… The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

In this post, I’d like to point out how the creation of the first time sharing machines and email are to many of the  product management challenges that people still have today.

1. Showing is more powerful than telling:

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: “So that was mostly to convince the skeptics that it was not an impossible task, and also, to get people to get a feel for interactive computing. It was amazing to me, and it is still amazing, that people could not imagine what the psychological difference would be to have an interactive terminal. You can talk about it on a blackboard until you are blue in the face, and people would say, ‘Oh, yes, but why do you need that?’ You know, we used to try to think of all these analogies, like describing it in terms of the difference between mailing a letter to your mother and getting [her] on the telephone. To this day I can still remember people only realizing when they saw a real demo, say, ‘Hey, it talks back. Wow! You just type that and you got an answer.’”

The article does a very good job of showing vs. telling by creating an email simulator that provides an interactive demonstration of how the original email program worked on the CTSS. It’s much more arcane than you would imagine — even to the point of using typewriters. Try hitting the backspace button when you’re typing a message and  see what happens.

2. Give an early version to your users because you never know how they might use it 

The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purpose and all the different things that people do.
— William Gibson, interviewed in The Paris Review, Art of Fiction #211

The original time sharing machines were created to make programming and debugging much easier. But to the engineers surprise, people wanted to share data with each other on the machine. In many ways this was the first computer mediated social network. 

TOM VAN VLECK: The idea of time-sharing was to make one big computer look like a lot of different little computers that were completely unconnected to each other. But it turned out that what people really liked about time-sharing was the ability to share data. And so one person would type in a program and then he’d want to give that disk file to someone else. And this was a surprise to the initial CTSS developers who didn’t realize that was going to happen. It’s one of the things that led us to build a new operating system after CTSS — Multics — which was able to do that better. When we wanted to send mail the idea was that you would type a message into a program running on your account and then mail would switch to your addressee’s account and deposit the message there. Only a privileged command that was very carefully written to not do anything bad could do that. And so we had to become trusted enough to be able to write that thing.

3. Incumbents often miss the boat in a big wayIBM Missed the boat on the computing technology but they eventually recovered.

MARVIN MINSKY: Marvin Minsky, one of the early members of Project MAC and director of its AI group, provides an account of an early meeting about time-sharing at IBM. IBM was committed to batch processing. It was part of their business model. “In fact, we went to visit IBM about using a computer with multiple terminals. And the research director at IBM thought that was a really bad idea. We explained the idea, which is that each time somebody presses a key on a terminal it would interrupt the program that the computer was running and jump over to switch over to the program that was not running for this particular person. And if you had 10 people typing on these terminals at five or 10 characters a second that would mean the poor computer was being interrupted 100 times per second to switch programs. And this research director said, ‘Well why would you want to do that?’ We would say, ‘Well it takes six months to develop a program because you run a batch and then it doesn’t work. And you get the results back and you see it stopped at instruction 94. And you figure out why. And then you punch a new deck of cards and put it in and the next day you try again. Whereas with time-sharing you could correct it — you could change this instruction right now and try it again. And so in one day you could do 50 of these instead of 100 days.’ And he said, ‘Well that’s terrible. Why don’t people just think more carefully and write the program so they’re not full of bugs?’”

A far bigger loser was the Post Office

TOM VAN VLECK: Well, I remember vaguely discussing it with people and worrying about what the U.S. Post Office would think of [e-mail] and whether they would tell us not to do it, or tell us that they had to be involved in it. 

ERROL MORRIS: Well, secretly, you were trying to put the post office out of business. 

TOM VAN VLECK: We didn’t realize that at the time, but we were afraid that they would want us to destroy a first class stamp every time we sent a mail message. 

ERROL MORRIS: Really! There would be Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck stamps.
United States Postal Service 

TOM VAN VLECK: We didn’t want to ask them because we were afraid they would say, “No, of course not.” Or, “We have a monopoly on that.” Which they did. In those days if you sent a box by UPS and you put a letter in the box, you were supposed to destroy a first class stamp. 

ERROL MORRIS: Is that true? 

TOM VAN VLECK: Oh, yes. The U.S. post office had a monopoly on sending mail. So, we didn’t ask until finally some years later, one of the professors at MIT ran into somebody from the Post Office advanced development organization, or whatever it was, at a conference and said, “Hey, we have this thing. Are you concerned with that, are you interested in it?” And he said, “Oh no, forget it, we’re not interested in that.” And we said, “Great, thanks. That’s what we were hoping to hear.” We didn’t ask again.