Long before online forums and communities like Reddit and Discord, and even before the World Wide Web, bulletin board systems (BBSs) reigned supreme. In the 1980s and ’90s, millions of people participated in more than 100,000 BBSs.

Kevin Driscoll, author of the award-winning book The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, and technology and society expert danah boyd joined CHM’s Marc Weber on stage at CHM Live to discuss the innovative world of BBSs and how they shaped today’s digital world. Here are some highlights.

“Modemers” Unite

Speaking to an insider audience, where 60% of people had once dialed in to a BBS, Driscoll explained what it took to access one in the late 1980s—if you even knew about them. First, you had to buy a modem so you could connect your PC to a telephone network. These early “modemers,” as they called themselves, discovered a whole new world of people interacting virtually that they quickly found to be indispensable. Today, we take it for granted that we’re online all the time, but back then it was an intentional choice.

On a bulletin board you were likely to meet people who lived nearby because of the flat-rate local calling of phones at the time. Bulletin boards might also be an extension of a real-world club or interest group that had offline meetups at a bowling alley or bar.

The Gifting Economy

danah boyd’s first experience online was memorable for the $700 phone bill it generated because she didn’t realize some of the numbers she was dialing up weren’t local. Sharing an account with her brother ensured that neither one would tattle to their parents about their experiences in this new space.

Usenet was her coming of age, and she found that many other early users self-identified like her as “geeks, freaks, and queers.” Sharing without consequences and receiving advice and help from caring strangers was life-changing for many online users.

By the late ‘90s, people were online building communities and social support networks as well as blogging. Some were using BBSs to share files, particularly images, when this was technically hard to do, and then got drawn into messaging forums. The content of early files expanded to other forms of grassroots media-making, like fanzines, and gave birth to music tracking and the demo scene.

Netiquette

The ability to create and participate in media was novel at this time, when most people experienced mass media primarily as passive consumers of television. Online users were exploring new territory. For example, Driscoll described how people who offered things they had created on bulletin boards had to relinquish control of distribution because other users could share it wherever they wanted.

As with any new technology, users also had to work out the systems and norms in addition to the technology, says boyd. There were trolls and jerks then as there are now. People crafted rules for behavior—called “netiquette”—in text files that were shared across boards. But, if rules or bans didn’t work, sometimes the bulletin board system operator was forced to literally pull the plug to shut down the conversation.

Participation vs. Consumption

BBSs and other early online communities gave rise to new social network sites that used the concepts of online profiles and recommendations, like Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, and online dating sites.

The panelists debated if early online networks were more participatory and creative and less about consumption than social media today.

While writing may be a more difficult way to engage with online communities in today’s video-driven world, there’s no doubt that technology both drives how users interact and is in turn driven by those who use it.

So, what’s the lesson for today? Many monetized systems push for more and more users, but the history of BBSs and other early online networks shows clearly that quality is more important than quantity in building authentic online communities. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to dial back in time?

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We’re here to put a dent in the universe.

— Steve Jobs

The Apple Mac Is 40

“Are you a Mac person?” CHM President and CEO (and former Mac marketer) Dan’l Lewin asked an enthusiastic CHM Live crowd on the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh’s launch—January 24, 2024. Many hands waved in the sold-out audience, which included Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

Moderated by tech journalist and author David Pogue, the evening included three panels of original Mac team members and Apple insiders—rock stars of the computing industry. Here are some highlights.

Creating a “Computer for the Rest of Us”

From left to right: David Pogue, Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps (speaking), Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare

The first panel featured Mac Development Team members Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Andy Hertzfeld, and Bruce Horn, and creator of the Mac icons and fonts Susan Kare. They shared stories of trials and errors, long days, and work nights fueled by chocolate covered espresso beans.

To test the new machine, the team filmed Apple employee spouses and asked them to mutter what they were thinking as they explored with the mouse. Lots of people became confused by the choice to “Do It” or “Cancel,” and the team realized they thought the button said “Dolt.” They immediately changed it to read “Ok” instead.

Bill remembered how Steve Jobs inspired him to join the team, asking if he’d rather be surfing the front of the wave or dog paddling behind it. The team talked about how Steve encouraged them to believe they were making art.

The team went on to discuss the original vision of the Mac as an inexpensive, easy-to-use machine for the masses, where rounded corner rectangles came from, why shortcuts look the way they do, and how double-clicking was a mistake. They were unanimous in feeling that being a part of the Mac team was the highlight of their careers.

Selling the Mac

From left: David Pogue, Andy Cunningham, Dan’l Lewin, Mike Murray (speaking)

The second panel featured Andy Cunningham, Dan’l Lewin, and Mike Murray, marketing team members responsible for getting the Mac into the hands of new users. The session opened with a video of the iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad directed by Ridley Scott.

The inside story of the famous ad, according to Mike, was that the board hated it and didn’t want it to run. But, when the advertising firm couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) sell the spot to another advertiser it ran anyway. A week later, the entire board gave the executive team a standing ovation.

Despite the ad, selling the Mac wasn’t easy, and the team knew they were in trouble even before the launch.

Looking for a market outside of business sent Dan’l on to university campuses, where contending with outdated distribution channels and consumer protection regulations that prohibited direct shipping forced him to find unique ways to bring the computers to students. He came up with a novel strategy to offer Macs through university purchasing departments.

Still, the Mac wasn’t selling fast enough. Andy remembered their “diagonal marketing” strategy, which basically meant trying to find customers anywhere. The marketing team conducted factory visits and demos for businesspeople. They visited developers to encourage them to write software for the Mac. They considered dedicated Apple Stores. They even offered a “test drive a Mac” campaign where people could pick one up for a weekend. Feeling the pressure not to let everyone’s hard work go to waste, the team was determined not to let the Mac fail. And they didn’t.

Denting the Universe

From left: David Pogue, Guy Kawasaki, Chris Espinosa, Steven Levy

The final panel focused on the Mac’s impact and featured the longest-serving Apple employee Chris Espinosa (47 years!), former Apple Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and tech journalist Steven Levy, along with David Pogue.

Chris noted that without the Mac, Apple would not have survived as a company and there would have been no iPhone. Embedded with the team for a few days to write a piece for Rolling Stone, Steven used a Mac for the first time. He said he knew immediately that a revolution had happened.

The Mac gave people the technology to unleash their creativity. But first they had to know it existed and what it could do for them.

Chris has been at Apple since he started working with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when they were building the first Apple computer in the Jobs’ family garage. He says that the original Apple marketing principles developed in 1978 by investor and mentor Mike Markkula endure and are still taught at the company today.

And, despite becoming the most highly capitalized business in the world, the company has retained a “demo ethos,” which means, in Chris’ words, “get a great product first.” That may just be the secret behind Apple’s success.

The event ended with a special treat that speaks—or rather, sings—for itself.

Main image: speakers and audience members who have worked at Apple.

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“My definition of a geek is an obsessive maverick.”

— Andrew McAfee

The most important innovation in tech isn’t what companies make but how they make them, according to New York Times bestselling author Andrew McAfee. The codirector of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy shared insights from his new book, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results, in a discussion with Carl Bass, former president and CEO of Autodesk, at CHM Live.

McAfee was inspired to write the book to explain what’s been happening on the West Coast over the past 20 years. The region has grown to include nearly 60% of the 100 most valuable companies in the US, including Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), and NVIDIA. They are younger and more tech-oriented than the industrial-era companies located in the rest  of the country that used to dominate.

The Geek Way

McAfee believes that so-called geeks in Silicon Valley and Seattle have developed a better way to run a company in today’s fast-paced world. The “geek way” has four defining norms, or behaviors that peers expect: science, ownership, speed, and openness.

No company embodies all four of the norms all the time or perfectly, of course, and, McAfee warns, “Bureaucracy is probably the greatest creeping danger for any company, geek or not.” He believes that no successful company does a lot of upfront planning and there is more “ambient egalitarianism” in Silicon Valley and the West than in most of the rest of the economy. The geek way is the exact opposite of what management gurus like General Electric CEO Jack Welch touted as the route to success decades ago.

Industrial-era companies succeeded by taking advantage of huge economies of scale, and to build railroads and provide electricity, companies needed hierarchy and structure. Today, with the constant change generated by technology, problems can’t be solved that way. Geek companies reduce process and structure to the bare minimum.

Cultural Evolution

McAfee explains why the geek way works through the concept of “cultural evolution.” Humans are the only species on earth that comes together in large groups of unrelated people and cooperates intensely, and we learn fast. Geek norms capitalize on what humans are good at and mitigate what we’re bad at.

The geek way, for example, harnesses the human tendency of overconfidence. We are bad at evaluating our own ideas, but we’re good at evaluating other people’s ideas. Geeks are very good at using science to evaluate ideas. Geeks also channel the innate human desire for high status by aligning it with the goals of the company and removing incentives that don’t help or lead to bureaucracy.

So, can an old company learn these new tricks? McAfee says “yes.”

McAfee quotes venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, who says that the way software is created today is the way that everything will be created in the future. But, traditional education is still focused on preparing employees for the industrial era. Kindergarten kids do better at “the Marshmallow test,” which requires thinking like a geek, than MBAs. Rather than planning a strategy and jockeying about who will be the leader, the kids just try over and over until it works.

There’s a lesson there. If companies give their employees ownership and let them loose to experiment, and if they’re vigilant in fighting bureaucracy, they can foster a geek culture where everyone thrives.

Main image: Carl Bass (left) talks with author Andrew McAfee (right) at CHM Live.

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None of us is free until we are all free.

— Freada Kapor Klein

Can investing in startups that close opportunity gaps for communities of color and low-income groups also be good business? Or are the two goals mutually exclusive?

Venture capitalists and social activists Freada Kapor Klein and Mitchell Kapor explored these questions on stage at CHM, along with Liz Carey, executive VP of finance and operations at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The discussion was moderated by Troy Cosey, head of platform for Kapor Center Investments.

The Equity Gap

When did they realize that the equity gap was a problem? For Freada, who believes we’re all interconnected, equity has always been a concern. Mitch admitted that as an angel investor he initially worried about missing hot deals when Freada convinced him to invest in line with his values, but he agreed to try it.

Liz said, “There are things that you can’t unsee.” Her personal experience as a queer woman in finance meant she was often in meetings where there was no one else like her. It made her wonder who else was being left out of decision making and the opportunities being lost. In fact, according to Troy, a recent McKinsey study showed that companies in the top quartile of racial or ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial outcomes better than their peers.

The Kapors decided to run an experiment to see what would happen if they only invested in companies they thought would do well economically and that also closed gaps for low-income communities or communities of color.

Debunking Conventional “Wisdom”

Mitch says the experiment has demonstrated how conventional wisdom is misguided. That so-called wisdom separates “regular investments” from “impact sideshows.” But, he notes, all companies have an impact on the economy, the environment, and quality of life and many increase the gap between the haves and have-nots. He believes you’re part of the problem if you’re not asking questions like: “What’s the core purpose of the business? If it succeeds, who is going to be better off and who is not?” The engine of value creation for the business must simultaneously create both economic value and social impact so they can’t be separated. The more business the company does, the more positive impact it has.

Liz believes in the “Hippocratic oath” of investing: Do no harm, and when you can add value. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a grantmaking organization with a mission to improve life in Silicon Valley. If they deploy capital to close equity gaps, that makes their work easier.

It’s important to think about the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem, not just founders and funders, but also the limited partners—the funders of the funders, says Troy. Mitch has strong feelings about that.

Liz noted that there are gatekeepers and systems of due diligence for institutional investors that prevent them from undertaking equity investing, which cuts off opportunity. Freada is hopeful that a new bill requiring endowment transparency will help people like university alums learn who manages the money they donate to their alma mater and where it’s being invested.

Accountable Solutions

Assumptions must be challenged in order to enable women and people of color to get their startups funded.

Mitch says one solution is to counteract the “clubby” networks in Silicon Valley by doing away with the requirement for a “warm intro”—meaning that a founder must get introduced to an investor by someone else in the investor’s circle. At Kapor Capital, anyone can apply for funding through a simple form that asks questions about how a business will close equity gaps. They receive several thousand applicants a year and have funded companies who applied through this channel.

Bias appears in other ways too. If someone has a mountain of debt, working for a startup for little or no pay is not an option. Kapor Capital helps employees pay down education loans. Freada is skeptical of pedigrees because they are proxies for privilege. Instead, she is interested in a founder’s “distance traveled.” She wants to know where someone started in life and where have they landed solely due to their own efforts. To help close equity gaps, Liz helps founders understand why they didn’t get funded.

To ensure that they’re accountable for closing equity gaps themselves and helping to move the field, Liz and her team updated their investment policy document. Now 1/3 of the firm is managed by a diverse manager.

Kapor Capital uses a “Founder’s Commitment.” Founders sign a pledge to build diverse teams and inclusive cultures or they don’t get a check. They must ask themselves who their customers are and recruit a team that reflects them. Because they believe that who writes the check affects who gets the check, the firm is also now run by Mitch and Freada’s two younger partners, and their latest fund is currently one of the largest Black-led VC funds. To recruit diverse partners, they recommend that VCs post open positions rather than recruiting from their networks.

Change takes a long time, says Mitch, but hope is a discipline. Look for ways you can make a difference and, in Liz’s words, “keep pushing forward.”

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Techno-Optimism

Expanding on key issues from his new book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, cowritten with AI chatbot GPT-4, Hoffman noted that while AI is often seen as a threat, it can also amplify whatever we create to elevate humanity. Imagine a medical assistant on every smartphone or a tutor for every age on every subject. It may be an existential risk, but AI may also be the only thing that can help solve pandemics or climate change.

Impromptu is Reid Hoffman’s latest book, cowritten with GPT-4.

Hoffman describes himself as a techno-optimist rather than a techno-utopian. He also believes the term “homo techne” should replace “homo sapiens” to reflect how humans have evolved through their technology: fire, the wheel, the printing press, electricity, and now AI. We must go beyond the fear of new technology so that we can shape it, because it in turn shapes us.

Working with chatbot GPT-4 to write a book was “amazing and delightful,” says Hoffman. Focusing on current discourse around AI, he explored how it could help us to become more human.

Hoffman says the book can provide ideas about how to use prompting to get results from GPT-4. He recommends trying it out for something that matters to you. You just might be surprised.

IQ, EQ, and AI

Technologists tend to worry about super-intelligent robots, Hoffman notes, rather than the more real threat of AI used by terrorists or criminals. We must put guardrails around AI to prevent that kind of misuse of its intelligence.

Anyone who has talked with a chatbot knows it can deliver on providing information. Sympathy or helpful advice? Not so much. Inflection AI, cofounded by Hoffman, has created PI, which stands for “Personal AI,” is designed to be a new class of AI—one with emotional intelligence that he hopes can help us solve problems along the way to becoming more of who aspire to be as human beings. AI’s access to information to solve problems has great potential.

What about…?

The audience was most concerned about AI in journalism and information, and most excited about its possibilities for work, the economy, and education. Hoffman shares concerns about journalism and worries that AI can help hackers like the Russians use open-source models to spread dissent and discord during the 2024 election. He believes that AI itself can help to deal with the disruption it will cause for workers. And, AI can help make education and tutoring more widely available, as well as improve other areas of social justice.

AI will change many jobs and certainly displace some people. For example, trucks cause 40,000 deaths per year in the US, and AI can get that number down to 1,000 with autonomous drivers. In other jobs, the hope is that AI can take on more of the “boring” rote work while humans focus on the more interesting and creative elements. Teachers would be freed to spend more time with individual students, for instance. And we’ll need AI to fill gaps when the Boomers retire.

So what will we do if AI relieves us of so much work? Hoffman isn’t worried about the “overabundance utopia.” Looking 10 years into the future, he believes we’ll all have a personal intelligence assistant to help us navigate many aspects of our lives. We will use AI devices for drug discovery and medicine at a speed and quality we’ve never seen before. And, perhaps AI will have helped us make a dent in climate change. Deep Mind saved Google 15% when it analyzed suggested reconfiguring electricity flows for all the company’s data centers. If we apply that kind of analysis to all buildings, city grids, and power utilization, AI might just save humanity.

Want to learn more? Download Impromptu for free.

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Here are some highlights from the three-part event.

The Survey Says . . .

CHM’s Vice President of Innovation Marguerite Gong shared the results of a survey of a representative sample of 1,600 adults nationwide. A series of questions resulted in eight primary insights.

The survey results focused the event discussions in three primary areas: a broad view about technology, news, and a free press in a digital world; national news, local news, and the ways they inform each other; and, how innovators are creating, delivering, and sharing news in novel ways with the help of technology.

A Free Press in a Digital World

Richard Gingras, vice president of news at Google, took the audience back to 1791, when the First Amendment was established. At that time, people shared ideas through the printing press, and it took weeks or even months for debates to reach a national stage. Technological advances like the telegraph, radio, and television allowed voices to carry faster and farther, but publishing information was the privilege of the few.

That changed in the 1990s, when the internet revolutionized communication and enabled anyone to share their voice in the public square. It also changed how people are informed, how they form opinions, and how they perceive the world and each other.

Along with technological advances like generative AI that can potentially serve the information needs of local communities as well as spread misinformation, Gingras notes that journalism must adapt to changing media forms and the different ways that people communicate and understand society, including through social media. The political sphere has adapted the internet’s capabilities to speak to voters and build alliances more quickly and effectively than journalism, resulting in the rise of authoritarians and the demise of democracies.

We’re at a seminal point in the role of our digital societies and the role of the press in them, says Gingras. We should admit that what we’re actually concerned about is not the dangers of machines, but of ourselves.

National and Local News

Chris Shipley, author and curator of Newsgist, moderated a panel that featured Cheryl Phillips, the founder of Big Local News at Stanford University and David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. They discussed how to build trust with local communities and fill information gaps.

For Walmsley, community engagement in a large country like Canada, with a population dispersed over six time zones, poses challenges.

Walmsley uses social media’s free platforms, including TikTok and Instagram, to improve accessibility to the newspaper’s trusted brand. Social media also allows the paper to offer news and information in a way that is more attractive or comfortable to people like young women.

Cheryl Phillips’ Big Local News collects and aggregates local data like school enrollment and police stops to create large datasets. The local data provides a good sense of what’s happening that needs to be addressed by a local government, and the larger dataset can be used to identify patterns that call for policy changes at the federal level.

So, asked moderator Chris Shipley, how do newspapers and journalists regain people’s trust today? Walmsley believes it’s important to share and explain your methodology—talk about how you chose the stories you did, for example, and why you declined others. Journalists must explain the effort that goes into the news. Phillips says its crucial to ask people exactly what information they want to see and give it to them—sometimes it might just be unvarnished facts on which they can take action rather than beautiful, comprehensive graphics of all the data that’s been collected.

Hyper-local News

Dawn Garcia, director of the John S. Knight (JSK) Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, moderated a panel featuring alumni of the program who spoke about the innovative models and the technology they use to help keep diverse communities engaged and informed.

Venture philanthropist Tracie Powell is the founder and CEO of The Pivot Fund. She invests in community-based, grassroots newsrooms, particularly those led by and for people of color, helping them scale their work to reach more audiences and generate revenue to become more sustainable.

Maritza Félix founded Conecta Arizona during the pandemic to debunk misinformation. What started as a group on WhatsApp grew rapidly into a radio show, then a newsletter, and now a podcast that reaches more than 100,000 people. She hosts Cafecito (coffee) every day on WhatsApp to discuss the news of the day, bringing in experts once a week to answer questions directly.

Candice Fortman is the executive director of Outlier Media, a non-profit newsroom in Detroit that provides information 24/7 through an SMS text-based platform as well as undertaking investigative and accountability reporting. To find out what Detroiters want to know, Outlier Media conducts an annual assessment, asking questions over text message, like, “If you had a reporter working with you for the next 24 hours, what would you have them figure out for you?” They also mine public record information requests, and Fortman notes that complaint data is a very good indicator of where there are accountability and transparency gaps. Outlier Media also fosters community journalism in partnership with an organization called Documenters.

Fortman closed with a plea to the techies in the audience at CHM: SMS technology is always breaking—please fix it! The same might be said of the news—it may be broken, but there are plenty of thoughtful and creative people working to fix it. Let’s join them.

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Image: Dawn Garcia, Maritza Félix, Candice Fortman, and Tracie Powell.

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Ethernet is everywhere, on everything, doing every task.

— Gordon Bell, Former VP of R&D at DEC

Ethernet transformed how we connect to each other and to the world. On May 22, 2023, CHM celebrated Ethernet’s 50th anniversary with co-inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe, a 2008 CHM Fellow and this year’s winner of ACM Turing Award, along with other networking luminaries.

Beginnings

Rich Karlgaard, Yogen Dalal, and Bob Metcalfe on stage at CHM Live.

Forbes’ Rich Karlgaard led the first panel discussion with Bob Metcalfe and Yogen Dalal, a member of the Ethernet development team. In the early 1970s, at Xerox’s innovative Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Bob was tasked with designing the network for the first personal computer.

When grad student Dave Boggs helped Bob, who had injured himself cutting coaxial cable, the two began to work together and quickly earned the nickname “the Boggsy Twins.” A breakthrough moment came when concerns about violating potential restraint of trade laws by connecting products from DEC, Intel, and Xerox led to making Ethernet an open standard. That strategy allowed for its rapid proliferation.

When Yogen Dalal first heard about Ethernet, his reaction was, “Wow!” a feeling shared by everyone who came across it. He would explain how the creative yet simple technology worked using a cocktail party analogy.

After a video clip of the late Dave Boggs describing how Ethernet evolved out of the need to connect office workers’ computers together, Bob explained how the monopolies of AT&T and IBM had to be broken to build the internet. Standardization was key, too, in making networking possible. Bob saw the potential for cooperation between DEC, Intel, and Xerox and how to serve the market with Ethernet-compatible products and founded 3Com. Selling Ethernet for IBM PC’s, Bob explains, led to the articulation of “Metcalfe’s Law.”

Use Cases

Rich Karlgaard, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Judy Estrin on stage at CHM Live.

The second panel focused on how networking pioneers capitalized on Ethernet technology, creating a global industry. Rich Karlgaard moderated the discussion with serial entrepreneurs Andy Bechtolsheim, who has been founding and building networking companies for over 45 years, and Judy Estrin, who founded eight networking companies.

From a technology perspective, Judy believes that Ethernet’s success and endurance was due to the simplicity of its design, its flexibility, and the layering that allowed entrepreneurs to build different technologies underneath the packet format. But, there were also other factors that contributed to its success.

Former VP of R&D at DEC Gordon Bell, in a video clip, describes the first meeting with DEC, INTEL, and Xerox at PARC in 1978 to begin creating the Ethernet standard that was ultimately completed in 1980. These standards helped enable the creation of billion-dollar businesses around Ethernet infrastructure. Judy’s Bridge Communications focused on switching, routing, and connecting legacy systems, while Andy focused on building workstations.

In another video clip, John Chambers, former chairman and CEO of Cisco, shared how he learned to listen to customers like Ford and Boeing who alerted him to fast Ethernet at a time when everyone was betting on AT&T. He got it and Cisco thrived. Similarly, Judy Estrin helped FedEx transition from mainframe to network computing as a board director. But, she was unable to convince Steve Jobs to include Ethernet as an option alongside AppleTalk. Turned off by the bulky component, he said, “Apples only need to talk to Apples.”

Connectivity

Bob Metcalfe in CHM’s Revolution exhibit with Ethernet artifacts.

In the third segment of the evening, Bob Metcalfe described how connectivity is an extremely powerful tool, and ones that humans have trouble handling. That results in pathologies, he said, like hacking, pornography, advertising, spam, and fake news. He then gamely answered audience questions on everything from AI to ALOHAnet and the future.

That future includes an Ethernet standard for 800 gigabits per second on optical fiber and 1.6 terabits per second, both with multiple lanes. Fifty years ago, the initial Ethernet was 2.94 megabits per second.

Main image: Bob Metcalfe on big screen with Rich Karlgaard, Yogen Dalal, and Bob on stage at the Ethernet@50 CHM Live event.

CHM would like to thank Arista Networks and the Ethernet Alliance for their generous support of Ethernet@50.

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Additional Resources

• The Verge’s special issue on Ethernet, World Wired
• The Vergecast: The fight over AM radio, the future of ethernet, and the legacy of Zelda
• CHM blog Happy 40th Birthday Ethernet

From 1988 to 1994, venture capitalist and historian James L. Pelkey traveled around the world conducting interviews for his hypertext book, A History of Computer Communications: 1968-1988. The transcripts from these interviews contain a wealth of knowledge from early computer communication pioneers. Explore:

• Pelkey’s oral history collection
• Pelkey’s online book hosted by CHM

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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

— Alan Kay

An Alto computer in CHM’s collection.

In 1973, the innovators at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had a time machine. The Alto computer transported computing 15 years into the future with its groundbreaking features and functions. It influenced Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and a generation of researchers. A half century later, how we live with computing is still shaped by the Alto.

On the 50th anniversary of the Alto, many of its creators and some of today’s leading inventors gathered at CHM to share the Alto’s legacy and discuss what we can expect for the future of computing research—centered today on artificial intelligence (AI).

Alto Team Panel

CHM Trustee John Shoch, who worked at PARC as a graduate student, moderated a discussion with two of Alto’s designers, Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi. Alan Kay participated via video. 

John Shoch, Butler Lampson, and Charles Simonyi

Laying the Groundwork

In the late 1960s, when mainframe computing was evolving, interactive computing was being done with time-sharing because it was economical. But, Lampson said, that wasn’t how anyone wanted to do it. Everyone wanted an efficient, working personal computer like the Alto.

Corporate behemoth Xerox decided to get into the computer business, and in 1970, Bob Taylor, an ARPA founder (Advanced Research Projects Agency), was hired to set up PARC, with a mandate to create the office of the future. Alan Kay was one of his first hires, and he admired how Taylor created a culture to facilitate collaboration among “lone wolves.”

Lampson explained that the prevailing way of doing computing research at the time was on a DEC PDP-10. But DEC was a competitor of SDS, which Xerox had just bought, so they didn’t want to ask for the machines for the lab. Instead, they decided to build one. The result was the MAX computer, a precursor of Alto. Simonyi described working with Chuck Thacker on the machine.

Ideals and Ideas

Lampson believes that advances in computing, including today’s deep learning, are limited only by hardware, specifically memory. Perhaps equally important are far-seeing visions. Kay explained how PARC researchers homed in on ideas from the larger ARPA community: the destiny of computers was to become personal intellectual amplifiers spread over the earth and pervasively networked to everyone. The Alto was their response to that vision.

The Alto was a perfect machine, says Simonyi, “So generous and at the same time so simple.” The keyboard read bits, the mouse gave bits rather than coordinates, the output interfaced with a 32×70 display with bits. But there was only a megabit of memory, under 128K. The panelists remembered that your text would disappear from the bottom up if the machine needed to pull memory to execute on formatting or printing commands. Alto software had to be developed as completely separate applications, only connected through the file system. There were several efforts to get around this, but all failed except Smalltalk.

In conclusion, Kay noted that when innovative research produces powerful tools, it’s important that training and education are an integral part of the system to ensure the tools are “used for good.” He believes that today’s computing power should be directed by high ideals like those pursued at PARC.

AI Research Panel

The second panel focused on artificial intelligence, arguably the most revolutionary sector in today’s computing landscape. CHM Trustee Diane Souvaine led the discussion with two computer scientists from pioneering research labs: Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist of Open AI, and Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz.

Both Sutskever and Horvitz aim to foster creative, collaborative labs focused on big ideas. Sutskever notes that all of computing has just one goal right now: To build artificial intelligence that actually loves humanity. Horvitz thinks computing systems should be reasoning about how to complement humans in a deep way, to understand gaps in thinking, synthesize information, and perform other functions that can lead to breakthroughs we can’t even imagine.

The panelists were frank that AI in various forms and expanding beyond research programs will be extremely disruptive to humanity. It will affect jobs and the economy, education, and how we spend our time. It will also, Horvitz notes, impact our sense of our uniqueness and identity as human beings. With guidance and ongoing deliberation across civil society and government, he believes things can go well. Sutskever also hopes for positive outcomes but cautions that AI is going to be incredibly powerful, and with such power comes significant risks.

Sutskever says that many layers of guardrails can be placed by those developing AI technology, for example in refusing unacceptable requests. But we also need wise, well-chosen societal rules and collective choices that will lead to a better environment and outcome for everyone.

Without a doubt, we will see creative and unexpected solutions as people use AI, and also new problems caused by AI that we haven’t seen before. These things, says Horvitz, will happen at the same time. Adds Sutskever, “It will be not boring.”

Main image: John Shoch, Butler Lampson, and Charles Simonyi.

CHM would like to thank Arista Networks for their generous support of “The Legendary Alto and Research at the Edge.”

Watch the Full Conversation

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

David C. Brock, “50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World,” https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-alto

The Alto in CHM’s flagship exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/347

A selection of video recordings featuring an Alto computer restored by CHM, https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbSX7IyztvLjML_lgB1C_Bb

A 1986 lecture by Alan Kay, “The Dynabook—Past, Present, and Future,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMDphyKrAE8&list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbIuONzZcrM0IM7sTPQFqgr&index=8

A 1986 lecture by Butler Lampson, “Personal Distributed Computing – The Alto and Ethernet Software,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h33A-KWJKDQ&list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbIuONzZcrM0IM7sTPQFqgr&index=9

A 1986 lecture by Chuck Thacker, “Personal Distributed Computing – The Alto and Ethernet Hardware,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9n2J24Jg2Y&list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbIuONzZcrM0IM7sTPQFqgr&index=10

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