MITPressLog

The PC and IBM

Over the weekend, IBM marked the 25th anniversary of the announcement of the first personal computer—which altered the way we think about computing.  The BBC reported that the first PC cost $1,565.00 and had just 16K of memory.  IBM's model was not the first attempt to popularize computing but it would soon help define the global standard and inspired many of the advances we have seen with our computers since. 

In The History of Modern Computing, Paul E. Ceruzzi looks at modern computing—from the first digital computer to the dot-com crash.  Now in it's second edition, Ceruzzi traces the story of individuals, institutions, and the forces that led to the computer's dramatic transformations.  Here is a bit about what he says about IBM's first PC:

The Personal Computer was IBM’s second foray into this market, after the 5100—it even had the designation 5150 in some product literature. Neither IBM nor anyone else foresaw how successful it would be, or that others would copy its architecture to make it the standard for the next decade and beyond. In keeping with a long tradition in the computer industry, IBM grossly underestimated sales: it estimated a total of 250,000 units; ‘‘[a]s it turned out, there were some months when we built and sold nearly that many systems. MS-DOS transformed Microsoft from a company that mainly sold BASIC to one that dominated the small systems industry in operating systems. IBM found itself with an enormously successful product made up of parts designed by others, using ASCII instead of EBCDIC, and with an operating system it did not have complete rights to. It was said that if IBM’s Personal Computer division were a separate company, it would have been ranked #3 in the industry in 1984, after the rest of IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation. Within ten years there were over fifty million computers installed that were variants of the original PC architecture and ran advanced versions of MS-DOS.

The Better is the Enemy of the Good

The evolution of technological artifacts is often compared to the evolution by natural selection of living things. There are many parallels, including the way selective forces of the marketplace affect the survival of a technology. There are differences, too: living things inherit their characteristics from their parents—at most two—but an inventor can borrow things from any number of existing devices. Nor does nature have the privilege that Seymour Cray had, namely, to start with a clean sheet of paper when embarking on a new computer design. The history of personal computing shows that these differences are perhaps less than imagined. The IBM PC’s microprocessor descended from a chip designed for a terminal, although Datapoint never used it for that. Its operating system descended from a ‘‘quick and dirty’’ operating system that began as a temporary expedient. The PC had a limit of 640 K of directly addressable memory. That, too, was unplanned and had nothing to do with the inherent limits of the Intel microprocessor.  640 K was thought to be far more than adequate; within a few years that limit became a millstone around the necks of programmers and users alike. The IBM PC and its clones allowed commercial software to come to the fore, as long as it could run on that computer or machines that were 100 percent compatible with it. Those visionaries who had predicted and longed for this moment now had mixed feelings. This was what they wanted, but they had not anticipated the price to be paid, namely, being trapped in the architecture of the IBM PC and its operating system.

Computers and Thought

We’re pleased to announce that Peter Stone has won the 2007 IJCAI Computers and Thought award.  The award is presented by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence to an outstanding young scientist in artificial intelligence.  Stone, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, is recognized for his contributions to machine learning in multi-agent systems, particularly in collaborative and adversarial dynamic environments.  He is the author of Layered Learning in Multiagent Systems: A Winning Approach to Robotic Soccer and is currently working on another book about autonomous bidding agents which should come out next year.

Sebastian & Stanley, Racing for Glory

On Tuesday PBS aired an episode of Nova called "The Great Robot Race." It centered on the DARPA Grand Challenge, a Pentagon-sponsored race of robotic, driverless vehicles held in the Nevada desert in March 2004.

At the center of the milestone competition are two autonomous robotic vehicles: H1ghlander, a modified Hummer created by a team at Carnegie Mellon University team headed by Red Whittaker; and Stanley (left), a (far cuter) modified Volkswagen Touareg built by Stanford University's Sebastian Thrun (also left) and his students. (Thrun is coauthor or coeditor of five, count 'em, five MIT Press books.)

The program is fascinating, and not only because of the built-in competitive atmosphere surrounding the race. (Besides the fame and glory, the wining team would take home a $2 million check.) The two teams took decidedly different strategies for navigating the grueling 130-mile course. The Carnegie Mellon team used meitculous topographic mapping of the race course, to plan in advance for what the vehicle would encounter. H1ghlander was also a highly hardware-dependent vehicle. Stanley, by contrast, relied largely on its adaptive vision software, which effectively allowed it to learn about the course as it went on.

We won't tell you who won, though an upset might have been in the cards. PBS has a well-stocked website devoted to the show here, where you can watch the episode and find out a lot about the robots. John Lithgow narrates -- could you ask for more?

P.S. - In case the answer to that last question is yes -- i.e. you are a confirmed autonomous-robot nerd -- you can check out a long article about Thrun and Stanley in the January 2006 issue of Wired.

Studying Computer Science Shouldn't Just Be a Guy Thing

Bush unveiled his Jobs for the 21st Century program during his recent State of the Union address, putting forth a set of initiatives intended to prepare school kids for the math and science jobs that are increasingly important for US economic growth. Scott Carlson, in a recent piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), points out that it is still vital that we consider provisions for ensuring that women are not excluded in the pursuit of today's hot computer jobs.

At the end of the '90's, women's enrollment in computer science programs rose dramatically. Carlson cites Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, which chronicles the research and reforms that Carnegie Mellon made in order to increase the percantage of women in their computer science programs from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000. While that was great progress, the last half decade has seen a dip in enrollment by women shows us that the battle's far from over. Fortunately, programs like CWIT and Women@SCS are creating a culture for women and girls to find mentors, role models and a community in the field. Claudia Morrell at CWIT assures us that "it's simply a matter of time before. . . this will no longer be a problem".

Let's hope we hear some noise about this aspect of the issue in the political debate heats up on Bush's plan. It's certainly worth maintaining and active interest in it (write your rep!). Oh, and when discussing this issue, remember the lesson of Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

Testing "Turing"

One Press author reviews another over on Grand Text Auto, the blog dedicated to computer narrative, interactive fiction, gaming, and other hip digital topics. GTA contributor Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little Passages and coeditor of The New Media Reader, reviews Christos Papadimitriou's Turing, "a novel about computation." Montfort focuses on the way in which Papadimitriou balances personal and intellectual narratives. "If you appreciate ambition and computation," he writes, "and certainly if you are a humanist considering computation and trying to see how it might fit into your work, read Turing."

Montfort's review can be read in its entirety here. He's also got a brand-new piece of interactive fiction called Book and Volume, which you can check out at this link.

Let's Hear It for Open Access

Peter Suber praises John Willinsky's new book, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship on his blog, Open Access News, reiterating the endorsement he provided for the book:

John Willinsky understands the way the Internet changes everything for scholarly communication and has written a clear and compelling defense of open access, both in principle and in practice. I recommend it especially for its treatment of copyright issues and the special situation of scholarly societies and developing countries.

Scheming Minds

Today on Lambda the Ultimate, a popular weblog dealing with programming languages, Matt Hellige offers praise for The Reasoned Schemer, the most recent in our ongoing series of short books on programming languages by Daniel Friedman. (The Reasoned Schemer is coauthored by Friedman, William E. Byrd, and Oleg Kiselyov). Previous entries include The Little MLer, The Little Schemer, and The Seasoned Schemer.

Hellige's post is available here.

John Willinsky Speaks Up

John Willinsky, author of The Access Principle, spoke recently at a Vancouver Public Library seminar series entitled "Speak Up: Who Owns Knowledge?" Willinsky's session came during a panel entitled "Open or Closed: Software and Information." A brief summary of his talk was posted on the Open Access Librarian blog; you can read it here.

Copyrights, Patents, and the Information Age

The internet makes it easy to get ahold of other people's work. If you protect what you create, no one will see it, but if you put it out there, you risk it being stolen or ending up in places you don't want it to be. The information age has made it easier for us to create, communicate, and share  our work and our lives, but it is also more difficult to protect.  Copyright and patent laws are as old as the United States itself.  Times have changed but the laws and regulations have not.  How are advances in technology making it difficult to enforce copyright and patent law today?  And how do these laws protect new technologies like software programs and downloadable music and graphics? Bruce Abramson, author of Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again, helps us make sense of the information economy in an interview on Focus 580 on Illinois Public Radio (WILL-AM).  Abramson explains that we are moving from an industrial age to an information age, but outdated copyright regulations have hindered innovation and advancement.  Focus 580 host Jack Brighton noted that Abramson's explanation of how the patent and copyright law works and what problems and opportunities the future holds was probably the best he's ever heard.

Read more at Bruce Abramson's blog, The Informationist.
 

Software Development and Extreme Sports Really Do Have Something in Common

Richard Waters finds that the next big business idea may come from an unexpected source in an article called "How Open Source Gave Power to the People" which appeared in the Financial Times recently. The article references the ideas in Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation.

As related by Eric von Hippel, professor of management and innovation at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, followers of extreme sports have become expert at adapting and refining the equipment they use. Sometimes, the way these informal communities work can look very similar to the way open source software developers create their elaborate products.

Kitesurfers, for instance - who stand on surf boards holding kites which whisk them over breaking waves, producing acrobatic leaps and twists - have taken to using sophisticated computer modelling software to design the most efficient kites. They then share their ideas over the internet, refining their concepts before sending them to a manufacturer.

Sophisticated tools that let individuals take part in the process of creation, the internet as a means to draw together communities of like-minded people, a willingness to share ideas for the common good - these are the basic ingredients of a new approach to innovation.

The information technology industry has not merely created the means for these practices to take root. In the form of the open source software movement, it has also provided one of the most powerful examples yet of distributed innovation. And, thanks to the experiments in software licensing behind Linux and other open source programs, it has created a new framework for defining intellectual property rights when the brain power comes from a broader community.

Even corporate giants are starting to learn from this. Microsoft, for instance, may take issue with many of the claims made for open source products but it does not dispute the power of some of the new working practices that are bringing them about.