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20 Years of IT History: Connecting Devices, Data and People

The story of the past 20 years of technology has been all about connecting the dots between computers, data and the people who use them.

By Fred Hapgood

September 28, 2007 — CIO —

Throughout the late 1980s, microcomputers had been understood as toy versions of mainframes and minis; they were standalone devices that attacked problems with processing cycles. In the quaint locution of the day, they were “artificial brains.”

Gradually, the devices acquired a different function. They became smart links, machines that connected devices, data and people. They went from being computing machines to connection machines. Much of the history of the last 20 years can be written in terms of who got this and who did not.

1987: PS/2

IBM’s rollout of its PS/2 microcomputer came on two levels, both news. The ads raved about the classy technical specs: a blazingly fast internal architecture, plug-and-play BIOS, keyboard and mouse interfaces that are still in use today (and are still called the PS/2 interface) and a floppy disk format (1.44M) that was so good it lasted as long as the technology.

The analysts saw a different message: IBM had decided to shoo the children away. Where the PC had been wide open, the PS/2 was buttoned tight. Every aspect of it was proprietary, including the operating system. Businesswise, the job of the PS/2 was to yank the rug out from under both the clone manufacturers and that upstart, Microsoft.

There was no reason to bet against IBM. It had the classiest brand, an immense promotional budget and some of the best engineers in the world. Yet, incredibly, after several years of very expensive triage, the PS/2 initiative crashed and burned. The failure was a body blow to IBM and its standing in the industry.

What went wrong? The fingers of blame pointed in every direction (silly ads, pricing), but the truth is the PS/2 was the wrong product for a market coalescing around connectivity. Sizzling performance is nice but not essential in a connector because performance is measured against the entire system, not any one part. Blatant assertions of ownership—this is my toy—threatened compatibility, the key virtue in a connection machine.

IBM failed to understand the important difference between a connection machine and a computing machine. And it paid the price.

1988: Next and OOPs

The connectivity story continued with Steve Jobs’s Next. When you bought a Next, you got a piece of great (but completely closed) hardware (which, of course, looked totally cool) and an operating system built around a programming philosophy new to micros: Object Oriented Programming.

Steve Jobs's NeXTCube

Where traditional programming focused on logical operations (computing), OOP’s great strength was the management of categories or classes, including hierarchies of classes. This made it possible to write programs that pulled more kinds of things (humans, structures, classes, data) into a given computing environment without forcing the programmer to rewrite these environments from scratch. OOP was a programming language for connection machines.

The totally cool but closed hardware totally failed, while OOP went on to become bigger than the Next computer itself could have ever been. Today, many important computing languages (Java, C++, PERL, SmallTalk, among others) come with an OOP toolbox.

1989: Netware 3

The first customers of micros, largely programmer types, found ways to use their new toys on the job. As collections of these machines aggregated at various institutes and centers, the idea inevitably occurred to their owners that it would be neat to be able to hook everybody’s micro together (and to the main system).

Ethernet coinventor Bob Metcalfe

With every passing year, the amazing power of connectivity was becoming more evident. At least in theory, every device you plugged into the network inherited the assets and resources of every other machine on that net. In 1980 the inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, took a stab at quantifying the gains to networking by proposing a law that the utility of a network went up with the square of the devices connected to it. While people did and do argue over whether Metcalfe got the exponent precisely right, nobody doubts that he nailed the spirit of the thing.

But getting stability, predictability and compatibility out of a grab bag of machines, themselves in constant flux, was not easy. Novell had been working on the problem since 1983. By 1989 enough hair had been trimmed from the software that people of reasonable skill could use it. Netware 3 was networking for the rest of us, plus it was optimized for Intel’s very popular 386 processor. As this combo spread throughout the world it took with it the gospel of connectivity, leaving hosts of beleaguered CIOs struggling to migrate their systems from the quiet world of host/terminal to the mosh pit of client/server LANs.

 

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