Fashionable Computers Disappear and Things Start Thinking

Folks,

In the long ago days of 1998, my Mom bought her first computer, an iMac. At the time of her purchase, the fact that it looked cute and didn't require a mess of wires to hook-up was more important than all that megahertz and RAM stuff that she still does not nor care to understand.

Gateway soon introduced a line of radically slimmed down desktop machines, as did Sony and other manufacturers. Intel was showing off prototype computers that looked like brightly colored Aztec pyramids or sleek modern sculpture. A company that made a popular line of web servers was packing their industrial electronics in a blue cube barely bigger than your hand. At the same time, AOL and Microsoft wanted to be everywhere anywhere via a new generation of handheld and TV set-top devices. Palm Computing’s then current offering came in a sleek aluminum case that would not have been out of place on a Klingon Warrior, sheathed next to his Bat’leth.

Today, such design consciousness in digital devices, from computers to gadgets that had not existed in 1998 (WiFi hotspots and routers, digital music players, inexpensive consumer digital cameras, etc.) is the norm. As with an older tech, the automobile, consumers are making buying decisions based as much on a machine’s look and feel, as on the technology inside the box.

So what? Well, there are smart folks, such as the  MIT Media Lab’s near futurist Andy Lippman, that believe this tells us that we are witnessing both the first and final two or so decades of the personal computer as an Everyman's status object and fashion statement. They contend that when a technology gains more attention and confers more status as a fashion statement than its work-a-day purpose, it's probably about to disappear. That's "disappear", as in to be removed from view.

Confused? Let's look at an analogous situation. When was the last time you thought of the multi-gigawatt power plant on the other end of the wire that connects it to the motor you never hear in the compressor that you never think of in your fridge? All four pieces of technology just mentioned used to be big deals in the marketing of electric power, as well as the industrial design of fridges. Remember those old machines with the fat, round compressors on top? If you've never seen one for yourself, look for one in the background next time you're watching a 1930's vintage movie.

Today, the most important thing about picking a place to keep the beer cold is how well it disappears into the decor of our faux colonial kitchen. The last thing that we want from a reliable, ubiquitous technology is for it to call attention to itself. It should just be there, and be working the next time you feel like having some ice-cream. Thus, we hear the prediction that after the current phase of computer and telecom product design, the devices will begin to fade into the background of our environment. Their services, though, will still be there, but more reliably, like the light that comes on when you open the fridge.

What will emerge from this reinvented model for computing and telecommunications? Individually, many services will seem trivial from our present point of view. Milk cartons may access the internet-grocery store when they get low, and order replacements for themselves. A necktie might tell a business associate’s electronic rolodex what your email address is, as you shake his hand. Through the same tech, tablet computers distributed freely across the office will know who is holding them and what documents will be required for the next damn meeting. Pages in electronic books and catalogues, made with electronic paper, will update themselves when new information is available. Web-based information will be accessible from not only from hand-held devices, but previously "dumb" objects such as the tread of your car's wearing tires. 

Other services will seem less triffling. Your tee-shirt may contain processors woven into its fabric and a web-connected cardiac monitor to let the hospital know to send an ambulance when you’ve eaten more heart arresting calzones than you can jog away. That shirt and it’s wireless connection will be subsidized by a changing assortment of ads for the hospital’s services displayed on flexible video screens over your chest and back. Your own exertions will supply the power for the “smart” shirt’s connectivity and computing.

Devices like mice and trackpads, even keyboards, will truly disappear, and not just from view. They will be replaced by an intelligent environment that knows where you are looking and understands your facial and other gestures, as well as speech via cameras, microphones, and machine smarts. You may be wearing a hat or headband that puts you in direct connection to your outboard “brain”. The ubiquitous screen that we’ve been peering at for almost seventy years will disappear into your contact lenses or stylish shades, and they will also be your computer interface.

We are at the threshold of some truly remarkable tech. It will enable the things around us will seem to think, and we will think little of that, as the machines fade into the background and do their work invisibly. This prospect brings both promise and peril, of course. Do we really want our very environment to know all of our comings and goings, where our eyes wander, what stimulates various sectors of our neocortex… the host of our self and self awareness? Will the last bastions of privacy fall with this new generation of hidden tech? Can a society and culture function without secrets be kept from not only its denizens, but their own machines?

Interesting questions to ponder on the high speed ride to the near future!

S

What’s in a Name?

Folks,

If you're like myself, or my father or mother for that matter, you probably had a little red wagon when you were a kid. It was probably called a Radio Flyer. Did you every wonder why? What did radio have to do with a child's wagon? As for flying, it never went much faster than you could pull it over the sidewalk or lawn.

So, why call it Radio Flyer? Well, immigrant Antonio Pasin, inventor of the little red wagon formerly known as Model #18, needed something catchy and thoroughly modern sounding in a name. The time was the 1920s, and the two truly hot technologies coming to commercial prominence were radio broadcasting and human flight.

Other immigrants, such as Marconi, Tesla, and “General” Davide Sarnoff, where making distant sounds, and not inconsiderable money, appear out of thin air. People like Charles Lindbergh and Glenn Curtiss were finding some things to do with "aeroplanes", besides dropping grenades ineffectually onto the farm fields of WWI Europe. They were setting records, zipping across entire oceans in barely more than a day, and swiftly delivering mail across continents. People turned out at country fairs, and paid good money, to see "Barnstormers" perform death-defying aerial magic. What name could have been more trendy and cool than Radio Flyer? It even looks pretty good today at RadioFlyer.com. Check out their present retro/modern as tomorrow new/old logo.

Now, every generation since the dawn of the industrial revolution has stood somehow transfixed by the latest technology to take off in the commercial market. At the dawn of television, the public was treated to television programs with characters like Captain Video; a rocket pilot, not a camera man. A couple of generations before the renamed Model #18, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked, "Is it a fact- or have I dreamed it- that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!" He's referring, of course, to the telegraph. The year was 1851. Hawthorne, like Teilhard de Chardin in his treatise “The Phenomenon of Man” wrote a century after the great poet’s heralding of a new age, foresaw the advent of today’s Internet.

Whatever. Today, just about anything with a dot-com in its name is apt to predispose us to a favorable view of it. Things cyber and virtual have become so trendy, the words have almost lost their original meaning. In fact, the word cyber practically has no meaning! It's borrowed from the word cybernetics, itself an adaption of the Greek word for a helmsman, kybernetes, and was coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener. The year was 1948, well before the advent of the microchip, and rose from Wiener's theories about the similarities between steering mechanisms for naval torpedoes and human mental processes.

Everything has a history. No technology emerges into the world as though from the Void. A company, technology or product with a name that contains dot-com, or for that matter, video, radio, steam or steel, is no more or less likely to be excellent or useful than one with the word ACME in it. But, names can sound cool. They can evoke emotions and spark notions. They can even offer a sense of dominion over what is named and pride in naming it. Naming things was, after all, one of the first gifts that G-d is alleged to have given to Man after He made the first Woman.

What’s in a name? 

S

Great Grandmothers, Social Networks, Revolution!

Folks,

A long, long time ago, when the late Victorian Era ladies and their daughters who were born before the arrival of the Roaring Twenties, when most "civilized" women of the day's cultured society did not drive horseless carriages  nor leave the house without extensive preparation in grooming and attire. Even after the Dress Reform Movement and associated undergarment reform, it might take hours to just get ready to go to the market on the horse drawn trolley down a poop laden, smelly dirt street. This after waking at dawn or before to see to it that her husband and children were fed and clothed. It was an ordeal, not very glamorous, particularly for the wife of a successful business person or public figure in her community.

Alas, the market, the general store, the apothecary, and so on, were the only places during the average day that she could meet and chat with friends and acquaintances, those not her immediate neighbors over the fence behind the garden or grape arbor. Communication, idle or otherwise, was no more easy to engage in that transportation.

My great grandmother was one of the ladies of that day. She lived in Greenfield, MA in the 1910s. Her husband was a bit of a techie for his day, a gadget freak. He had one of the first private autos in town. Several folks had early trucks  to haul goods to and from market and the local metal and textile mills, but my grandfather's car for hauling people for such purposes as having a picnic up the old farm road by the mountain stream on Sunday. Gasoline powered vehicles were so rare in that day, he had to have his own big gas tank with attached hand-pump in what had been the carriage barn.

Around the same time that my great grandfather brought home that big car, he had the local phone company install two telephones . One was in the house that he, his wife, and my grandmother and grand uncle lived in. The other was at his mill up by the Vermont border, in Turner's Falls. Back at the turn of the last century, as the auto and telephone were ascending, and the region's textile and milling economy had yet to settle into utter decline, it was common for affluent owners of businesses to live a far bit away apart from their going concerns. With no highways as we know them today, a telephone link from the owner's home to the plant or store was the way to ride herd on employees working nights and weekends. Likewise, pharmacists , doctors, shop owners and other business folk could call up via the central operator (no dials or push buttons on phones yet) their suppliers and commercial customers.

But, what's this got to do with social networking and ladies who liked to gab with their turn o'the last century friends?

Well, remember how dirty, smelly, and time consuming it was for middle class and prosperous women to get down to the milliners for a fancy hat and the essential community news of the day with their friends about who and what was up or down, and for coconspirators to discuss such things as the emerging Suffrage Movement.

My great grandmother and some of her colleagues noticed that they could pick up those phones and ring through Central to get in touch with each other while still dressed in their house coats, securely away from their husbands and children busy at work or school or toiling in the mills, and speak freely and intimately… even politically.


Today, girls in Tokyo, Seoul, Detroit, Toronto, Tel Aviv and elsewhere text gossip and small news franticly while young women at the foment of revolution in the Middle East lay their lives on the line in tele-communicated bits.


The beat goes on. It is interesting how some things do not change, but they do evolve and iterate with tech and culture. Interesting. Anyhow, thank you Bubbie Fannie and your ilk, then and now and into the future, for your contributions.

S

Folks,


When I was about six years old, my idea of geeky fun was to hide out in the dank basement of our family's house on Abbott Street, in Springfield, MA. There, I'd take apart old clocks, yank the vacuum tubes from ancient radios, and play jungle explorer with my father's night-watch kerosene lantern from his days defending Panama from WWII Japanese subs that never came.


But, my favorite activity was playing with an greasy, heavy wrought iron monkey wrench. I was fascinated by its heft in my little hands, and the simple dexterous motion of the thumbscrew that coiled and uncoiled to adjust the vice atop its hand grip. That it had only two moving parts was aesthetically pleasing to the arts and tech-inclined nerd that I was to grow up to be.


But, why was it called a monkey wrench? It didn't look like a monkey. Even my young mind knew that arboreal, knuckle walking social primates had no fittings nor pipes to tighten. My all-knowing dad had not a clue to the moniker's origin, either. I soon moved on to other questions, and left this matter behind to ponder and execute the design of futuristic model cites out of balsa wood cubes and some copper pipes, plastic safety razor holders, Instamatic Flash Cubes recovered from the trash. It was now four years later, 1964, and I'd just seen the NYC hosted World's Fair. The future was inhabiting my thoughts; a future where turbine powered cars would run on grain alcohol and people would make phone calls with video.


Some two decades later, however, I was looking toward the other end of history, rummaging through the fabulous Johnson's Used Book Store. This place is a lost treasure to the decay of downtown Springfield. It is so gone that it leaves not even a trace in the digital aether on Google nor Wikipedia. In any case, on one sunny afternoon, I somehow found the mouldering scent of old periodicals more enticing than the scent of spring blossoms and fetching young ladies, and I browsed the racks of tattered periodicals. There, I stumbled upon a magazine whose name I have long forgotten. Within it, though, was an article about the origin of the term monkey wrench. Shazzam! My inner six year old got his long delayed prize.


Although most tech and tool nerds believe that a British guy named Moncky (see the link above illustration below), was the fellow that patented an adjustable wrench in 1858 and gave his name to the tool, the fact is Lexicographers have the found the term monkey wrench dating back to at least 1840. Connecting the dots, the path to the tool's name comes to an origin in the hands of an iron miller named Monk who had grown tired of lugging around his heavy tool box full of fix sized wrenches. He worked in a small metal fab plant in Springfield on the bend where Mill Street meets southern Main Street. The mill was then owned by Bemis and Call Company, and they proceeded to produce Monk's innovative gripper/twister/puller and plumbers helper. That place on the corner still stands today, by the way. It's now a furniture and home decorating shop for the affluent.


Whatever, some day a future father will be cranky as he goes down to the basement to bang on the fittings of the home's aging thin-film photovoltaic powered sodium/water heating system and hand a wrench to a kid that will become fascinated with supple, useful, adjustable tech.


Keep and eye to the future, and an ear to the past…


S

The Wikipedia Entry: "Monkey Wrench"

A Modest Proposal…

Folks,

I've been blogging recently about where tech collides with politics, society, commerce and culture. Yesterday, it occurred to me that I could could localize this stuff to be of particular interest to folks in Northampton, MA and the Pioneer Valley, as I tell simple stories of how tech hit the streets, worked its way into business, and entered our homes in the past, and continues to do so today. Some of the topics that immediately occurred to me are:

• Why are the only industries remaining in the Pioneer Valley, once the Silicon Valley of the first Industrial Age, light metal machining, arms manufacturing, specialty plastic fasteners, and agricultural chemicals?
• Why do we call a monkey wrench a monkey wrench? Clue: it has everything to do with the Valley, and nothing to do with monkeys.
• How did William Pynchon, Springfield, MA's founder, pull off one of the great swindles of early British colonialism in America by using ancient technology to drain a swamp in what became Springfield's north end. And, where did the natives that he swindled go?
• How and why was Florence, MA chosen as the home to a utopian community and worker owned textile mills?
• Why did Rolls Royce choose this region to build their vehicles outside the UK?
• And, why is the Valley a rare hotbed of enthusiasm for NASCAR in the Northeast?
• What are so many sensible but poor Hispanics doing in New England the Valley when they could be just as disadvantaged in someplace warm by coral beaches? Clue #2: It has to do with bombs and those agricultural chemicals.
• How did Victorian Era ladies help build the telephone industry in Greenfield, circa 1910?
• Did Mark Twain finance and own the world's first word processor while living in the region in the late 19th Century?
• How do Northampton's Web development companies stay afloat, even prosper with an international clientel, in the face of competition from 'Net and telecom giants, cloud-based freeware, and industry consolidation?
• Why was fiber-optic tech invented in the region at the dawn of the Internet and telecommunications revolution, but never commercialized by its inventor? How did Quaker Oats figure in this story?

So I'm pitching these ideas for an occasional column at Northampton Media, an excellent local news portal whose reporters and editors typically hustle harder and outperform their colleagues in regional print, television and radio. We'll see what happens.

S

There's Power and Then There's Power…

Folks,

Does nuke power have to be ugly and dangerous? There is such a tech, Thorium Nuclear Reactors, originally researched in the USA back in the '40s but never adopted as it was not suitable to generating Plutonium for Hydrogen Bombs from spent fuel used in the Peaceful Atom Program. Thorium nuclear tech is now being explored by the Chinese for the purpose of clearing their air of fossil fuel pollution, and powering their booming economy into the future. It also has the benefit of producing far lower amounts of toxic waste that must be sequestered for longer than Humanity has had civilization and perhaps even existed.

Meanwhile, other alternative energy sources including turning the faces of our skyscrapers into power plants, harvesting tides and the warmth of the deep Earth, the breath of the wind, the rain of photons from the Sun remain to be harvested.

Anyway we shake it, here in the West, to cut our addiction to oil, allow the folks in the Middle East and Northern Africa settle their affairs on their own as the big boys they really are (Israel has its own nuclear bombs, and Iran soon will, as well), we have to likely have to embrace everything in our tech quiver to quench our thirst for power.

S

More or Less in Line.

Folks,

Throughout Human history, across all aspects of our many cultures, innovation continues to either its terminal evolution or highest development along the line laid out in its initial state or conception, a path dependency. This trend can be seen in everything as diverse as religion and mythology to rocketry and space flight.


Right now, today, we can see this pattern manifest in another tech realm as Japan endeavors to stitch its electrical grid back together after it was brought to its knees by the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and a nuclear disaster brought about by Human muddling and over-optimism. Their problem today is the product of decision made one-hundred and five years ago when the big issue to solve was electrically powering newfangled, durable Edison light bulbs and textile shops automated by central electric motors that drove thick, wide bands of leather to power looms and sometimes shredded and  killed workers. Nuclear power was then more than half a century in the future, and nuclear radiation had yet to be discovered. The country was so busy in 1895, industrializing and modernizing, that they hadn't even gotten the knack of numbering new buildings by orderly street addresses, and thus had to invent the fax machine to send maps to each other over the recently installed telephone lines.


So, what's the point? I guess it's just that if you've got a bright idea, take a look to the Long Now. Your notion might have the legs to change and form the future in unanticipated ways.

S

Saturn V Apollo Moon Rocket