Saturday 2 November 2013

BEST OF BRITISH

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 226/05/05/2013

A wave of nostalgia for the British home computer industry is upon us. It's mostly driven by games players who were schoolkids during that brief "golden half-decade" between 1980 and 1985, which is hardly that surprising given that so few of those UK-designed microcomputers were much use for anything else. Tony Smith has been running a highly entertaining series of memoirs about the Sinclair Spectrum, Lynx, Oric, Dragon, Jupiter Ace and more weird and wonderful devices at The Register website. Also emulators are available, written by selfless enthusiasts, to run all your old Spectrum games on a modern PC.

I'm an in-betweener, a crucial decade older than this Spectrum Kid demographic, so my own retro-spectacles are tinted rather less than rosy (indeed, closer to pale blue). To be sure I must thank the home computer boom for my present career, having entered the magazine business on the crest of it, but the machine I actually took home was a Sharp MZ80B running CP/M 3.4, on which I wrote my first book and learned Pascal, Forth and Lisp. To me computers were already serious tools rather than toys. In *my* schooldays I'd helped build an analog computer out of ex-RAF radar parts, and as a biochemistry student in the '60s I'd used London University's solitary Atlas mainframe to process my scintillation counter readings.

A month or so ago I had tea with Andy Hopper, Cambridge Professor of Computer Technology, President of the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) and for many years head of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. We talked about Britain's role in the history of computing, and after our chat Professor Hopper sent me a copy of a lavishly illustrated new book celebrating the first 75 years of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I found myself quite transfixed by it, because although I sort-of-knew many of the facts it contains, I'd assembled the complete story of UK computing in my mind before, and the evocative B&W photos of the principal actors helped too.

The story of course starts in the 1840s with Charles Babbage's ill-fated attempts to build his mechanical Difference Engine - which now has a happy ending thanks to the superb working version now on display at the Science Museum. It carries on with Alan Turing, Bletchley Park, Colossus versus Enigma, a story now sufficiently familiar to make it onto TV and Hollywood movies. But there's another, less known story running in parallel with these landmarks. What's the working material that all modern computers manipulate? Electrons, as discovered by J.J. Thompson at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1897. In 1926, also at the Cavendish, brilliant radio engineer Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams invented a "scale-of-two" counter for an early radiation detector, which was the prototype of all digital devices.

The concept of the digital computer itself comes from Turing's 1936 paper on Computable Numbers. After WWII, with the triumphs of Bletchley still top-secret, British computer scientists found themselves in a neck-and-neck race with their US equivalents. Though Eckert and Mauchly's 1946 ENIAC is credited as the first working stored-program digital computer, the first practical one was EDSAC, built at the Cambridge computer lab by Maurice Wilkes's team in 1949. Made available to other university departments, its calculations contributed to several Nobel prizes including Richard Stone's for economics, John Kendrew's for the structure of myoglobin, and Martin Ryle's for radio astronomy. EDSAC's design also pioneered a bunch of crucial innovations still in use, including the subroutine, microcoded instructions and bit-sliced processor architectures.

But we lost the race because British scientists just don't have the Yanks' business acumen, right? Er, no. Wilkes was approached very early, in 1949, by the catering company J Lyons (of the Lyons Corner House cafe chain) to licence EDSAC as a model for the world's first commercially-useful business computer called LEO. Wilkes was quite adept at technology transfer and used Lyons' money to build EDSAC 2, while Lyons sold a range of three successive LEO models successfully until 1963, when taken over by English Electric (and later merged into ICL).

This story continues through the 1970s Cambridge Ring pioneering network project, which eventually lost out to Ethernet; to Acorn Computers and the BBC Micro; culminating with the formation of ARM Ltd as a joint venture with Apple (for the Newton PDA) which eventually saw ARM-designed CPUs driving the iPhone, iPad and most of the world's mobiles. We're often lectured nowadays that Britain's poor overall industrial performance is due to too much public and not enough private enterprise, but what this story says is that what our computing successes share with Silicon Valley's is that they're all started by scientists and engineers who understand the product (think Gordon Moore) rather than money men who don't.

GAME OF PHONES

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 225  09/04/2013

When we look back at the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century we tend to focus on the steam engine and the railway, and when 22nd-century historians look back at the Digital Revolution that began in the late 20th it won't be the personal computer they single out but the microprocessor, the internet and the mobile telephone. Microprocessors supply processing power to increasingly intelligent devices, and the PC will be seen as a quite brief but crucial phase in the evolution of the microprocessor until it got small enough to fit inside a smartphone or tablet. The rise of the PC was spectacular enough, 1.5 billion over 30 years, but the mobile phone reached 6 billion in around 20.

The reason four times as many people use mobiles as PCs isn't hard to fathom. Most people have little need for calculation per se in their daily lives, but communicating with other people, locating and consuming information are absolutely central. And while both PC and smartphone can do that, a smartphone can do it from your pocket and in the middle of a field. There'll always be professionals who need spreadsheets and word processors, but almost everyone has a use for email, SMS, social networks and Google Maps. What's more mobile phone masts can be erected even in parts of the world that will never get a wired internet and phone network. From Mongolia to the Maasai Mara, farmers and herders deal direct by mobile and cut out parasitic middlemen, cab drivers find their destination without years of study, engineers no longer need carry bulky manuals.

Control of the mobile internet is set to become the hottest of all political issues, in a way that control over the PC never quite was. To be sure there was a period at the very end of the Cold War when the US government tried to deny the Soviet Union access to the latest microprocessors via CoCom, but that apart it's been market forces all the way. And since CoCom ceased around 1994 the world has become a very different place. A handful of giant internet corporations - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter and the rest - now have annual revenues comparable to those of sovereign states, plus direct access to the hearts and minds of vast swathes of the population that governments can only dream of.

It's no coincidence that every week now brings a new rumour that some corporation, like Facebook or Amazon, is developing its own mobile phone. Everyone seems to be thinking about owning the phone or tablet and "forking" Android to run it in their own special way. Most users are not techies and don't want to be techies, so if you can sell them a branded phone with your logo and your UI-veneer on it, that's all they'll ever see. (Rooting and tweaking are strictly for a tiny, nerdy minority). There's great power to be had there, and great revenues too because unlike the silly old Web, mobile networks remembered to build-in a payment mechanism! Actually an outfit the size of Facebook is so ubiquitous it doesn't need to own the phone hardware: getting its app onto everyone's phone (of whatever brand) would be enough if it offered Skype-style voice-over-IP calls and messaging, which would start to eat the lunch of the mobile operators themselves as well as competiing social networks.

Katherine Losse was a pioneer Facebook employee who used to ghost-write posts for Mark Zuckerberg himself, and in her recent book "The Boy Kings" she offers a disturbing picture of his thinking. The main points of his credo include youthfulness, openness, sharing power and "companies over countries". Asked what he meant by the latter he told her "it means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world." So the model for a new world is the Californian youth-oriented corporation, untramelled by pesky laws and regulations, by messy old-world stuff like pensions and having to win elections. The Nation State is just plain out-of-date, it still practices stupid stuff like secrecy and taxation, it doesn't get the New Digital Narcissism where everyone can be an (unpaid) star of their own channel. All rather reminiscent the 1960s counterculture mixed with a dash of Orwell's Oceania, Eurasia, EastAsia. But actually it starts to look rather like a new variation on feudalism where you'll only get fed if you become a retainer of one of these mega-corporations, as the boring old centralised state and its services wither away.

THE COMPANY STORE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 224 06/03/2013

I recently reviewed a interesting book, "Carbon Democracy" by Timothy Mitchell (Verso 2011), which analyses the effect of different energy sources on politics. Very brutally condensed, Mitchell argues that our political institutions are profoundly shaped by the types of *energy flow* we employ. A coal-based economy spawned the industrial revolution and the rise of mass democracies, while the displacement of coal by oil is tending to erode those democracies. Early humans consumed energy that came almost directly from the sun: photosynthesis provided plants for food and wood for dwellings and fire, and both hunter-gatherers and early cultivators consumed plants and animals close to where they lived, with no need for extensive transport networks. Coal changed all that by providing both the means to create, and the need for, a network of factories connected by railways, and the new social disciplines this enforced are those we still more or less live by.

Unlike coal, oil almost mines itself. It spouts to the surface under its own pressure, and although advanced technology is required to discover deposits and drill wells, the highly-skilled workers are few compared to coal miners, and remain above ground where they're easier to supervise and enjoy less autonomy. As a liquid, oil can be sent over vast distances via pipeline and tanker using little human labour, and its global distribution ensures that supplies can be diverted by a single phone call to neutralise a strike at one location. Hence the switch from coal to oil reduces the ability of labour to disrupt energy flows and hands that power instead to large oil companies, granting them the ability to threaten governments and dictate foreign policy (the post-WWII Marshall Plan was in part designed to switch Europe from coal to oil and introduce US-style industrial relations). I'm impressed by Mitchell's approach, which makes sense of a lot of stuff happening today, but I'm sure he wouldn't disagree if I say that it's just one layer of an explanation, and that adding a similar approach to *information flows* (means of communication) would be a valuable complement.

There have been shelf-loads of starry-eyed books about what the internet is going to mean for the future of human societies. Many imagine small rural communities of Hobbit houses, buried deep in the woods, living on home-baked spelt bread and organic beetroot soup while swapping kitten pictures with kindred spirits the world over on Facebook. There are a few grumpy dissenters from this fluffy view, notably Jonathon Meades who in "Isle of Rust" describes something structurally similar, but the real village on Lewis and Harris he visits is littered with rusting car chassis and its inhabitants dwell on the net as a way of completely ignoring their immediate environment. He imagines humans in 2113 revering the detritus as sacred objects from a distant pre-apocalyptic era when we still had oil and electricity.

And so to Microsoft's (and Adobe's, and Apple's) software licensing policies (which you might think rather a long leap). The more positive future models assume that, as a response to climate change, these Net-Hobbit communities in the woods will be fuelled by distributed renewable sources of energy and ruled by equally distributed libertarian social structures, a sort of cyber-anarchism. But what they're not? Mitchell's methodology suggests something more like a net-mediated feudalism, ruled over by a handful of giant corporations. Why? Because Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon are rushing toward a vision of *renting* rather than *selling* their services. You won't be able to own their software outright but will have to pay for it over again every month, as you do for electricity and gas, and perhaps music and other entertainment. A step backward to an economy where people earn money simply by owning stuff, rather than by investing and employing other people. Fail to pay and you'll get kicked out of the global village.

I recently had an email chat with our Online Business columnist Kevin Partner about the way Adobe will soon be wanting £50 a month for the graphics tools he relies on (he plans to buy some alternative before it's too late). This is not a new economic model, but rather one with a long and disreputable history. It's how Mississippi share croppers and Kentucky coal-miners used to live, owing more money to the company store for groceries than they ever earned, which ensured their continuing servitude. To salute this brave new vision I've taken the liberty of writing an updated lyric for Merle Travis's famous 1946 song "Sixteen Tons": 

                           "You upload sixteen gigs and what do you get,
                             Another day older and deeper in debt,
                             St Peter don't you call me 'cos I can't go,
                             I owe my soul to the virtual store..."
                            
                            

SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday...