Excerpts From A Talk By George Morrow At SOG IV

 Micro Cornucopia Number 26 Oct-Nov 1985

[Discovered and forwarded by S.M. Oliva. This is OCR; any errors were made by the machine, not me. If anything needs fixing, please drop me a line.]

 I’ve been in the computer business for something like 10 years now, and I’ve seen the good years, and I’m beginning to experience some of the lean years. So I’ve given a lot of thought to what the future holds for computers, and I’ve tried to apply some lessons from the past to the future. I want to share a little of that thinking with you today, and perhaps a little bit of what the future holds. There have been three computer waves — mainframes, minis, and micros. To think there’s not going to be another is to think the sun isn’t going to rise.

 There will be another wave of new computers, and those computers have to be as different from micros as micros were from minis. None of us, including yours truly, can see the shape of that. Because we’re all part of the present wave, just as Data General and DEC had no idea what was happening in micros, there’s no reason to think we will be any smarter about what will happen next.

Fuel From The Past

 I think I have a candidate for the technology that will shape the next wave, and let’s get at it by examining the technology that fueled other waves.

 Mainframes were fueled by the transistor. Big computers existed before transistors, but the big rollout of mainframes occurred with the invention of the transistor. The transistor was invented and improved during the period the big computers were being built.

 Somewhere in the ’60s when the mainframes were on a big roll, the fuel for the next wave, the minis, began to get into place — the integrated circuit. Small and medium scale integrated circuits were the technology of the mini computers.

 I can remember seeing the cover of Electronics Magazine with a picture of the Data General circuit board, and the big surprise was that they’d managed to put a complete CPU on one 15″xl5” circuit board. They did it using SSI circuits. Things called 7489 and 7418Iwere invented to make it possible to put a CPU on a 15″xl5 circuit board.

 That machine processed information in groups of 4 bits — a big step forward from single bit computers. (Editor’s note: let’s not forget all the two-bit computers, some of which are still being built.)

 In 1972, ’73, ’74, mini computers were on a big roll, and what was being invented in the laboratories of Silicon Valley was the micro processor, the fuel for our wave. So each new wave of technology comes in the midst of its predecessor.

 CMOS

 Each technology has its window. The window opens, and if the technology gets through it. great. If the technology doesn’t get through, the window usually closes. CMOS is a notable exception.

 Its window opened up around 1970. But the companies making CMOS refused to come down on the price. RCA and Motorola told us we were always going to pay 25% to 35% more for CMOS. But TI came along and cut them off at the knees.

 If you look back to around 1970, the 4000 series of CMOS logic had a completely different pinout than TTL. There was a considerable premium for that logic, and at the time, low power logic did not exist.

 There was standard TTL, low power TTL (74L), and high speed TTL (74H). And there was this completely unmanageable stuff — Shotkey.

 TTL was too power hungry, and the low power stuff was far too slow. And they didn’t compete effectively with CMOS.

 What TI did in ’72, ’73 was come out with low power Shotkey which matched the speed of TTL. Low power Shotkey cut power requirements by 4 or 5 times, and they got right down to the same price. And then they got cheaper.

 This completely annihilated the CMOS. Although CMOS was more cost effective from a power point of view at lOOKHz, at 5MHz low power Shotkeys were even with CMOS. CMOS had missed its window. It had a second chance, though, thanks to the Japanese.

 What Business Are We In?

 When the computer industry was beginning to blossom, we began to get religion. We began thinking about management and wanting to become more than a mom and pop company. It was a mistake.

 My wife ordered a subscription to the Harvard Business Review. With the subscription they sent a set of reprints of famous articles of the past. One of the articles. “Market Myopia,” was about businessmen not recognizing what business they’re in. If the railroad people, for example, had realized they were in the transportation business, they would have offset the slump in railroads by investing in airplanes. Instead of United Airlines. It would be Southern Pacific Airlines.

 If the telegraph company had known it was in the communications business instead of the telegraph business, they could have bought all the telephone patents in 1880 for $40,000. Now you have to add a digit to that to get an idea of how much it’s worth today. Why didn’t they buy it? Because they thought they were in the telegraph business, not the communications business.

 I believe we’re supposed to learn something from our own mistakes, and if we can, learn something from other people’s mistakes, too, which is what we’re going to get into in a minute. So I asked myself. “OK, smart guy, what business are you in?” I didn’t know. I have asked hundreds of people, and they’ve given me all kinds of answers. IBM thinks it knows what business it’s in — information processing — and it’s very successful.

 So I said, will I be as smart as IBM? Or will I hear a description of what business I’m in without recognizing it? I claim that’s possible, and I claim that’s why the telegraph people didn’t realize they were in the communications business. And I’ll tell you why I don’t know what business I’m in. and why the telegraph people couldn’t possibly have known to invest in telephones. Because the telegraph was the first instance of the communications industry. Does this apply to trains? The distinguishing feature about trains was that they used steam engines, and as it happens, the steam engine was implemented in ships almost the same time it was implemented in railroads. So the railroads, and simultaneously ships, may have been the first real instance of the mechanized transportation industry. So how would they know to invest in airplanes if it was the first instance? Maybe the computer is the first instance of some kind of business we’re in.

 Mistaken Identity

 You hear often that those who don’t remember history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of history. It’s a misquote. A closer rendition is: progress, far from consisting of change, depends on retentiveness, and those who do not remember the past are condemned to fulfill it. Most problems, most difficulties, can be recast from the past.

 The computer business is in the pits right now. Is it going to recover quickly? It’s common to hear people say now, “Gee whiz, all we have to do is get another spreadsheet, make computers user friendly, and everything will take off again.*

I used to say that myself. Now everyone’s saying it. When the herd starts to move in one direction, I always try to stop and ask myself if I am heading for a cliff.

 Now that I’m hearing people say that computers should be user friendly. I’m suspicious of that idea. Is it just that we need a new piece of software, something like a spreadsheet to reignite sales? That was something I thought for several years. So I asked myself — what is “user friendly?”

 To be really user friendly, a machine ought to be able to understand what I meant and not what I said.

 Suppose we made a machine that was intelligent. If I were a machine and I were intelligent and I were competing for scarce resources, and I looked around at human beings, I think I’d decide they were redundant. And if I ever needed to find out the way they did anything I could just get a movie out and run it, and that’s the way I’d find out. Why put up with humans? I don’t want something like that.

 Machines (computers) are very user unfriendly. The UNIX operating system has been described as user hostile. dBASE II is certainly user hostile. If I’d had something that could have temporarily maimed the author’s leg for a week or two when I first started on dBASE II, I would have used it.

 Hardware Solutions

 To get a proper perspective of the computer business, imagine a fence. It’s tall. On one side are hardware makers, and on the other side is a wild area with animals you don’t want to get near.

 Now we make hardware, and we throw it over the big fence, and we look to see where the animals gather. We aren’t interested and don’t have the slightest idea how they’re to use our hardware. We’re throwing them solutions. We have 17 solutions here, and we hope to God there are people around who can take these solutions and put them with problems. (Remember, our business is not solving problems, it’s selling solutions. And we don’t know what solution we’re selling.)

 Reading, Writing, And Printing So I asked myself: Is there something as user unfriendly and basically unfamiliar to human experience as the computer?

 How about reading and writing? There was a time when the printed word was relegated to a very small minority, to the priesthood almost. What was it good for? Well, we had the Bible to explain the words of God — where we were going, where we were coming from, and why things were difficult where we are now. And we had encyclopedias and a few stories like Dante’s Inferno and things like that. Nobody needed the printed word. The town crier came and told you if there was a fire. If you needed a job, you apprenticed yourself at age 12 or even before that for 6 or 7 years. Nobody needed to use the printed word except for a very small priesthood.

 Except for cuneiform, every language. every written language, has gone through two metamorphoses. First was visual. The first languages were pictures — Chinese, Egyptian. Cuneiform, I’m told, was phonetically based from the very beginning. The languages that kept the visual image died. Chinese, by the way, changed from being strictly visual to being a mixture of visual and phonetic. But now our languages are phonetically based. So we approach this business of writing down our languages in two vastly different ways — one having to do with the eye, and the other having to do with the ear.

 Now the ear is more natural, but the marks are more abstract. We didn’t realize at first that it was actually better to model our recording of information based on our sounds of the mouth rather than our eyes.

 Could it be that the way we communicate with computers now — by if/then/else logic — isn’t the right way? Maybe there’s a methodology for conveying to these machines what we want them to do that is as different from current logic as pictorial language is from phonetic language. Printing And Computing The computer is like the printing press. If you believe IBM, IBM is in the information processing business, so computers are primarily used as a medium for storing, manipulating, transmitting, doing things with information. If that’s true, you can make the analogy of the computer and the printing press. Paper is like memory. Paper is almost a free good. But al one time it was very expensive. Also keep in mind that, as far as I know, there isn’t a single technology that has made it that didn’t have an almost overwhelming entertainment component attached to it.

 The reason today that you think of Victor rather than Edison when you hear the word “phonograph” was because of Edison’s attitude toward the phonograph. Edison hated the commercial entertainment aspect of his invention. He once said. “Jazz music is the same backward or forward.”

 Think of the computer as a new kind of printing press. If it doesn’t find an entertainment component, it can’t survive. I have the same sickness Edison had, because I don’t like to use the computer for games. The only difference between Edison and me is that I realize it. I don’t think Edison ever realized how badly it hurt him — his business, at least with the phonograph — in not being able to recognize the need for an entertainment component along with the technology. Why did the printing press get inverted, and what might have happened to it? The reason we had a printing press, I think, was because of population growth. During the Dark Ages and prior to that, when the Population of the world was relatively stable, you had a cadre of monks who copied Bibles, encyclopedias, and that Was it. The Renaissance comes along, There’s a big growth of the population, but Bible copying is a 7 year or 10 year process. You put a monk in one end and 10 years or so later a Bible comes out the other end.

 Learning To Read

 Imagine what it was like learning how to read and write in those days. There were no rules of grammar.

 Everyone spelled the way they wanted to. and God help you if you came along and told somebody how to spell. Imagine walking up to Chaucer in the 1300s and saying, “Look, jerko. these double f’s aren’t going to make it!

 They really should be s’s.”

  He would’ve told you to get lost, because he learned how to spell from the fellow who taught him, and after he became a master he decided how words should be spelled. There were so few people who could read. How did they teach? It was a one-on-one thing.

 So there was a big pipe between getting monks in and getting books out. Because if the population grew you had to have more Bibles, or you had people straying from the proper way. And they would stray from the proper way whether they were Moslems or Christians, it doesn’t matter

 •          all human beings like to stray. And then be brought back. Gently. So the printing press was a way to get more production out of copying. I’m told that if you were an author and wanted something printed, they created a typescript especially for you

 •          they looked at your writing and created a typescript. What were they doing? They were copying writing. Now think of the early days of the printing press. Here you’ve just invented this widgit, and instead of having a cadre of copiers, you’ve got a printing press that makes doing these things a lot faster. Now we do spreadsheets fast: then you created words fast.

 So we invent the printing press and turn it on. There must have been a 10.000-fold increase in productivity, right? How long did it take to fill the need for Bibles and encyclopedias? And what happened to all these poor devils who put in printing presses after the pipe was full?

 Vertical Markets

 I’m a guy trying to figure out how to sell computers, so what do I think about vertical markets. Let’s go back and see how that works.

 I’ve got a printing press now, and I’ve sold all the Bibles and encyclopedias the world needs for the next 10 years, and this thing’s sitting here idle. I’ve invested all this capital; I have this plant. It’s always easier to gain weight than to lose weight, and now I’ve got all this fat. How am I going to get rid of it?

 Well, I’ve got to use it some way. Maybe I’ll go into vertical markets. Well, what could I do? Maybe I could gather information about metal and sell it to blacksmiths so they could make other goods as well as horseshoes.

 So I print the book. I take it to the blacksmith. I say, “This is the greatest thing since canned rice. Look what you’ll be able to do with it.” He opens the book and says, “What is this? This is definitely not user friendly.”

 “Well,” I say. “you’ll have to hire a reader to come and read for you.”

 “How much will he cost me?”

“Probably three apprentices.”

 “Oh, really. Well, does he tell me anything?”

 “No, he just reads.”

 “Does he know anything about the metal business?”

 “No, all he does is read. But he’ll read anything you want. He may mispronounce words because they are not always spelled the same. But never mind, you’ll get over that.” And I’m gone, off into another vertical market.

 A New Priesthood

 Just as everybody reads and writes today, I want everybody to program. Am I going to try to make a Shakespeare out of everybody? No, I just want everyone to be able to read and do a little writing. Now how do you translate that to computers? If you can read, then you can use the computer. And if you can write, maybe you can do a database for the dBASE II or III or whatever.

 You have to learn the rules of grammar you have to learn the programming language. You have to learn how to spell.

 So I said, ‘‘This doesn’t stand a chance, because why would anybody ever learn. How did it ever happen?”

 Then I asked myself. “How did our education system ever happen?” Before the printing industry could get where it is now, we had to embark on this huge program of educating everybody. Where were the fringe benefits? There weren’t any. There was no benefit to learning how to read and write. None!

 The church started the school system. Why? Because they wanted to spread the word of God. The monks couldn’t remember everything that was in the Bible, so the church taught them to read, put the Bible under their arms, and pointed.

 And so it started as a fairly modest program: you took a certain subset of the clergy, people who didn’t have the university benefits, and began creating a system to teach them to read and write. Later, I guess, counting, adding, and subtracting were added.

And it slowly grew.

 In those days church and government were a lot closer than they are today. So if the church decided it was a good deal to educate a certain portion of the population, it had almost the force of law. As benefits began to accrue, it began to spread. And it spread fairly rapidly when you consider how unfriendly the printed word is.

 Have you ever seen people who don’t read well, and watched their “oaths? They’re not reading; they’re talking to themselves. That’s how unfriendly the printed word really is. We have adapted ourselves to it. Why? Because of the tremendous benefits. I maintain that it’s possible for everyone to learn how to program. The kind of benefits that might accrue, while probably not as profound as everybody learning how to read and write, still are quite considerable. Then I asked myself. “Is there any force today like the church was then— that could force everybody to read and write?”

 Now maybe I’m wrong here, but I have the right to play with it. I think we’re going to turn into a completely subservient debtor nation if things go on the way they are economically. We are no longer able to economically compete with the rest of the world. Our technology’s all gone. We don’t produce things as well or as fast as other people do in any area, and the few areas that are left are rapidly disappearing. We rely on our economic growth from foreign capital right now. The deficit is so huge, that if we didn’t have a lot of foreign capital, we would not have the excess money to finance the economic growth necessary to fuel the growth of the population and new jobs.

 If we were to completely automate our entire industry, top to bottom, north to south, east to west, then I think we would enjoy productivity. How could you have any productivity advantage over a machine that rims well? Machines do work better than humans.

 The Future Of Computing

 The upshot is that I don’t see the computer industry doing all that well now. because I think we’re at the first wall of the printing press.

 The vast movement of the computer industry isn’t over, except it’s over for guys like me. I’m very happy that it’s not over for guys like IBM and Sperry and NCR, because they’re gonna hit the wall a year or a year and a half from now worse than we ever did. Right now, the government is buying computers like they’re going out of style. But I think the government is going to stop buying just as abruptly as the consumer stopped.

 They’re spending borrowed money now. but they will stop as soon as the computers start falling off the desks, when they become as underutilized there as they did in the homes. And at that time these big guys are just going to be revved up. turning the crank, turning the flywheel at a real good clip — and it’s going to stop, just like it did with us. And there’s going to be blood and guts and bones, and I’m going to be sitting there saying. ’’Well, you got yours.” What’ll happen afterward is that the big guys will leave the business, and then we’ll just have the two of us who are left, and we’ll have a good business, because there is a need for computers, but we just don’t have a need for as many computers as we have right now.

 If my analogy of the printing press is correct, we are the readers, the university graduates of the 1400s. But I maintain that we haven’t started the rules of grammar yet. We were the proper wave to decide the operating system issue. What is good and what is not good in an operating system is now generally recognized. I think the next wave may make an environment to settle these language issues. And I look forward to that, because we’ve got to have an idea of what makes up a good language before we can decide on what the rules of grammar are.