omenti

connecting the titanic, sputnik and dealing with forgetfulness

1955, Fred Whipple had just been appointed to head the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge.  The International Geophysical Year was less than two years away and he wanted to involve citizen scientists as much as possible.  Whipple was one of the few who realized a satellite was likely and set about creating a web of radio operators to monitor and relay transmissions from satellites along with groups of amateur astronomers who could optically track their orbits.  Operation Moonwatch was formed and by Sputnik's launch over 200 teams were in place. 

 

Tracking a satellite was done with a clock and a low power telescopes that could read azimuth and declination.  The National Bureau of Standards time signal broadcast on WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado used as the reference clock and most people into amateur astronomy had a shortwave radio. Readings from stations separated by hundreds of miles were sent by amateur radio operators to a computer at MIT that gave the project a bit of its precious time.  More clusters of readings would come in from around the world and a model of the satellite's orbit generated an ephemerides - predictions of where it would be. Later specialized cameras were developed by Bell Labs to automatically generate satellite ephemerides as well as tracking ICBM tests, but Moonwatch was a success and lit the imagination of a few people.  

 

In physics it's common to turn a problem on its head to gain a bit of insight.  Operation Moonwatch used known positions on earth and an accurate clock to measure a position in orbit.  What if you put synchronized clocks in space and measured how long it took radio signals to reach a position on earth?  With enough satellites with synchronized clocks you could triangulate a position anywhere on the Earth's surface.  The technical details were difficult details, but the basic idea was simple.  

 

It turns out accurate navigation is very difficult and expensive and a limiting factor in fighting the cold war.  It was so difficult that as technology progressed ARPA decided to push ahead with a satellite based global positioning system - the inverse of Operation Moonwatch.  It was a bargain for what it gave to the military.  Finally a good enough signal was made available to civilians and navigation changed.¹ 

 

GPS doesn't work everywhere.  It would be nice to track things indoors and at a lower cost. Bluetooth and WiFi are currently used -  usually measuring signal strength from several transmitting beacons and triangulate a position.  Sometimes it's just proximity to a single beacon - a lighthouse model.   The approaches aren't very accurate - three to ten meters is common.  Good enough to track your phone as you move around, say, in a mall or subway, but doing better would be nice.

 

This is where the Titanic comes in..

 

On April 15, 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg.  Frantic radio signals went out, but there was confusion among rescue vessels and people on land trying to coordinate the rescue effort.  Sometimes it takes a disaster to create order and an effort to regulate radio frequencies began soon after. Transmitters were assigned narrow swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum that were large enough to effectively communicate with receivers that could tune to those frequencies. Regulations changed as larger chunks of this resource were needed - AM radio required more than Morse Code, FM radio even more and television much more. Government would parcel out these increasingly scarce resources, but power was also regulated and it was possible to give much larger chunks to low power short range communications - WiFi and Bluetooth are examples.  Most of radio engineering tried to pack as much information into as little spectrum as possible and to build transmitters and receivers that could be accurately tuned to specific frequency ranges  If you waited for some technology to catch up there was another way (actually several, but I'll only mention one) way to do radio.

 

You may have heard about ultrawideband (UWB).  In the mid 2000s it was supposed to be a good way to send large amounts of information over short distances.  Cheaper and higher bandwidth than the WiFi of the day. Often existing technologies are improved with scale and an embedded base making it difficult for new players.  Sophisticated coding technologies and enormous penetration (WiFi has greater penetration than smartphones) cemented WiFi as the prime high bandwidth low range wireless connection.  In a few years UWB went from redundant to lagging. Many thought it was dead, but it had a few advantages in some use cases.   

 

Here's how it works.  Rather than sending out a precisely tuned narrow band frequency, UWB sends out narrow (in time) digital pulses that "splash" over a very wide frequency range.  The signals are usually only one or two billionths of a second long and aren't sent that often - a hundred thousand to ten million a second are common rates. The frequency range is so wide that usually at least some of it can pass through objects that block signals like GPS and WiFi.  It's also so weak that narrowband communication can't detect it.²

 

 Imagine scattering a few UWB transmitters around where you know their location with some accuracy.  Now start transmitting synchronized pulses.  A receiver notices the time of arrival of each signal and, using the fact that light travels about 30 centimeters in a billionth of a second, can triangulate it's own position.  Accuracy is about ten centimeters - about four inches.

 

A use case I'm familiar with is finding the locations of players in a beach volleyball game.  In international FIVB games a very small (less than a half ounce) UWB device goes in the back of each player's  shirt or sports bra.  Their positions are tracked within ten centimeters about a hundred times a second and accelerometers and a compass send out rotation and orientation information on the UWB signal that the announcers, coaches and sports science people use.  Four transmitters are used and all four players are easily tracked.

 

It would also be useful for augmented reality and Apple has included an UWB chip in every iPhone 11 - the greatest deployment of the technology so far.  For now it's being used for data transfer, but wait a bit.  Someone could also make very cheap ($10 or less) postage stamp devices that might be powered by available light that could be location tags.  Put them on your keys, glasses, remote control .. anything you tend to lose track of.  We went through trying to manage dementia with my mother.  I would have paid a lot for this capability.  And thousands of other uses from amateur sports to tracking boxes accurately in warehouses.

 

There are probably some bad things that can be done with it.  We need to be thinking these things through, but our track record isn't exactly good. 

__________

¹ It also gives a very good frequency standard and a timing signal.  Without this our mobile phone system, high frequency trading and a host of other core technologies we depend on would break.  This is an issue as GPS is vulnerable to attack and we've done almost nothing on backup technologies. 

² The FCC defines it as taking up at least 500 MHz of spectrum somewhere from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz.  Power is under -41.3 dBm/MHz .. or 75 nanowatts.  Since it only deposits a tiny bit of power in any narrowband frequency, it's just below the noise floor of a narrowband receiver.  Fortunately it's straightforward to build a receiver that can detect the signal. 

hacking creativity and collaboration

A recent Bell Labs reunion celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Unix gave me a chance to visit with old friends I hadn't seen in a long time.  Some of the people had moved into industry (Google was a popular landing place) and others found university posts.  I found myself thinking about the differences between the evaluation process of major research universities and the old Bell Laboratories.

 

In a run that lasted about five decades Bell Laboratories - call it Bell Labs Classic - was arguably the most applied research organization in the world.  There were certainly warts and missed opportunities and it effectively came to an end about five years after the mid 80s breakup of AT&T, but it was an astonishing place while it lasted.  I'm continually been struck by differences between that institution and almost everything else I've run into.

 

In universities hiring and promotion (tenure and beyond) is strongly connected to ten or so recommendation letters from leaders of the field in different universities. The authors are almost always experts in the same subspecialty as the junior researcher.  Bell Labs was different. There was an internal ranking that extended throughout the research organization. A department head would rank their people and the results were merged with the rankings from the other department heads in the same center. These rankings would then go through the same process for the next two levels up until a ranking of the entire institution existed. An expert in a field might receive fantastic marks inside their department, but do poorly further up in the process as others might be unaware of them. Interdisciplinary work would stand out and the highest ranked people tended to have one solid speciality along with work in centers far removed from their own.

 

I entered the Labs as an experimental particle physicist. There were a number of physics groups, but no particle physics. I was initially assigned to an applied physics group and found myself working with a number of other groups as I scrambled to find my way. In the process I made connections inside and outside the center and found some encouragement to trade help with others.   All researchers were given the title of  MTS  - member of the technical staff.  It resulted in a certain equality that made approaching others easy.  

 

Most researchers weren't interested in management, but there was one small step up.   If you were in the top ten percent or so for a number of years you became a distinguished member of the technical staff and given more freedom. In my case I was initially given a day a week and resources to do anything I wanted.  Those projects were all collaborations far from my home organization. 

 

Guaranteed funding for pure and applied research went away about five years after AT&T's breakup and folks had to attach their work to business units. It’s what killed Bell Labs, but realistically it was the only logical path for the company at the time. Bell Labs Classic could only exist as part of a regulated monopoly, but that’s another story.  

 

Some universities are playing around with this kind of ranking to stimulate interdisciplinary work. I don’t think it works in industrial applied research.. at least not at scale, but it might be worth considering.  Of course there are different mechanisms in other organizations - places like Pixar - but the difference between Bell Labs Classic and research universities is quite possibly the result of collaboration encouraged by a simple ranking process.

 

giving time a hand

Hold out your palm and point it skyward.  Every second about one muon will strike it.  Muons are the most common remnant of cosmic ray collisions with the upper atmosphere that make it to sea level.  They're responsible for some genetic mutations and even cancers, but the levels are low enough that we really don't have to think or worry about them much.

 

When I was about thirteen I came across a cosmic ray experiment near the summit of Sulphur Mountain in the Canadian Rockies.  I've described the experience before - two young physicists had the patience to explain what they were doing to a kid. When comic rays collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere a lot of debris is produced - mostly in the form of subatomic particles.  Some have very short lifetimes and don't make it far.  Muons live long enough to make it down to sea level.  But there's a twist.  The half life of a muon is about two point two millionths of a second.  Even if it traveled at the speed of light it would have traveled about six hundred and sixty meters.  Most of these collisions take place a few tens of thousands of meters up. The trick is when we look at something moving very fast, time for it appears to run slowly.  The number of muons making it to your hand is a manifestation that time is relative. 

 

My mind was blown

People put up Stonehenge type markers in the prehistory to note seasons and other special dates.  Moving closer to historical times a variety of sundials were developed.  Clouds and night made them problematic and, depending on design and the skill of the observer, they were frequently only good to an hour or so.  Even so the some Romans had no trouble complaining about them forcing a structure on life.  The Romans moved a bit further  timing devices in the form of water clocks and hour glasses.  Water clocks were used to limit debate in the Roman Senate as well as arguments in legal proceedings.  But time was still mostly for special occasions and localized.  Most people relied on an approximate natural rhythm from cues from the sun and stars.

 

The thirteenth century saw the invention most associated with modern time. The mechanical escapement is a bit of cleverness that converts an oscillation into a ratcheted advancement in one direction.  In a clock a pendulum's swing causes a gear to turn one notch at a time.  The first use was in the church with pendulum driven bells to call the monks to prayer.  Several decades went by and dials appeared allowing the visual estimation of time and a key driver of the Industrial Revolution had appeared a few hundred years early.

 

Since then mechanical time managed to penetrate deeper and deeper into society.  The Industrial Revolution demanded workers at factories at certain hours.  Home clocks were affordable to some households, but reliable alarm clocks were still expensive enough that the profession of the knocker-upper - someone you would hire to wake you up by a certain time - persisted in England until the twentieth century.

 

Now we have accurate portable time and increasingly an expectation to make use of our time. And now if clocks were limited to an accuracy of a second every century, much of our modern technology would no longer work.  Sometimes it seems as if we're to be optimizing the time we have.  We're admonished - or we admonish ourselves - against "wasting" time.  For many being bored or having idle thoughts is somehow wrong.

 

Our sense time in our brain is very non-linear and irregular and an active area of study.  Almost certainly there is no master clock.  We seem to have individual interactions.   I find I require a fair amount of idle time to daydream, think and make associations that don't seem to happen when I'm filling my time "slots."  I can only be creative if I'm bored at some level.  

 

When I began to work out of the home I made it a point to take a walk in the woods across the street every day I was around.  You begin to notice the cycle of the seasons, and after a few years other patterns emerge.  It's been about fifteen years now and the experience grows richer with time. Some of this Summer seems to echo with one eleven years ago and other parts seem unique.   There are cycles for the trees, flowers, weeds, deer, wild turkeys, coyotes, bats, weasels and so much more.  You experience some visually, some with sound and some at time and audio scales we normally don't notice (I often take along a microscope or a box that allows me to listen to ultrasound.)

 

Hold your arms out side to side.  Imagine the distance from the furthest tips to be the age of the Earth - something like four point five billion years.  Now take an emery file and take a few swipes from the fingernail that is touching the present.   Now look at that fingernail.   You've completely eliminated the period of human civilization. 

 

I worry that humanity is failing the marshmallow test -  where you give a little kid a marshmallow and tell him there will be two if he can save the one he has for wait for your return.  Many key countries can't visualize the generation or two ahead to confront global warming.  Perhaps we'd be better off if more of us moved a bit away from the forced regulation of our clocks and allowed more opportunity to consider the broader world.

abigail van allen's layer cake - catalyst for the last half of the 20th century

I was in my second year of grad school and had gone to dinner at my advisor's house.  These dinners were always interesting and the deserts were a near match.  That night we had a wonderful homemade cake.  A layer cake rolled in the shape of a log, filled with fresh fruit and coated with a thin layer of bitter chocolate.  One of the guests - James Van Allen - yes the guy the Van Allen belts are named after - remarked on the cake and told us the story about Sputnik starting the space race was all wrong.  The real beginning came years earlier in his living room over his wife's excellent layer cake.  Reality is often more fascinating than the recent history we hear in school.

 

It was around 1953.  Van Allen and a group of physicists were at his home after a formal meeting.  This night a critical step was taken.  After talking about new learnings from balloon and sounding rocket explorations of the ionosphere.  Someone suggested maybe an Earth orbiting satellite would be possible soon.  After all - this von Braun guy was making a lot of noise about space travel being practical.

 

Indeed Wernher von Braun had been trying to popularize space travel.  He had teamed up with science fiction writers and later with Disney and Collier's trying to convince the public. Although von Braun was charismatic, he wasn't taken that seriously.  The only thing the government wanted him for was leading the Army's program to be rockets that could deliver nuclear weapons.

 

Enjoying the excellent cake was someone who could make a difference.  Lloyd Berkner was one of the most respected scientists in the United States.  He had the ear of generals and even the President.  He made an interesting suggestion.  Maybe the way to learn more about near space would be a multination collaboration like one that explored Antarctica.   Given global tensions it could be useful for political reasons and would spread the costs. Larger sounding rockets could be built along with expeditions to the poles.  Maybe even a satellite.   Everyone at the dinner loved the idea and the International Geophysical Year was proposed soon afterwards.  Ultimately dozens of countries and hundreds of scientists were involved.  The target year would be 1957.

 

Van Allen and the other near space guys kept proposing satellites with no luck.  Then, a few years later, Berkner found the key.  President Eisenhower was focused on avoiding WWIII and countering the Soviets.  Something like a satellite for science was nothing but a distraction.  Berkner had used the "it will shock the other side" argument without luck.  Then he changed gears and suggested it could lead to spy satellites.

 

Eisenhower was a general.   Having great surveillance is deeply embedded in military DNA.  Spies on the ground, high altitude aircraft, code breakers .. whatever it took.  The only trick with a satellite, Berkner said, would be to establish Earth orbit as neutral territory.  A small scientific satellite could set a precedent.   Eisenhower agreed and the Navy ultimately won a competition to work on Project Vanguard - a satellite to be instrumented by Van Allen's team. 

 

The Soviet Union's ICBM project was led by a scientist more interested in space flight than ICBMs.  He realized an ICBM would make a dandy satellite launcher and when Khrushchev took power managed to convince him on an ICBM program and added an Earth orbiting satellite would have a great political impact.  Khrushchev agreed, but what he really wanted was a big ICBM.

 

Through the International Geophysical Year interactions it had become clear that the Soviets were building a satellite - indeed that it would launch in the Fall of 1957.  It seemed like a fantastic cap to the year, but the knowledge and excitement didn't go beyond far that group.

 

When Sputnik (fellow traveler) launched it was mostly ignored by the Americans - certainly the government.  The New York Times made a big announcement and people went out to look.  Satellite tracking became almost a hobby for some (that was the genesis for a global positioning system, but that's another story), but America wasn't quaking in fear.

 

The American government was happy - perhaps delighted.  They weren't first, but this little Soviet metal sphere orbited over American territory several times a day.  Precedent had been established. It would take time, but the Americans would get their spy satellites.

 

The story most of us know came from Texas.  Lyndon Banes Johnson worried whoever controlled space could control Earth - an old sci-fi trope.  LBJ also happened to be the Senate Majority Leader.  He gave impassioned speeches about falling behind.  His words resonated with the public and early American rocket failures only increased public anxiety.  

 

And what about Van Allen and the other scientists?  Johnson managed to open the serious money spigot.  It became clear that ICBMs made great satellite launchers with modest changes.  The scientific study of space was a dandy idea to help prove in new rocket technology.    STEM education in the public schools sprang up largely out of Berkeley and MIT.  The world was changing.

 

The Van Allen Belts?  They were discovered using the early Explorer series of satellites in 1958.  The interaction of the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind was beginning to sort out. 

 

So that's the secret .. really good layer cake.

 

moonshine

"Land sakes"

 

A hot Sunday afternoon almost exactly fifty years ago.  My sister and I were on the couch next to my Grandma King.  Walter Cronkite was out connection to the small spacecraft as it slipped towards touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility.  I was just a kid, but I knew this might be one of the most dramatic moments I'd witness.  About then she said those two words and I had another realization.

 

Spacings between the generations on my mother's side were large.  I never met my Grandfather - he died working as a telephone lineman for the Bell Telephone System in Utah, Idaho and Montana years before I was born.  He was born a few weeks before Custer's Last Stand.  Grandma was born in 1889 in the Territorial Utah theocracy.  She would tell stories of the first motor car she saw, of a Butch Cassidy-like thug who ran a small business protection racket, when she read about the Wright Brothers a few years after they flew, and why moving pictures were awful (the batteries emitted a stink).  They didn't have indoor plumbing until 1940, but the big event was getting electricity around 1930 .. bigger than indoor plumbing, bigger than their Ford.  We couldn't get her on an airplane.  Airfares from Great Falls to Salt Lake City were cheaper than riding the dog, but she heard about crashes for much of her adult life .. in fact real air safety didn't begin until the mid fifties, so she wasn't that far off. 

 

And here she was watching glowing phosphors on a piece of glass, listening to a human voices coming from thousands of miles away along with two that had traveled by radio requiring about one and a quarter seconds to find antennas on Earth..

 

What happened in the next few minute was breathtaking, but I found myself wondering if her life spanned greater fundamental change than any other time in history.  Would she see more fundamental change than I would?   You start thinking about what fundamental means,.  It still keeps me up at night.

 

Now there is talk about going back - sending people to the Moon and to Mars.  I'm afraid I don't see it as a big deal and consider it wasteful.

 

Others have articulated what Apollo did for America and the world.  So much was spent - nearly 4.5% of the federal budget was NASA in the mid 60s - that technologies advanced at a much more rapid pace than we'd normally see.   The computer and semiconductor industries were jumpstarted.   Secondary school science education changed and a large STEM pipeline to Universities was created.¹ There was a morale boost for a few years, but it faded against an awful war and dramatic social change on several fronts.  A moon landing, iconic as it was, faded to insignificance in a few years.  The last three Apollo missions were cancelled largely because the public lost interest and politicians responded. 

 

I'm a big proponent of space exploration and the unmanned space program has been brilliant.  Putting people into space is not only expensive, but probably wrong biologically.  We didn't evolve to live in such harsh environments.  Most of the people who have flown in space have orbited in a region where the Earth's magnetic field shields them (and us!) from radiation.   Without Earth's magnetic field it is unlikely life could have evoled on the surface or in shallow water.  Anyone who stays on the Moon or Mars will have to live underground or in elaborate radiation shields.  There are issues of water, air, food, human psychology, low gravity muscle and bone degradation and so on.   We're the wrong tool for the job.

 

People, life support systems and rockets didn't scale by Moore's Law, but computation has.  What a non-human kilogram in space or on another body in the Solar System can do has made leaps opening and now we have commercial businesses exploiting near Earth orbit and students orbiting satellites.  We can build increasingly intelligent probes that are space faring.  Plucky (I've wanted to use that word) robot explorers  are getting better and better and do almost all of the meaningful exploration of the Solar System.  We're really good at building and flying them as well as analyzing and wondering about what they tell us.  

 

There are those who sayt we have to leave Earth - that it's our destiny and we've ruined the Earth.  That strikes me as defeatist and driven by more by science fiction than logic and science.  A failure of the imagination.   Another explanation is adventure.  Adventure is fine, but you can't call it real exploration at this point.   My vote is for learning about the Solar System and beyond in a cost effective way as we work on repairing the damage we've done here.  

 

We can always look up and admire the Woman in the Moon.

 

 

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Grandma King swore in Irish Gaelic.  Sadly I never learned.

__________

¹ I've written quite a bit about the good and bad of the approach.  Arguably it's created an over-supply of scientists at the cost of ignoring and even alienating the majority of students. It's sad it hasn't changed much since.

complete with lighter and ashtray

About a month after Apollo 8 circled the moon my Dad and I traveled the two miles to Malmstrom Air Force Base for a tour of the SAGE installation.  A number of these Semiautomatic Ground Environments were scattered around the country to detect and coordinate a response to bomber attacks from the Soviet Union.  The cost was enormous - more than the Manhattan Project - with the effort resulting in several computing "firsts".    It formed how I thought of computing at the time, blinding me to another more important revolution that was underway.

 

The SAGE building was enormous. It had to be to house the roughly supermarket sized FSQ-7 computer.  These were tube based and designed to be redundant enough that statistically likely tube failures could be repaired by airmen with replacement modules that could be swapped inside of a minute.  Outside the blast hardened building was a large cooling plant to keep everything from melting down. 

 

The big show came with an airman pointing a light gun at a large circular display with radar blips from a number of radar stations. He'd pull the trigger and get some basic information on the airplane - friend or foe id, call sign, altitude, speed and heading.   Should an intruder be spotted, interceptors would be scrambled.  In Great Falls that meant F-106s from the Montana Air National Guard about seven miles to the West on Gore Hill.  It was co-located with the commercial airport.  I believe it was the only commercial airport in the US with nuclear weapons on site.  All this was really impressive, but so was the fact that each of the radar terminals had an ash tray and a cigarette lighter.

 

I thought computers were huge expensive beasts - rare things that I might get to program some day, but certainly not anything that would be part of my life.   It turned out what took place the month before provided a hint that didn't register until much later.

 

While many of the fundamental ideas behind computing had been put together in the fifties and sixties, miniaturization and the real start of Moore's Law really came with the space program.  Simple integrated circuits had been developed, but size and weight requirements on the Apollo command module and the lunar lander called for huge advances.  The advances were borderline unthinkable, but solved with cubic money and outstanding minds.  My favorite example is the Apollo Guidance Computer.  Books have been written and I wouldn't add anything, but here are a couple of gee-whiz links.

 

The first is from Ken Shirriff's terrific retro computing hardware blog. Ken's hobby is reverse engineering ancient electronics and restoring old computers.  In this post he talks about core rope and the guidance computer.  Programs were literally woven into a rope that was a simple core memory system.  It's elegant in a hammer and tongs sort of way.  If you don't know how core memory works go and check out the photographs and skip the technical parts of the text.  It's a remarkable story involving women who could sew and sexism.  And if you have the background it's even more interesting.

 

And here's a nifty Apollo Guidance Computer Simulator.   Print out the instructions or open them in another window and play astronaut!  Just in time for the 50^th anniversary in a few weeks.

 

The dramatic infusion of R&D money built the semiconductor IC industry and established starter markets. There many other stories - like how AT&T and IBM worked together behind the scenes in the 60s and early 70s to bootstrap the necessary tool building. They did it for their own benefit, but without it we might be a decade behind where we are now.  Perhaps a more interesting question might be:  'would that have been a good thing?'  I've been thinking about that a lot recently.

 

the mayor of allentown

You've probably seen this excellent summary of issues associated with the Boeing 737 Max.  The core message seems to be this:

They described a compartmentalized approach, each of them focusing on a small part of the plane. The process left them without a complete view of a critical and ultimately dangerous system." Few people get time to reflect and look at"inessential stuff" and few of those who can care to; they are used to be "focused."

Compartmentalization seems to be the default when it comes to complex systems.  I think it's ingrained in our culture to appreciate specific easily identifiable acts. "Catalysts" and generalists are rarely appreciated.  The move fast and break things mentality in certain quarters combined with interchangeable employees who fit certain descriptions is aspirational in certain quarters and it extends to education.

 

I'm reminded of an internal postmortem of an expensive disaster that occurred in AT&T's Allentown Western Electric facility in the early to mid 1980s.  Western Electric was AT&T's manufacturing arm. The telephone monopoly built a dizzying array of almost everything it used - from relays and wires to telephones and building sized switches.  Digital switches were built around computers and a specialized switching fabric  that required a lot of memory.  Manufacturing capabilities grew with the increasing need and AT&T, along with IBM, was inventing and developing a lot of core manufacturing technology as well as financing key pieces in Silicon Valley and beyond. By the early 80s these two companies were close to the leading edge of IC manufacture.  The Allentown works was Western Electrics cpu, memory and custom silicon location.

 

Western Electric and Bell Laboratories manufacturing and technical directors began to appear for the increasingly specialized subprocesses of a complex larger process.  They'd get together and meet regularly, but they each recognized they owned the most important part of the process. This focus and pride in specialization extended downwards.  In a sense they were sort of right - many of them were critically important.  They optimized their subprocesses measuring what they could find.

 

During the period a guy named Doug (I think) would wander around and talk to people.  Almost no one knew who he reported to, but he was friendly and smart.  Smart enough to let the engineers talk about what was going right and wrong. He'd take doughnuts around and show up at meetings and in the clean rooms.  No one considered him an expert, but the doughnuts were really good.  Every now and again he'd make suggestions being careful to let people feel it was really their idea.  He was given a somewhat derisive nickname - The Mayor of Allentown.

 

Doug worked for an old line director.  Someone who taught other companies how to make transistors in the early 1950s when AT&T, as a monopoly, was required to share their intellectual property.   The director created Doug's position as kind of generalist's glue.  Doug had a master's in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in anthropology. When the director retired the other directors absorbed his groups.  None of them saw any need for the Mayor. - his skillset wasn't specialized enough to give value to the company.  He was given an insulting offer and quit instead.

 

In a few months a series of process disasters cascaded through the works.  Critical switch and computer components weren't available to the people who needed them.  Other parts of the company had to do frantic redesigns to incorporate external parts.  Losses were well over $40 million in early 1980 dollars.  It took six months and an enormous revamp to get back on track.  Western Electric never regained its position as a leading edge manufacturer. 

 

It turns out you can still find excellent doughnuts in Allentown.

 

 

it's switches all the way down

The other day I saw something that a few of you might want to consider for a kid or even yourself - the Turing Tumble Mechanical Computer.  

 

It turns out digital computers are mostly switches.  A lot of switches these days - perhaps a trillion in your smartphone. As a teenager I built a very simple relay based digital computer based on a column in an old Scientific American. Later I built an updated version that substituted transistors for the relays using some (free) components from the high school physics teacher.  

 

Playing with these beasts is an excellent introduction to understanding how logic circuits work.  You'd be surprised how many computer programmers are hazy on the subject (of course they work at a level of abstraction far above the silicon - or what old timers called the iron).  The early machines of the 30s were very important and set the stage for the dramatic developments that followed.  Here's an outstanding non-technical short history of those early days. (recommended!)

 

But back to the Turing Tumble.. It's limited, but that's central to its beauty.  The instruction book has about sixty examples to play with and an aha! just might strike leading to out-of-the-book insights.  

It's also great to play around with extremely simple silicon digital computers - particularly those that you can hook up to sensors, lights and other interfaces to the real world.   But getting down to the basics is usually a paper or YouTube exercise or, if you want to do it yourself,  a frustrating experience involving a lot of soldering and a non-trivial amount of money.   The Turning Tumble might be just the ticket.  It is play and that is the best way I know of to learn. I didn't have much of a chance to play with it and can't do a thorough review, but I'll probably end up buying one to give to a kid.  The caveat is that you have to spend some time with it to learn.  If the user doesn't find it fascinating enough to devote time to there won't be any learning.  But the same can be said about so many things.

 

The education link on their site has the following in addition to a set of resources:

 

Appropriate Age Range

Turing Tumble is for ages 8 to adult - and that is not a stretch! We find that kids 8-12 are able to get through the first 20-30 puzzles. Adults get addicted by puzzle 27, and their minds are blown by puzzle 35. Younger kids enjoy the first 10 and building their own computers.

 

 

THE FUTURE™

I'm certainly not a futurist.  Oh - there are some things I can predict with reasonable accuracy: that one of my ferrets will beg for a banana next week and next year, when an eclipse will happen somewhere, roughly when the Sun goes into its red giant stage...  The easy stuff.  Throw in people and culture and all bets are off.  I've made some informed predictions that were heavily dependent on technologies I knew a lot about that seem precent now, but if I'm honest and look at my old lab notebooks.. well..  I'm batting 200 at best.¹

 

Since then I've learned a bit more.   New business ideas can appear and develop rapidly, sometimes in a year or two.  Big technology leaps usually depend on basic research and are less frequent appearing at  twenty to forty year intervals.  They're often difficult to notice early on and are accompanied by widely negative and positive projections.  Then there is culture.  We - our basic needs, desires and dreams - evolve at a very slow rate.  Typically thousands of years.  Understanding this is critically important to thinking about the future.   I like to identify what preoccupies people and where future conflict is likely.

 

My model of the near term - say up to twenty year - future involves four areas.  There are probably more.  

    ° what is technically possible (understanding the combination of multiple technologies and a bit of the basics is important.)

    ° what is economically feasible and what are the externalities

    ° regulations and standards

    ° people, culture and social acceptance

   

There's a forest and trees problem.  You have to understand why a certain product or service is popular to see if it's something fundamental or if it's just a manifestation of the possible.  A few years ago people were running around playing Pokemon Go.   Many got excited about augmented reality games and saw this as the future. In fact it was a fad that quickly died out.  It was made possible when the quality and user cost of wireless networks and smartphones got to a point where enough people had them to allow a novel experience.  The underlying importance was the convergence of a good enough network and smartphones.  

 

When a wheel is invented you have to sort out what is a bicycle and what is a hula hoop.  We have a lot of hula hoops.

 

About ten years ago a few of the titans of Silicon Valley pronounced privacy dead.  Lots of people agreed.  I'm guessing almost none of them had any understanding of what privacy is and how it has developed over the past two hundred years.  It's very complex but anyone making decisions needs to understand the history and conflict and why modern notions are still unsettled.   Now we see two huge chastened firms claiming to go all in on privacy (I don't trust one and only partly trust the others).  I'll go out on a limb and claim it will still be a major issue at least two decades out.. probably more.

 

A few words on externalities, but it can get involved.  You can think of great projects that make enormous financial sense on longer time scales that are problematic.  Dealing with climate change and proper sanitation are two excellent examples.  Technology exists to solve both, but the people who benefit most are not those who invest.  

 

Prediction is difficult.  It takes a smart multi-disciplinary team and a rigorous process. You need to understand the past. There can be good success with the bicycle and hula hoop class questions.  Identifying new wheels are likely to be a once in a career issue if you're lucky.    All of these things are well above my pay grade.  I'm continuously reminded how simple physics is.

 __________

¹ In 1992 using, Moore's law and the notion that the Internet and wireless were so desirable that hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment would happen, I suggested in 2017 people would hold a piece of glass in their hand and have have a video connection with a friend halfway around the world and that "call" would effective be free.  The hardest part, in my mind, was the battery.  There were a few other seemingly clever calls, but more than a few duds.  At least there's the realization that I, along with many colleagues, did better than the very expensive futurists the company hired,

 

 

 

RrdD: how a lot of new stuff happens .. (sort of)

The ripped and stained vinyl covered seat of some lost color puffed a cloud of tobacco smoke when I sat down.  It wasn't the worst seat in the room.  One wall of the windowless basement room was a painted green chalk board.    Over forty years had gone by and it was still called the opium den.  Someone had brought a box of doughnuts from the shop next door.  Fifteen was their  bakers dozen.  I was lucky to have been in this place before the building was torn down.  You could feel the presence of history.

 

In the late 1940s at the Bell Telephone Laboratories an acronym for inventing the future of electronics and telecommunications appeared in the technical journal.

    RrdD

Big R, little r, little d, big D:  pure research, applied research, investigatory/inventive development and development at scale. It was supposed to be a path from a discovery in the laboratory to the next marvel you'd use anywhere from five to fifty years out.  Parts of the labs and the Western Electric manufacturing arm were organized to support that path.  There was just one little problem.  That's not how things happen in the real world.  Some bits of it work sometimes, but it influenced how people think.  That said it's a useful framework.  You can identify the pieces, but they may not appear where you think they will.   I have a lot of experience in R, r and d.  I'll spend most of the post talking about little r as it's the one that often brings dramatic change.  It's probably the one to study if you worry about change, but it's often impossible to see the early signals unless you're a participant.  You need to be playing the game.

 

First a bit on "pure" research.  Science as we know it really didn't develop until the early 19^th century.  One of the great inventions of that century was the modern natural science laboratory.  It was a radical departure from anything people had seen and was best exemplified by the creation of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge around 1870.  A half century later the modern large government lab grew out of Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley and the Bell Telephone Laboratories started to become a formidable industrial lab. All of these places supported pure research - research with the primary aim was understanding Nature better.  It was assumed that some of these discoveries would be useful and it was important to have people intimately familiar with the discoveries as well as finding some practical use.  It was an important step as the pure research was becoming very expensive to justify as pure curiosity.  

 

Pure is a bit tainted.  A feature of science is when you look at something in a new way - a better telescope, microscope, particle accelerator - you often learn things beyond your wildest imagination.  Technology drives instrumentation.  Computers and exotic electronics and materials fuel better views of Nature so scientists find themselves inventing and perfecting new tools in addition to using commercial tools that came from engineering organizations.  

 

There's an interesting story about the global positioning system.  Shortly after the USSR orbited Sputnik in 1957 the US launched a frantic effort to track satellites.  It enlisted thousands of amateur astronomers and high school students with a dirt-cheap azimuthal spotting scope.  You'd record your latitude and longitude, find the satellite, read off a couple of numbers and note the time.  The largest source of error was accurate timing.  It was recommended people use a shortwave radio and tune to the time standard at WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, but even then human reflexes got in the way.  A physicist was part of the team and wondered what it would be like if these trackers had their own accurate clocks - atomic clocks. It wasn't practical, but he flipped the problem in his mind.  What if the satellite had it's own clock?  If you had several in orbit you could calculate your position to great accuracy. That was the holy grail of navigation.   There were a lot of details to work out and it wasn't technically possible at the time, but it resurfaced at the government research organization DARPA about fifteen years later when they realized you could do it for a few tens of billions of dollars.  A bargain given the need.

 

With that, on to little r:

 

A century ago a little polytechnic school in Pasadena created  the premiere astronomy program in the world.  A few other brilliant people outside of astronomy were attracted and the school was transformed.  They needed some technical goals to grow past pure science.   The hottest game in the technical world was electrifying the country.  It seemed like magic.. spin a bunch of copper wires in a magnetic field with steam or moving water and make a light bulb come on in a home a hundred miles away.  For many it was more desirable than indoor plumbing and universities, companies and politicians were falling over each other trying to make it happen.  It seemed to be the natural problem for an electrical engineering program to work on.  The folks at Caltech looked studied it and came to the conclusion that the fundamental problems had been solved - it wasn't worth the effort if you were trying to make a major impact.  Rather they decided to work in more basic areas and trust that practical developments would take place. Not in one person or even a department, but if they cleverly linked departments and had people float around a bit..    They went long and deep with the blessings of their leadership.

 

It paid off. They developed an understanding of earthquakes, aerodynamics, and biochemistry.  They developed a rich understanding of the emerging field of quantum mechanics and were able to make contributions in solid state physics - the key to semiconductors and computing.   But the big steps didn't seem to follow naturally.    In the late forties the transistor form Bell Labs was regarded as an exciting curiosity.  They were difficult to manufacture and didn't amplify as well as tubes.  Early devices had a high failure rate.  Bell Labs saw them as being useful for long distance telephony.  A bit later on, as the solid state physics of silicon developed it became clear that you could capture the energy of the sun with silicon and the solar cell was invented. And some people in Caltech were finally positioned to help change the world.   But let's go back to the opium den.

 

My first director was a young Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs in the early fifties.  The Labs, as part of AT&T's agreement with the government to exist as a regulated monopoly, had to make most of its inventions available for very modest and sometimes non-existent licensing fees.  He had become an expert on one of the early types of transistors and tricks used to make it  and was in Allentown, Pennsylvania teaching a master class to two in the opium den. One of the two at the table liked the doughnuts, but both were probably wishing for sushi. Akio Morita and a Japanese physicist had traveled from the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation - a tiny Japanese tape recorder company.  They wanted to make smaller tape recorders and were hoping the lower power demands of a transistorized amplifier would make a difference.  They were also interested in the high frequency characteristics and the possible use in a radio receiver.  They asked a lot of questions and managed to survive the room and its doughnuts. Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation later became known as Sony and the transistor radio was a breakthrough product. 

 

By the late fifties a core of R and r people from Bell Labs left to start Fairchild in the Bay Area.  There were some connections to Berkeley and Stanford, but for more fundamental work, to Caltech where some of these people had done their degrees.  Early transistors were about the size of the eraser on a pencil with three wire leads coming out. They were hand assembled and had to be individually tested and then soldered into circuit boards mostly for military and telecommunication applications.  Until it was realized you could turn them into switches.  Suddenly it made sense to build transistorized computers.  Transistors were still too expensive and the tube industry wrote white papers telling people not to waste their time and money.   Few realized one door was closing and another opening.  

 

Radical change seems to come out of left field.  There's rarely an "aha!" moment. People who have done the most impactful work will tell you they've been frustrated working at something for a long time meeting with failure after failure.  They end up trying something different and wonder why it seems to be working differently than expected.  There are still failures, but also a series of promising developments.  Some of these are little ahas!, but the final result is often anticlimactic.  

 

There was a twenty year period when electrification technology went from almost zero to having almost all of the basics sorted out.  There was still an enormous amount of work and investment required to bring electricity to America and large areas of the Earth are still in the dark today, but during this amazingly intense period when almost every good engineer seemed focused on the problem until a certain maturity was achieved and progress slowed dramatically.  About the time electrification was slowing, radio lit up.  Ten to fifteen years and most of the basics had been worked out.  We still use designs that date back to the twenties.  Television followed a similar path during the 30s.  The North American NTSC standard dates to 1941.  Post WWII advances like color were much less radical in scale than the early developments.  And the earliest precursor to the Internet sprang up in the early 70s.  By 1985 most of the necessary technical leaps had been made.

 

After each one of these hot engineering periods people wonder if that's the end of progress.  It never is.  To drop in a bit deeper consider the solid state electronics revolution that began at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, 

 

The cold war created strong demands for radar, computers as well as general miniaturization.  Money was flowing and engineers were focused mostly on dealing the the problems of tube based computers (there's a separate story on computer architecture that I'll leave out for now).  Exotic materials in the tubes to make them last long enough that a computer might work for a day evolved into computers that could have sections die and still keep working. It had been discovered that transistors could be switches and from that you could build all of the logic elements a digital computer required.  The problem was cost and reliability.  IBM stated making some of the first practical solid state computers, but there were a series of wack-a-mole class problems.  

 

Robert Noyce was also frustrated by these problem.  He came up with connecingt them on the silicon with metallic runners that were created as part of the manufacturing process.  He added a few passive components and had invented something he called the integrated circuit.  It was completely out of left field, but helped solve some of those pesky connection problems. Suddenly an entirely new direction had been found.  The focus shifted to increasing the density of devices on the chip.  

 

Carver Mead started wondering, assuming you had the manufacturing technique to make things arbitrarily small, what the practical limit of "micro" was.  As part of what started as a back of the envelop exercise he found factors conspiring with each other in such a way that it should be possible to make working complex devices near the region where quantum mechanics would become an issue - you should be able to make working ICs more than a million times denser than the state of the art at the time.   Gordon Moore was also working in this area and observing progress to date and understanding Carver's clear blue skies, wrote a document that became known as Moore's Law.  It isn't a natural law, like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity, but rather a permission.  It provided people with the belief that fundamental road blocks didn't exist - or at least wouldn't for decades.  You might only see a generation - a year and a half or so - ahead, but if you worked hard you'd get there.  Then there would be a new set of hurdles you could set your eyes on a conquer - but it would be possible for someone to take them down.   It was a permission slip and  probably the most optimistic document in all of engineering and technology.

 

There isn't any isolated pure research in solid state electronics.  The tools and money are in advanced development and production. It is where that part of Nature is most easily studied.  Researchers work in these areas informed by the fast moving problems.  It's somewhat different from the natural sciences and you ignore manufacturing technology at your peril (arguably Intel has fallen victim as have many others).   Now back to the late sixties.

 

Laying out dozens and then  hundreds of logic elements was becoming a difficult task.  The design progress had become a bottleneck for logic based ICs and people were inventing frustrating solutions that weren't solutions.  Wack-a-mole.  The herd is working very hard, but some people get frustrated and realize there's something wrong with the zeitgeist. A few had the freedom - or have managed to create it for themselves - and wander off in other directions.  There was failure but enough little successes and hints to keep going. Federico Faggin had the idea to put enough of an array of logic elements on a chip that he could make it a programmable general purpose computer.  His four bit 4004 microprocessor with a few thousand transistors ignited a revolution was created.  

 

Microprocessors were complex beasts and enormously difficult to design.  Carver Mead had been working on improving design languages and ended up creating a new direction with his silicon compiler.  It was now possible to design very complex chips in a language designers would work with and debug - not unlike the compilers and debugging tools used in software development only rather than an executable program the output was a "tape out" that would let an electron beam writing tool create a set of photomasks used to manufacture the chips.  It became possible for people to design chips without owning a manufacturing plant.

 

Even now there's a new revolution underway. People were building supercomputers in the 80s and 90s as they had for two decades before for scientific tasks, but it was felt they'd be needed for perceptive systems and the next generation of artificial intelligence. Conventional digital computers aren't exactly well matched to these fuzzy perceptive tasks.   A few people had been playing with neural networks and a couple of architectural advances had been made along with the realization that simple processors used in gaming computers could be used as building blocks.  This new class of fuzzy computing is still being sorted out, but it works with a tiny fraction of the energy and cost required for equivalent work on a supercomputer. It even exists in smartphones.

 

I don't think we're at the beginning of that exciting twenty year period for quantum computing yet - but it's probably coming. 

 

So that's what would have been called little r research ..  the process that makes dramatic pivots in technology possible.  You can't create them with market research .. that approach is exactly backwards and there are tragic examples.  It's remarkable that you find yourself with something new that you intended to solve a problem with and suddenly a thousand new other solutions to other problems - problems you couldn't have dreamt of - become available. This is a great example of why trying to predict the detail of future technologies doesn't work.  

 

What happens in what was once called little d .. advanced development .. is also fascinating.  Only a few organizations have managed to pull it off more than a couple of times.  I'll write about it somewhere down the road.