SFWEM.NET is the San Francisco Wireless Emergency Net, which is a mesh network that’s being built out by amateur radio operators with the intention of being a communications backup in time of emergency — when phone and data networks may be locally overwhelmed or not functional. Beside that, however, it’s an interesting experiment for amateur radio operators seeking to understand the benefits and limitations of “wi-fi” as a long-distance tool.The wi-fi that most people know is range-limited and often flakey.  SFWEM works with directional antennas that have far greater range, and with higher radio power (permitted to amateur radio operators) on a band of radio frequencies not available for public use. So rather than being stuck with a 50-foot maximum range, we can get good connections over distances of 20+ miles. The connections are still line-of-sight, meaning that one antenna must be able to literally “see” the antenna on the other end that it’s connecting to. Any buildings, trees or hills in between the two will reduce or eliminate the signals.

So the idea is to create a mesh or network of interconnected stations to cover the space — in this case the northern end of San Francisco Bay, and soon the southern end of Marin County — with stations that automatically relay communications from one node of the mesh to the next. And as long as even one mesh node has a connection to the Internet, all of the other interconnected mesh nodes can reach the Internet (and each other).

My “interconnection” consists of the packet radio station, which is linked to the amateur packet radio network in the area (in my case to KE6JJJ in Bernal Heights, and to NøARY in the South Bay). And two nodes on the SFWEM mesh. The link between the two is software. A JNOS software system running on a Raspberry Pi4 computer. JNOS can send and receive messages on the packet side, and can send, forward and receive messages using regular Internet-based email.

The whole setup is currently solar powered. Summer in San Francisco is cold, and sometimes foggy, but there are enough sunny days that the batteries can make it. (Winter, with different sun angles, is a bit more challenging.) Currently (May 2021) I’m testing to determine how long the solar powered system can supply both the packet and the SFWEM systems, as well as solving some issues with how many different voltages are required for all of this equipment, and how efficient the whole power supply thing can be.

Lots more to say; enough for now.

The post Packet and SFWEM interconnects appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Very techie here… For a few months I’ve been operating a packet radio station on a 2-meter radio frequency here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I explored what it would take to make this a full “BBS” (like an online “forum”), and then backed off and let it just hang around n this frequency listening to the other (mostly BBS) stations. A few days ago, I got interested in graphing the data to better understand what stations were using the frequency and when.

The chart is made by this process:

• JNOS (the software that runs the packet radio station) logs all data it hears on the radio;
• A Python script analyzes this log file, keeping track of what stations were heard in each hour;
• The Python creates javascript data in a form acceptable to Google Charts;
• The javascript is transferred to a web server;
• PHP code reads the javascript and inserts it in an HTML page;
• Google Charts javascript fashions the data into the interactive chart.

A “cron” job carries out this process once each hour to keep the chart data current. Because each data bucket spans a whole hour, there’s no need to update more than once an hour.

The post Visualizing packet traffic appeared first on Sky's Blog.

In amateur radio circles there’s much use of digital modes to exchange information. (In olden days it was almost exclusively limited to “chatting” on the air.) At least in the circles I’m running in these days this is true. “Packet radio” involves putting a computer on the front end, which then controls the radio, connecting to other packet radio stations and transferring messages digitally. At the lowest level the software has a command-line interface (accessed via radio), and at its highest level, it is basically supporting programs that exchange email (again, by radio, not thru the Internet).

Later articles:
° Packet and SFWEM Interconnects
° Visualizing Packet Traffic

My packet radio station operates on 145.07 or 145.09 mHz (also known as “2 meters” and mail is exchanged by “connecting to” AA6AX-1 via that radio. If you need to email me about this, please use the email address packet@aa6ax.us.

The station uses a Raspberry Pi 4 as the computer, and I use VNC to view the virtual “screen” of the RasPi and interact with the system. The radio is a cheap 2-meter transceiver, and a circuit board in a box called a “TNC” attaches to the computer and controls the radio. The photo shows the RasPi (about 4 inches wide) on top of the slightly-larger TNC. Plug it all into electrical power, add a radio with an antenna, and it’s on the air.

Read more about this packet radio setup in the PDF file.

(More aa6ax info.)

This diagram shows the components of the packet station. Most notable are the Raspberry Pi computer (the “RasPi”), with the reddish TNC-Pi on the top, connecting it to the radio. The radio has an antenna, and is connected to a power source.

The computer itself is on the local network, and the VNC software lets me view its “screen” on my own computer, and use my mouse and keyboard as if they were directly connected to the RasPi computer. It’s kind of a virtual computer.

The post Packet Radio Notes appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Does that sound odd? First of all, what’s a phone for if you don’t answer it? But second, who answers the phone any more, given the overwhelming volume of spam calls we receive every day?

You’re probably thinking “Why is he even asking this? When was the last time I answered a phone call?”

Why do I say I had to answer my phone? Well, I had called a US government agency in order to set up an appointment at that government office. First, I waited on hold for 50 minutes trying to reach them. They have no “local” phone number here in San Francisco, only a big national call center. So to make a local appointment, you have to reach the call center, which means waiting 50 minutes. Then talking with them, they agreed it made the best sense to go to the local office. “We’ll give you a callback to schedule that appointment.” Huh? I wait for 50 minutes and then they can’t make an appointment, they have to call me back?

“So what’s the best time to reach you?” “Well,” I answer, “Daytime. Nighttime. Anytime. I don’t care.” And they respond “We can’t do that. We need a one-hour window. We will attempt to call you during that one hour window some time during the next five days.” In other words, they pick a single hour during which I have to answer my phone for possibly five days in a row. Well how hard would it be for them to just call me whenever they have an agent available? Like maybe on Tuesday. Nope. Instead they have to use one single hour of the day, but any time in the next five days.

(This is worse than waiting for the cable company to fix my equipment. At least they tell me what day they’ll be here.)

OK, I thought that was bade enough, but… they won’t tell me what number they will call from. They’ll just call from some random phone number. Meaning that during my availability times I have to answer every call that comes in — something I never do because of the volume of spam calls.

So I tried it because I had no alternative. During my first day of availability, during my “best time to call me hour,” I got a call in the first 4 minutes. Spam. Of course. Then after 20 minutes, another. Spam again. And so forth. During the four hours I answered calls that day, I got a dozen calls. All spam. Yes 12 spam calls. No real people at all.

It occurred to me that actually I hardly ever answer my phone any more unless the caller is in my address book. And that in trying to schedule things, I actually never call people on my phone. Instead I email them or “text message” them. And, in fact, email is increasingly going unanswered by my friends. The only way to really reach someone is to message them. I know this has happened with the younger generation, but now I find it extending up into people in their 70s.

So my question is — and you can just think about this if you want to — no need to really answer: 1. Do you still answer your phone (if the caller isn’t in your address book); 2. When did you stop?

If you do answer, I probably won’t answer your call. Hahahah. Just think about how your own behavior has changed.

The post When did you stop answering your phone? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

In the subway stations, an automated display shows commuters the position of trains system-wide. (A “train” is one or two articulated cars coupled together.) Your station is in bright yellow. Trains are represented as little colored balls containing the route designation J, K, L, M, N, T (and at times a shuttle “S” which runs only underground). The other day there was some kind of failure at one station (Van Ness) outbound (toward the left, on the upper line in the photo), causing trains to back up almost nose to nose all the way down the Market Street subway. Stations are the gray rectangles “VAN NESS” etc. and stations are about 4 blocks apart.

There were 24 trains backed up outbound at this time in less than a 3-mile stretch. Just remarking on this because I’ve never seen a backup like this one. Wild!

The post Olympic-size Backup appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] in the United States has voted to nullify the common carrier status of ISPs, and thus to kill net neutrality, but of course other nations may not do so and I think there are customer actions that could make it difficult for carriers to run roughshod over this principle. The FCC calls their own action “Restoring Internet Freedom” and I, along with millions of others, contend that it’s only restoring the freedom for carriers to differentiate and prioritize, and charge as they see fit, making it more difficult for us common folks in the long run.

On the positive side, improved and more timely data service seems really attractive. People want it. Faster and stutter-free movies. Voice-over-IP calls without interruptions. Gaming and hugely-fast downloads. So there is actually some consumer pressure to prioritize.

Personally I think most of this is “entertainment motivated” in that the customers who care will be mostly the “consumers” — not businesses and not nonprofits. That’s because even if ISPs charge businesses more for these premium prioritized services, the big businesses will pony up and pay for it. Small businesses and individuals will be less able to do this, and that’s a big part of the problem.

So here’s how I think things will play out:

Advertising — The first thing that’ll happen, and it will be soon, though it’s not specifically limited by net neutrality, is that ISPs will look at your web usage and keep track of the sites you visit. They’ll make money by selling this data to third parties. Are you visiting Amazon.com a lot? You’re probably shopping. Are you visiting REI.com a lot? You’re shopping for outdoor gear. Visting Toyota.com a lot? Shopping for a new car. This kind of information is of great use and worth money to retailers, advertisers, car manufacturers. This kind of data is already commercially shared from web sites to advertising networks, but when ISPs can gather and sell this information, they’ll make money from it. And what’s more, ISPs can collect the data without your knowledge, and without leaving any evidence that they are doing so. Other web sites and advertisers do not have that advantage.

An ISP can also sniff the content of your (unencrypted) email, or your file downloads, which is something a web site cannot do. In other words, the ISP can create an open book full of information it can sell, because it is capable of monitoring every unencrypted communication you make through its connection. You may know that Google’s gmail can sniff your gmail traffic and will present advertising based on the contents of your mail — the ISPs would be able to do this regardless of where your email is held, if the connections are unencrypted.

The Let’s Encrypt project, which has ramped up mightily in the past year, aims to make it easier to protect traffic between you and the web sites you use, by making web site content unreadable by ISPs. The ISPs can still see which sites you use and how long you’re using each site, but when a web site is encrypted (HTTPS) the ISP can’t see which pages you’re viewing, nor what content you’ve viewed or submitted. (And you can also protect all of your network traffic from your ISP using a VPN, which I’ll discuss later.)

So here’s how I think this is all going to play out over a time period of one to three years (2018 to 2020):

The Inspection Scenario — To shape and prioritize your traffic, the ISP wants to understand (and prioritize) the type of data packets you’re sending. In theory and as far as the technology is concerned, all packets are just binary data, but in practice an ISP can look inside those packets (see deep packet inspection) and make conjectures about which ones are video, or audio, or gaming, or file transfers, and could treat them differently. Such as giving them higher or lower priority. Or charging more for some kinds of data. And because the carrier knows where your packets are going (meaning Disney, or YouTube or Netflix), it can differentiate and then prioritize based on financial agreements it may have (or interests) in those endpoints. So I predict that ISPs, who already have the capability to examine content, will be differentiating in some way based on your content as early as 2018.

Premium Services Plan — If the network manager has the capacity to examine your data, it could charge more for certain types of data — for the data that has more value to you. In other words, the carrier might “take a cut” of the economic value of the packets. This would be a lot like your phone company charging you more money to call a bank than to call a barbershop. Doesn’t happen to phone calls because the phone company (in the US) is a common carrier and regulated thus by the FCC. But that’s what Net Neutrality did for data carriers — and that’s now been rescinded by the FCC. I predict that ISPs will announce premium pricing for some types of content by 2019 — starting with voice-over-IP or video — and will promise to prioritize such types of traffic, for that price.

Transfer of costs to the supplier — Using a process we call zero-rating, an ISP may make certain types of content effectively free to its customers. They could make web access free, but inject advertising. They could make music “free” as T-Mobile has (meaning certain sites are free). Or throttle the delivery of (low-quality) video as Verizon has. Zero-rating has the effect of making other content more expensive, and of excluding content or providers based on criteria invisible to the customer. I predict that during 2018 more ISPs will first offer to accelerate certain content (such as video) for a price to the customer, then begin soliciting suppliers themselves to underwrite this, and eventually contend that this saves the end user from having to bear this cost.

Premium Sites Plan — The network manager could also charge customers more, or give more reliable or faster service, for traffic from specific providers. “Get your Disney movies faster and without glitches – $19.95 a month” is what I’d expect to hear within a few years. This would be done by prioritizing all traffic from Disney to you. Or any set of providers. Web sites. Email. And so forth. Any service the ISP thinks it can charge extra for, it will. I predict that by 2019 we will see Top-100 Premium Sites Plans from ISPs. Something that would have been illegal under the Obama-era FCC rules of net neutrality.

HTTPS (web) encryption — We’ve already reached the point where around half of web sites use HTTPS encryption to keep pages and submitted forms private. This will increase to 90% by 2020 and will frustrate the ISPs ability to look inside your interaction with these web sites.

Encrypted email — Here I’m pessimistic. People using standalone email, such as Apple Mail or Entourage, Outlook, Thunderbird apps on computers, have had encryption available for 20 years, though it hasn’t been easy to use until the last year or two. I predict email encryption will only slightly increase by 2020. However, more and more customers use outlook.com and gmail.com and services that use HTTPS encryption on their webmail interfaces, which renders email contents opaque to ISPs. This is a mitigating factor that will continue to improve the privacy of email, except that the email hosting company can, of course, still read your mail.

The Resistance — How could you prevent this kind of predatory behavior? Well even today, you could use a Virtual Private Network [VPN] to encrypt everything between your computer and the net. The encrypted packets are tunneled to another location (beyond your ISP), where they emerge onto the public Internet. For example, if you’re in San Francisco using “BigBad ISP” as your ISP, your computer might encrypt everything and send it to New York City, where it might emerge on a “GoodGuy ISP” network. BigBadISP would lose the ability to examine your data, and consequently could only charge you one rate for all traffic. That wouldn’t prohibit GoodGuy from doing something on its end, of course, but presumably you’d choose to emerge in friendly territory. I predict that by 2018 VPNs will be used by 20% of individuals and that ISPs will discourage their use by limiting VPN traffic. I predict that by 2019 ISPs will differentially charge more for VPN traffic from non-business customers or will require that customers upgrade to more expensive business or “Pro” plans in order to use a VPN. And I think that by 2020 ISPs will block VPN traffic from consumer accounts.

Higher Priced Privacy — And with VPNs blocked, ISPs will offer “Privacy services” for an additional price. In other words, if your ISP can’t see and make money off your traffic, they’ll charge you more to pay for the difference.

So the bottom line here is that businesses are in the business of making money by offering services. ISPs have offered connectivity for many years. That connectivity was priced initially based on bandwidth, then on data volume (particularly for mobile data), and now ISPs want to price their service on the value of the data. They’ll attempt to charge both their customers and the businesses who want to interact with their customers. They’ll offer “prioritized” services for an extra fee where there was no fee before. They’ll throttle services that don’t comply.

Because they can inspect customer behavior and data, they’ll profit by monetizing the value of the information about their own consumer customers. If that becomes difficult because of encryption, they’ll charge the customer an extra fee to protect his own data, under the guise that this is an improvement.

Net neutrality, and its interpretation under law, has largely protected consumers from this scenario for years. Now you have my predictions about how it could all unravel in just a few years.

The post After Net Neutrality appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The Role of the ISP — Individuals and companies who have their own networks interconnect those nets by plugging in through Internet Service Providers [ISPs]. And in turn, each ISP is linked to “upstream” network providers, and through those to a group of very large carriers who form what’s called the Internet backbone. It’s not just a two-dimensional backbone, but itself is a distributed network of very-high-speed carriers with real-world physical interconnection points. There are many possible routes from an end user to another end user through this backbone. The big providers do what is called peering at these interchange points, where they are all peers, handing off traffic from one to the other with the flow based, of course, on how much traffic is going in any given direction, but otherwise “equally” in terms of priority.

There is, of course, nothing to prevent companies from creating their own private networks to route their traffic faster or more directly than the Internet can route it, but the flexibility and particularly the ubiquity of the Internet makes it ferociously attractive even for private data exchanges.

Each ISP collects fees from its customers, and it then purchases its upstream connections (meaning connections “closer to the backbone”), paying more or less based on the bandwidth of those connections. That’s how upstream ISPs make their money. And they pay the backbone providers for connections. And so forth.

Bandwidth — From the earliest days of the Internet, ISPs have provided service based primarily on the bandwidth (bits per seconds) provided to customers.

In the 1980s, a regular guy like me might buy dial-up service, which could run at maybe 1,200 bits per second [bps]. My blue graph illustrates relative speeds from dial-up on the bottom to T1 dedicated service on the top. Dial-up services (which includes ISDN)  reached higher speeds with better equipment (called modems – which connected a computer to a phone line). Even higher speeds could be achieved with dedicated lines rather than dial-up. ISDN reached 64,000 bps, but required two dedicated pairs of copper wires. The “T1” line, spoken of in hushed reverent tones in the 1990s, was a repurposing of the phone company’s internal T1 lines, which bundled 24 basic lines together into a single channel at about 1.5 million bits per second [mbps].

As digital services proliferated, the T1 became less useful, with DSL and ADSL speeds several times faster, and consumer cable Internet going up to nearly 80 mbps at the fast end of that spectrum. My red graph shows the T1 at the bottom end of the data services at 1.5mbps, and cable Internet at the top with around 80mbps. There are also fibre services where the speed of cable is kind of the low starting point, and service may reach 1,000 mbps (1gbps) at the top end.

Ah, but my point is that ISPs used to really sell bandwidth and your monthly price would be linked to the speed of your connection to your ISP.

• If you multiply out the bandwidth times the number of seconds a month, it would give you a theoretical maximum amount of data your ISP might be carrying in a time period. A phone line running at 1,200 bps would carry a max of about 30 billion bits (about 3 gigabytes) in a month, for example, though typically you’d be using only a fraction of that.
• As data services developed, businesses bought “T1” and higher-speed lines from their ISPs. Today’s DSL services at 6 mbps theoretically could carry about 15 terabytes [TB] in a month (15,000 gigabytes). And consumer cable data services could carry more than 10 times that amount of data, or more than 200 TB in a month.

Bandwidth and Capacity — As with any network that carries traffic — think interstate roadways, for example — a network is built with enough capacity to handle only a small percentage of the total possible traffic. Otherwise, the vast majority of routes would remain almost empty most of the time.

Engineering a Network’s Capacity — So there’s an “engineering” problem that always has to be solved — deciding how much capacity to actually build or turn on (to “provision”). (But look up the term dark fibre sometime if you want to know more.) Carriers need to be able to handle realistic peak traffic, but not maintain excess and therefore unused capacity.

Managing Network Traffic — And when a network gets close to capacity, the network manager wants to manage traffic in some way to avoid complete gridlock. In fact, large network managers claim that this is the primary reason to eliminate net neutrality – because they claim it hampers their ability to shape traffic when it peaks.

Why Limited Bandwidth and Net Neutrality are enemies — So carriers want to be able to prioritize (”shape”) traffic (and presumably charge someone more for priority traffic). Makes sense, huh? If the network is clogged, wouldn’t you as customer want your real-time video or audio calls to get through. And wouldn’t you agree to postpone delivery of spam, or delivery of traffic that’s not time-critical? That’s the genesis of the term Quality of Service [QoS], which deals with finding ways to ensure the delivery of high-value communications. But the question is who sets the priorities. Certainly one user would like to prioritize his video or audio. And another might prioritize her online real-time gaming. So here is the one crucial sentence in my argument:

In other words, to belabor my point, if there were no principle of net neutrality the carrier could prioritize and give more timely delivery to the prioritized traffic.

And to belabor my further point, if prioritization is allowed, carriers can and will charge more for it, will make special rules that benefit themselves (and their associated companies and services), and will begin restricting other traffic. This is the origin of today’s whole hullabaloo about net neutrality. (And with which I am in agreement, as you can see.)

So in a nutshell, this is why carriers don’t like net neutrality:

1. ISPs and other carriers already build out (or “provision”) less capacity than they sell to their users. For statistical reasons, this generally works out just fine.
2. They have to carefully engineer their capacity, and when it fills up, net neutrality (all bits being the same) leads to all traffic, including videos, audio, and real-time communications, get gummed up.
3. They would prefer to be able to de-prioritize some traffic so the special traffic could get through the jams, but net neutrality prevents this. (They’d also like to charge more for this special traffic.)
4. They could build out more capacity, or could “light up” unused lines, to relieve the problem, but that costs them more.
5. Therefore carriers in general will argue against net neutrality.

This leads me to predict some pretty clear scenarios for the future — some Post- Net Neutrality scenarios. You can envision your own, then read on in my next article.

The post Net Neutrality — The Issue is Bandwidth appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Net Neutrality — Its core is that 1. all bits/packets on the Internet have equal priority; and 2. all endpoints on the Internet are interconnected and traffic is accepted and delivered without prejudice to and from each and all of these endpoints.

The network operators (as data carriers) find better and better ways to carry traffic faster and cheaper (and perhaps more profitably overall), but to date it has been Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, commerce, media, news and online services who have created new uses of this Internet platform, not the traffic carriers themselves.

The opponents of net neutrality want to eliminate the neutrality principles.

They tell us this is so the carriers can innovate and develop new services, and better manage their own networks. I’d say there’s some value in the management issue, but since the 1990s, carriers have been developing new capabilities, higher speeds, and the ability to handle more traffic even with net neutrality in place. What the elimination of net neutrality would allow them to do is charge based on type or origin of traffic — in other words, the carriers would presumably charge more for traffic that’s more valuable to the user, participating more directly in the profitability of every new service innovated by any entrepreneur. And also “calling the shots” on which services may have to pay the carriers more to prioritize, or even handle their type of traffic in the first place.

How do I know this? From conversations and news reports in the mid-1990s.

Net Neutrality has, so far, prohibited this kind of behavior and left the networks as essentially common carriers carrying all data without discrimination.

Legislation and the Internet — Legislation passed in the US, or China, or Iran or Brazil has localized effect for the most part. But legislation in the US, in the case of neutrality at least, will affect vast amounts of global Internet traffic, and the elimination of Net Neutrality in US law, followed by its elimination in practice by network managers, will have global effects.

Political Questions — This is not a “political” question. It is an economic question. Carriers would like to benefit more from the data they carry — currently they carry all traffic uniformly regardless of its content or economic value. Every bit costs the same as the next bit to carry, though some services use more bits. But financial data doesn’t cost any more to carry bit-for-bit than a Disney movie. Although Dems and GOP in Congress are coming down on pro- and con- sides of Net Neutrality, in real life it affects all of us equally. Seeing that Dems are more pro-neutrality, they are attempting to save neutrality which will benefit Republicans every bit as much. The political arguments are really based on taking sides for or against the large network operators, and for or against live citizens.

Why it’s Important — Neutrality permits netizens to build platforms (software, hardware) without regard for whether their traffic will be speeded, blocked or slowed by communication providers. That’s just it in a nutshell. It has been an essential part of net life for many years.

It also permits “anyone” to connect to the net. There are no special fees based on type of business or type of content. Instead they’re based on volume or speed. Fairly and equally. Some content may be blocked legally, but this is rather narrow in scope, and is determined in law, not by network carriers.

As a fundamental principle of the Internet, Net Neutrality is essential to openness and innovation.

The post Net Neutrality — Introduction and overview appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The post The Time-Machine Queen appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I’ve already remarked on some predictions I made in 1973, including working from home, email, co-working spaces and online community access to information and learning. There were a lot of people working on these concepts in the 1970s. Many people had these and similar ideas, and much of the work presaged today’s online educational and social media. My personal focus was on communication in education, and my work involved using a supercomputer (and later a minicomputer) as a hub for education and distance-independent group communication.

Notable among those I interacted with

Community computing—People’s Computing Company (Bob Albrecht) in Menlo Park. Resource One (Lee Felsenstein) on Howard in San Francisco. Whole Earth Store (Rich Green) in Evanston (and Berkeley).

Computer conferencing—Murray Turoff (New Jersey Institute of Technology and formerly the Office of Emergency Preparedness). NSF project managers.

Networks—Doug Engelbart and team (Stanford Research Institute, SRI). I was at Doug’s lab he day they connected to the “Arpanet.”

(There’s a whole additional thread of people who worked in computer-based-education, which I’ll write up later.)

Resource One

The post Community Computing in the 1970s appeared first on Sky's Blog.

In thinking back about how I came to the decision to form DesignWare, I have to acknowledge some important roots. When I’m coaching people these days, I always ask them to describe for me their core capabilities — those capabilities or interests that keep coming back into their lives.

My own core is a curiosity about how things work, and a desire to build things of my own. There’s a secondary interest I have in understanding how people communicate and in facilitating communication, and it’s important, but definitely secondary. My early life was in the 1950s, when the pervasive feeling in the United States was one of optimism and growth. I lived in a small town of 1,100 residents. I realized yesterday that large aircraft today routinely carry (each) almost half the population of that town across huge intercontinental distances. My class of 100 fellow high school graduates would just make a dent in the back of the plane.

So my core of curiosity led me to a National High School Institute summer program for high school students, in the summer of 1963, at Northwestern University [NU]. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, we had some weeks of time on campus in introductory courses, getting interested in science and engineering. One fundamental course was in computing—in which we got access to the card punch machines and instruction on how to write small iterative programs in Fortran. Many years later, my neighbor here in San Francisco was John Backus “inventor of Fortran” — but I knew him more as the father of Backus Normal Form or Backus-Nauer Form which was even more important in my education. The university computer was an IBM 709 — a tube-computer — at our beck and call that whole time. At that time the university didn’t have computers of any size in administration — they were only for research. I learned basic programming, and invented algorithms to do things like shuffle a deck of cards efficiently, and figured out a lot about how probability worked. And programming. I became intrigued by how computer languages worked and what the different languages were good for.

I had maybe been destined to become a concert pianist. (A struggling one, at that.) But only until this time when I was sucked into computing. Why computing? It fit my core definition of being something fascinating to understand, and also to be “infinitely tractable” as Alan Kay would later say. A medium in which practically anything you could envision could be simulated, calculated, analyzed, constructed, dissected. Or even better, you could work out alternative formulations of a problem and solutions, both as simulated possibilities and as virtual logical systems making their own decisions.

By the time I was in grad school, the university had grown through a CDC 3400 computer to a big CDC 6400. When the 6400 came on the scene, I became part of a varied crew of students who were permitted by the computing center director, Ben Mittman, to use the computer after the midnight shift completed. In those days, programmers punched cards and submitted hundreds or thousands of cards in “decks” to a clerk who then ran them into the computer. Each job would run until completion or abnormal termination, and batches of jobs would run until the shift was completed. On some nights, there might be very few jobs, and even those might terminate abnormally, or just finish early. And we then had the run of the computer until 6am when maintenance work began each morning. In some sense you could consider this “my own little supercomputer” that I had the privilege of using on an unpredictable basis at truly weird hours. I got used to having a personal computer quite early in my career. A number of important, and some famous, projects were started in this way. Larry Atkin and Keith Gorlen wrote the CHESS 1.0 program in this environment while I was doing my own work in 3D graphics. David Slate joined the team early in that process. I remember vividly more than one time when my work failed, taking down the computer and consequently abruptly ending a session in which CHESS had been playing against itself to learn the game better.

To get ahead of my story, my responsibilities in 1969 were to maintain and expand the online capabilities of our computer. This included the systems that allowed CHESS 1.0 to play games through remote terminals, thus freeing the team from having to sit in the computer room to type in or be told the computer’s moves. Development of CHESS continued beyond my own time at Northwestern.

[Read what comes next…] [Or return to the start of the story]

The post Computing Comes to the University appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Here are the seven Computers And Teaching newsletters from the project.

Newsletter #1 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

A brief overview of the Computer Aids to Teaching Project is first presented. The workshops, seminars, demonstrations and open house events conducted in the course of the project are described, and the information services provided are discussed. An outline of the project’s 1st workshop designed to introduce users to the PLATO IV computer-assisted instructional system is included, along with instructions on how to operate a computer terminal. Lastly, a brief article reviews the development, current status and future potential of ARPANET, a geographically distributed network of different computers interconnected by a communication system based upon high speed message switching.

Newsletter #2 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Details relating to the daily operation of the Computer Aids to Teaching project are provided, along with some feedback from readers of the previous issue of the newsletter. Following this are a brief article which discusses the possibility of making man-machine interactions more personal and a review of two seminars which dealt with the establishment of a National Science Network, a net of computers and computer users connected by high speed communications lines. A description of HYPERTEXT, a student-controlled instructional system consisting of pieces of discrete texts, is presented, followed by a look at the future possibilities of computer terminals in the home. Lastly, some instructions on how to operate a computer terminal are given.

(This newsletter contains the COTTAGE INDUSTRY article.)

Newsletter #3 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Included in this issue of the newsletter are details about the usage of the currently available computer terminals,information about equipment soon to be added to the Computer Aids to Teaching, Project, and an announcement describing a workshop and open house held in March of 1973. Some recent publications are cited and a student guide to HYPERTEXT is provided, along with an author’s guide to HYPERAUTHOR. Lastly, instructions on how to operate a computer terminal are presented.

Newsletter #4 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Information relating to the installation of the PLATO-IV computer terminal is presented. This terminal is connected to the University of Illinois’ system, making it possible for personnel associated with the Computer Aids to Teaching Project to keep in touch with the development of the large-scale PLATO system. Problems associated with the authoring of programs, with their modification and adaptation to new hardware systems and different universities, and with the cost of developing computer-assisted instructional (CAI) courses are discussed. Also offered are details on a workshop and seminar run in conjunction with the Project and information about a CAI summer workshop for teachers held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Newsletters #5/6 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

This combined issue first gives descriptions of the PLATO terminal and of an interface which has been completed to allow them to be linked to the CDC 6400 system at Northwestern University. Details are next provided relating to four events; 1) an open house at the Computer Aids to Teaching Project; 2) the Computer Caravan, a traveling computer exhibit; 3) the summer 1973 workshop at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for computer resource personnel; and 4) the Festival of Educational Alternatives at De Paul University. Two new articles are presented, one on the evaluation of computer-assisted instruction and the other on community uses of interactive computers. Also included are reprints of several articles which appeared in earlier issues of the newsletter.

Newsletter #7 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Recent developments in Northwestern University’s Computer Aids to Teaching Project are reviewed in the first section of this issue. Included are pieces of information about the use of the PLATO IV system, and about increasing access to System Development Corporation’s Educational Resources Information Center(ERIC) files, along with news about personnel, facilities and equipment changes relating to the Project. The second half of the newsletter offers an article which outlines some of the concepts and issues facing designers of computer-based learning/information exchanges. It reviews briefly some of Ivan Illich’s basic ideas for de-schooling society and for building dynamic learning webs in which teachers and students come together as their needs and interests dictate. In addition, it touches upon the role of the computer in such a system, the types of information found in the system, and some possible means of financing such endeavors.

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I made some guesses about the “cottage industry” that access to computing might support in the future and a lot of them were right. Um, actually everything in my article is commonplace today…Here are some of the things I wrote. They’re based on conversations I was having with many people at the time, so they’re not all my own original thoughts, but look at how many of them we’ve been able to realize by 2017!

The article is entitled COTTAGE INDUSTRY (download PDF) and is a forecast of what’s to come, viewed from 1973.

First, I proposed working from home (in your bathrobe or whatever):

As our economy moves more and more toward services and farther away from manufacturing, people find themselves doing tasks they could really be doing at home, if it were acceptable. Take programming a computer with time-sharing, the programmer could work from a back room, and could work any hour of the night or day.

And my favorites – co-working spaces, coffee, teleconferencing, cloud computing, email, voicemail, flat-rate all-you-can-eat phone plans:

Or, if one felt the desire, it would be possible to set up neighborhood work-centers,’ where people gathered to do their work and drink coffee. Communication would be carried out on the telephone or picturephone. “Paper” based jobs would be carried out in conjunction with computer communication systems, in which the computer stored all information. Letters would be written by typing them into the computer then when the recipient signed-on, the letter would be printed on his terminal. A secretary could be located in Chicago for a boss in San Francisco; the secretary would handle communications and route letters via computer to the boss, who would dictate a reply. The reply would then be played back automatically when the secretary called the boss later in the day, typed into the computer and routed to the originator.

Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps not! There are people in telephone companies today who look forward to the day when all calls will be included in the monthly charge. It would then be advantageous to work long-distance. The telephone network would hold your calls, record callers’ numbers, route your calls to another number, or “camp” on a busy line. Once the computer has been connected to this network, just imagine the possibilities!

Personal Computing — or at least home “terminals”:

When PLATO-IV plasma-displays get down to $700 each (roughly the cost of a color TV console), people will begin to think of buying them for their families. Learning will take place in the evening, after school and during lunch breaks. The school may have to take on more socializing tasks — teaching kids how to deal with each other and how to settle disputes.

Social networking and social organizing online:

They may begin seriously trying to direct a student’s inquiry, starting neighborhood study groups oriented toward solution of local problems. And the giant communication network may be used to form larger nationwide task-forces of people, communicating via the computer.

Community computing (credit here to Vic Bunderson et al), online shopping, social effects:

One of the first incursions into interactive computer controlled networks is the TICCIT (say “ticket”)system, by MITRE Corporation. This is centered around a cable TV system in Reston, Virginia. The cable TV will be computer controlled, and will provide information and educational materials to citizens on their own television sets, as well as regular TV fare. Signals are sent to the individual TVs in the homes of children studying lessons, displaying information much like that PLATO-IV will display on its screens. The child presses a key on his telephone to respond. Eventually keyboards will be included. Shopping can be done the same way. Items are displayed on the screen, and buttons are pushed to order. Information of community interest can be displayed, and citizens can even vote on issues.

TICCIT is designed to be a local system, comprising a few hundred homes. Can you imagine what could be done on a truly large system such as PLATO-IV with thousands of homes? It could change the structure of society.

Post Script: What did I miss?

Well I definitely missed cell phones. I almost missed personal computers because of my focus on terminals, although a couple of years later (say 1976) I knew about KIM-1 and other kits, which presaged this. I missed hand-held phones and tablet computing and such. I missed the entire software ecosystem that has grown up alongside those technologies, although my next two company startups transitioned into personal computing rapidly. Also, by 1977 I was working with PDP-11/43 systems, which reduced the mainframe to small-room size, and racks of dial-in modems for remote users. So still terminals, but by 1978 I was focusing on the Apple-II, which was the real game-changing device for all of us.

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Online_Computer_Conference_in_1973 (PDF) contains the transcript of this 1973 online conference. (The PDF has been saved in the ERIC system for 43 years. Thank goodness for government-sponsored ed research archives.)  If you notice the timestamps on the messages, some interchanges were in real time and many were asynchronous. The time-independence of the conference did actually confuse some of the participants because it was such a new concept. (And I had not implemented many of the commonsense conference components you’d find in a modern system.)

At the time I had a Texas Instruments thermal “TTY” style terminal I used at home on a separate phone line installed for the dial-up modem. The terminal belonged to my project and was well beyond anything an individual would have at home. IT was portable in the sense that it had a cover and handle like a big suitcase — and weighed maybe 25 lbs. I also had another dozen CRT style terminals in my lab at the university. And one terminal in my office. A true luxury in those days.

The online conference transcript displays messages in chronological order. Several participating locations had multiple human participants. Particularly Resource One (a community computing center in San Francisco) and the University of Michigan. Participants had to dial in to the main computer and could type while online, so this was an expensive process. To cut the connect time, a couple of locations batched their comments locally, then uploaded them by connecting their computer to ours. You might call this a precursor of email. My recollection is that Arpanet was young in those days, being one of the first networks to include email as a basic capability. PLATO-IV had its equivalent of email in its notes program, which allowed people to create threaded discussions.

Participants in the local conference were:

Long distance online participants included:

Organizations represented:

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Light, as you know, is energy. Photons flying through space. Our sun, like most stars, emits photons, which rush outward from its surface, and many of them strike the Earth, where they warm our clouds, oceans and surface. But without humans, those photons are just energy transfer mechanisms. They have no inherent meaning.

Humans often attribute meaning to light. Daytime is light and pleasant. Warm, sunny days are wonderful. Cloudy dark winter days can even lead to seasonal affective disorder [SAD]. Colors affect how we feel. We also use light to transmit information—fiber-optic cables for instance. are high-capacity channels transmitting information from one continent to another under the oceans. You’re reading this article because light-emitting-diodes are lighting up your screen, and photons are hitting your eyes, which you then interpret as words and images. There’s meaning there, and it’s all in your head.

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