Communicating in a networked world
Chapter 1 of 7 in the DesignWare history thread.
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.
I was recently reviewing the seven newsletters of the Computers And Teaching [CAT] project. I previously commented on an article that predicted the cottage industry of home working that we see around the world today. I kind of missed The Internet, because we were thinking of supercomputers and terminals in those days, but by 1975 our thinking had been changed by the appearance of hobbyist home computer kids. That’s another story.
Here are the seven Computers And Teaching newsletters from the project. [Read more…]
I just reviewed the seven archived newsletters of my Computers And Teaching [CAT] project, written in 1972 and 1973. During that time I led other graduate students, faculty and staff at Northwestern University and the Vogelback Computing Center (a big centralized supercomputer facility) in promoting online educational uses of the computer. There was no network to speak of in those days…computers were just beginning to be able to “dial up” and chat with each other, and the computer terminal was still remarkably new. I was a new faculty member, having just completed a PhD in Computer Science, and my mentors were Ben Mittman (that linked page includes a tribute from me in 2007) and Claude Mathis, who headed unique centers within the university.
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… [Read more…]
I was alerted to the presence online of a transcript of an “online computer conference” I organized in late 1973 when I was a professor at Northwestern University, and running my project called Computers And Teaching [CAT]. Murray Turoff, who was with the (US) Office of Emergency Preparedness had been running conferences limited to government participants, and Bob Johansen (while a graduate student) and I got the idea of doing a conference that would combine physical presence and remote presence, which we held in November, 1973. The PLATO-IV system, of course, had included its own internal online conferencing (serving maybe a couple thousand people at the time), but that was limited to people with PLATO terminals. Our goal was to expand conferencing well beyond that group by using an interactive system I had built.
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.) [Read more…]
My latest composition Beings of Light and Darkness is meant to suggest the conflicting information, processes and feelings of being diagnosed with cancer, going through chemo therapy and surgery, and recovering functionality. “Light” and “Dark” are used figuratively in describing events and feelings.
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. [Read more…]