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Accidental Empires

June 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Amusing history of computers and the Internet

This book has two sub-titles: ‘The Triumph of the Nerds’ and ‘How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition, and still can’t get a date’. You can see that Robert Cringely takes an irreverent attitude to his study of Internet history and computer development in the US. He looks at it in terms of business enterprise, scientific development, and as a collection of extraordinary and eccentric characters who were once skipping classes and are now running the shop.

Internet historyHis account is written in a breezy, amusing, self-deprecating style. He jumps around from one topic, one character sketch, and even one decade to another. One minute he’s tracing the history of software development, the next it’s business methods and biographical sketches of entrepreneurs. Much of his energy is spent on critiques of Chairman Bill and figures such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

It’s a sort of history of how it all happened – but rendered via a cubist form of narrative in which you have to reassemble the chronology yourself. Cringley is a computer magazine gossip columnist, and I’m afraid that ultimately, it shows.

What he offers is popularised science, via sound-bite journalism: “it takes thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life”. These little aphorisms are sometimes amusing, but they’re just as often slightly silly, as in the basic statements on which he bases his claims for the entire book.

First, that the Internet happened more or less by accident. Second, that the people who made it happen were amateurs. Neither claim is actually true, but it suits his purpose to amuse. However, the moment you stop to think about these propositions, they evaporate immediately.

cringely-3And yet for all that he takes a jokey line, he offers lots of interesting insights – such as the reasons why some software lasts, unlike hardware which on average is replaced every three years. It’s a shame, because he is clearly well informed and at some points has interesting things to say about technological developments and even the philosophy of the internet – but his efforts are dissipated by a lack of focus. He throws off ideas and sketches topics every few pages which warrant a book in themselves, but he can’t quite make up his mind if he’s a historian of technology or a commentator on business methods.

The last two chapters are a 1996 update [made for a successful TV adaption] in which he admits the rise to power of Microsoft – but this is more business management history than an account of technological development.

The good side of Cringeley’s approach is that he offers a bracingly irreverant account of the US computer business which might encourage readers to take a sceptical view and not be overawed by Big Names. The downside is that his analytic method is anecdotal, and hit-and-miss. There is here the beginning of what I think will eventually make a fascinating study – the history of software development. Perhaps he ought to get together with a disciplined co-author [or an editor with Iron Will] and he could produce something more coherent and persuasive.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Robert X Cringley, Accidental Empires, Addison-Wesley/Viking, 2nd edition, 1996, pp.358, ISBN 0140258264


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Filed Under: Techno-history Tagged With: Accidental Empires, Computers, Cultural history, Techno-history, Technology

Blown to Bits

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

business strategies and the new technology

This book seeks to explain how technological developments are impacting in the world of eCommerce. We’ve all heard about the IT revolution, but where is it actually having an effect? Evans and Wurster start with the cautionary tale of Encyclopedia Britannica, whose business model was wrong-footed when Encarta was launched on CD. A strategy almost two hundred years old was overturned in the space of five years. You can now buy Britannica on disk for the price of a paperback book. The lesson is that it’s suicide to rest on your laurels when faced with new technology. Their second major point is what they call the playoff between ‘richness’ and ‘reach’.

Blown to BitsYou can either deliver information-rich data to a few people, or lightweight general ads to many. These appear to be mutually exclusive strategies – though Amazon manage to do both at the same time. They are essentially IT optimists, because they believe that access to information will promote more efficient competition. “the emergence of universal, open standards will … accelerate the demise of hierarchical structures and their proprietary information systems”. Whether this is true or not is still a matter for e-Commerce conjecture.

In the era of the IT revolution, the knowledge we need to enrich information is available to us all – free of charge. Therefore, as they argue, “Shifting the trade-off between richness and reach melts the informational glue that bonds business relationships”.

As you can see, you have to be prepared for a mode of expression which combines abstractions and the jargon of business and management studies:

This shaped the horizontally integrated multidivisional corporation, held together by a logic that transcended the business unit.

I’ve read that statement several times, but I still don’t know what it means. It’s hard to stick with this kind of opaque and abstract language. But if you can, it’s worth it – because they do deal with important general principles – though it’s a great relief when they occasionally come to discuss a practical example.

They look at newspapers and banking as examples of business models which are now vulnerable to the new technology. For instance, those people who use personal banking systems are small in percentage terms, but they are the richest, and account for 75% of banking profits. What does this mean? It means that banking is vulnerable to changes brought about by software engineering.

They explore that buzzword of the new e-Commerce – ‘disintermediation’ (the removal of the middle man) using the example of online shopping. Yet no sooner has the middleman gone than he comes back again as the ‘navigator’ – that is, somebody who acts as a guide and as an advisor amidst the plethora of choices available to the consumer.

The general lesson boils down to this. Access to information and the transforming power of new technology puts traditional business methods under threat: yet at the same time it opens up new possibilities for those wishing to take them.

This book has become a set text on an Open University technology course that I teach. The students find it hard going, but all of them in my group have grasped the ideas behind it – and finished the course with successful Web essays outlining eCommerce plans.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy, Boston (MA): Harvard Business School Press, 2000, pp.259, ISBN: 087584877X


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Techno-history Tagged With: Blown to Bits, e-Commerce, Techno-history, Technology

How the Web was Born

June 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Readable technological history of Internet and Web

Robert Cailliau’s name was on the original research proposal for the World Wide Web, along with Tim Berners-Lee. This is his account of the development, written with James Gilles. They start with a quick history of the Internet, focussing on the key feature of packet-switching which made the Web possible. Part two switches to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Here the story becomes one of scientists from all over the world who need to share, archive, and retrieve information. CERN had developed its own Intranet, and by the late 1980s had become Europe’s biggest Internet site.

world wide webAs with most accounts of Internet history, you have to keep up with a complex chronology as the separate stories of each technological strand are developed: the TCP/IP protocols; the development of the PC; and the HCI (human computer interface). Fortunately, all technical terms are explained, and the general reader will be grateful for the appendices which include a timeline, a list of key individuals, a bibliography, an explanation of acronyms, and of course an index.

They include character sketches of all the main figures – Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Engelbert, who first thought of Windows, hypertext, and the mouse respectively.

There’s an interesting chapter on the rapid rise and fall of the UK computer industry which in the early 1980s was producing the world’s highest per-capita ownership of personal computers.

They also include potted histories of hypertext, and the pre-web search software such as Archie, WAIS, and Gopher. People who have used these command-line interfaces are likely to look back and smile fondly.

Finally, after all the preliminaries, everything is set for what was to be the killer application of the Internet – the invention of the World Wide Web.

It’s still amazing to think how recent all this has been – only ten years ago – as this second edition of their book is issued on the Web’s birthday.

If you want a history of the Web which is more general than Tim Berners-Lee’s more personal account in Weaving the Web, this is an excellent alternative.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web was Born, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.372, ISBN 0192862073


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Filed Under: Techno-history Tagged With: How the Web was Born, HTML, Techno-history, Technology, Theory, World Wide Web

The Whole Internet

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

updated version of first complete Internet guide

The Whole Internet was one of the earliest-ever computer books to become a best-seller. That was in 1992, when the first major wave of Net users needed information, and there as very little of it about. Ed Krol produced a manual which was well informed, comprehensive, and examined the technology in detail. However, it wasn’t very easy to read, and you needed to grapple with an arcane command-line interface which assumed you had grown up with Unix as a second language.

The Whole InternetThis new version is an update and complete re-write. It is based on the big changes which have come over the Net and the way it is used in the last eight years. Number one development of course is the Web, which moves up from a subsidiary chapter in the original to occupy the centre of this edition. Former features such as Gopher, Archie, and Veronica on the other hand are relegated to a footnote section called ‘Archaic Search Technologies’.

But this difference also makes the manual easier to read and understand. The emphasis has been changed from how the Net works, to how it can be used. There is far less impenetrable code cluttering the pages. Instead we get clean screen shots and nice photographs of what the Net looks like on screen, not at the DOS prompt. Ed Krol has been been very fortunate in choosing his co-author, and their co-operation has produced a far more readable book.

They cover all the basics which someone new to the Net would need to know. How to send email and follow the conventions of netiquette.; what to do with attachments; how to behave on mailing lists; understanding newsgroups; and how to deal with security, privacy, and Spam. They explain how to choose from a variety of Web browsers (including even one for the Palm Pilot). I was struck by how much more accessible all this technology has become in the short time since I struggled through the first edition.

This radical shift in user-centred design is also reflected by the inclusion of completely new chapters on Net commerce, banking, gaming, and personal finance. After a chapter on how to create your own Webages, there is an introduction to what are called ‘esoteric and emerging technologies’ – conferencing, streaming audio and video, and electronic books. This is a very successful attempt to cover the full range of the Net and its activities in a non-snobbish manner. They end with practical information – maximising the effectiveness of your Internet connection, searching techniques, and they offer a thick index of recommended resources.

The original Whole Internet may have been a more striking phenomenon because of its originality at the time, but this new edition has the potential to reach even more readers, largely because it explains the Net and shows how it can be used in a way which is much more attractive and accessible. It has gone straight onto my bibliography of essential Net reading, and I will certainly be recommending it to all my students.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Kiersten Connor-Sax and Ed Krol, The Whole Internet: The Next Generation, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 1999, pp.542, ISBN 1565924282


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Filed Under: Computers, Techno-history Tagged With: Computers, Media, Techno-history, Technology, The Internet, The Whole Internet

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