IT History Society Blog

Recently I bought a new laptop. Since then, I have been in heavenly misery.

Pre-new machine, my life was simple. My machine being about five years old, I lacked the basic technology for a survival in this hyper up-to-date current age. Although most up-to-date when I got it – I was one of the rare persons to use Windows XP back then -, the machine had by long become completely outdated. My machine’s touch pad and CD reader had been dead for about three and a half years. The battery life was non-existent – about 10 minutes. Storage was minimal – 26 GB -, a tiny peanut in this age of Lacie disks of 300 GB. All my ports were USB 1, which put a halt to all my attempts at using external CD readers to compensate for the lack of embedded systems.

That machine was thus – let’s put it plain – outdated. Yet that machine had been with me for so long, alongside its Windows XP OS, that using it was like playing with an old friend. My fingers knew by heart all the shortcuts and wandered happily in programs and between windows and folders. Once I got external storage space to get all my infrequent working folders out, the machine was running back again like never before despite my frustrations at not being able to read 95% of my DVDs. On a more serious note, I might have been outdated, but as a user I was efficient for knowing the specs and capabilities and – more crucially – limitations of my equipment.

Now, post-new machine, I have a fantastic piece of kit: 160GB memory, 3hrs battery life, CD reader and burner, touchpad, three USB 2 ports. It is light. And I no longer have to use my special – safer but bulky – England-continental Europe adapter for the supply. Hardware and software-wise, I am up-to-date. Electronic entertainment is at last possible again. I can read all my DVDs, listen to whichever CD I want and burn all the back-ups I wish. I can carry the machine wherever I want without being worried of undue screws or joints breaking up, etc. Alas, I also have Windows Vista, and a trial version of Office 2007. Apparently it is to become a standard very soon for everyone. Yet because of it, I cannot travel anymore happily in the virtual spaces of my machine.

As a working user, now, I am in trouble. The Home Windows Vista pre-installed was full of crap I had to kill out: Google Earth – fun but heavy -, Google desktop – useful but kills the machine speed as it indexes continously folders – , … Sure the clock on the side is pretty enough. Yet there was nothing wrong with the digital thing down there on the right. There was even a pre-installed Yahoo toolbar, and even an automatic link to e-Bay and Amazon.com… As for browser, always the good Internet Explorer, isn’t it? Yikes. More problematically, with Office 2007, all my skills with shortcuts and with the program interfaces are gone. ‘alt-a’ is no longer leading to a ‘save as’, etc., etc. Instead you need to put a long-lasting ‘alt’ to access the potential shortcuts, which are quite different than before. Yesterday it took me about 30 minutes to find out how to access my list of customised styles in a paper I am writing. Styles no longer come through shortcuts anymore, well except for pre-installed with the programme. It is only through a window hanging around your document, and that you can access only by use of the mouse. In brief I am in shortcut-less misery and cannot keep wondering about the stakes behind this transformation of my beloved interfaces. Why did Microsoft feel the urge to change access to shortcuts? Ergonomical considerations? Why this image of an analogue clock? Why all these craps around? Special contracts with Yahoo and Google? Or is there also a policy of looking at statistics on internet and programmes’ usages?

To top that up, I am told that if I want to put a legitimate copy of Office 2007, there is a hidden register somewhere in the systems file that I have to clean up first… Uninstalling is no longer enough I am told, like when I was using my old PC 486 – an oldie in which you would insert programs via floppy disks one after the other, all 35 or 50 of them – back in 2000ish while finishing an MSc  dissertation.

Enough with my moaning… What struck me throughout the whole process is how things have changed little since the 1950s when a new machine was presented to you as a fantastic modernity better than the previous ones. My moaning sounds strikingly like that I got from Durward Cruickshank while interviewing him about his rewriting of programs from Algol into Fortran … The irony is that I will probably moan like that again in three years time when I come to encounter the surely forthcoming Windows 2010…

I have a close relative who’s traveled the world. She’s climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. She rode on a dilapidated bus through the Khyber Pass, on her way to India along the famous “Hippie Trail.” She visited Machu Picchu and taught at a school in East Africa. Even though my work involves travel, I am an armchair traveler, not an Indiana Jones. I don’t want to be near the Khyber Pass nowadays anyway.

But there is one thing I’ve done that few others can claim. I’ve touched the Internet.

That happened when I was writing my book about Tysons Corner, Virginia. Among the places I was interested in was MAE East: the east coast network access point (NAP) that connected regional networks to the Internet backbone. Around 1990, as control of the backbone was being transferred from the National Science Foundation to private ownership, a company called Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) led the way by establishing these NAPs. Legend had it that MAE East was the granddaddy of all the switches—with up to 50% of the world’s Internet traffic passing through it.

The MAE East web site implies that it is no longer in a single place, but dispersed along the Dulles Corridor. That was no surprise to me, but still, I wondered if I could find some vestiges of it. A local real-estate developer gave me one clue—during the dot.com bubble she was only too happy to rent office space to Internet start-ups wanting to be close to this switch. Going through Google’s repository of old Usenet postings gave some more clues.  The Wayback Machine sent me to a mysterious undocumented photo of an empty parking garage. I wandered into the garage where I thought the photo was taken (telling the attendant that I was getting lunch at a deli in the building). Nothing. While writing down the names of the businesses listed on the building’s directory I was challenged by a security guard, who obviously didn’t buy my story about the deli. I had to leave. Outside, a number of young men, dressed in crisp khakis and wearing polo shirts embroidered with the name of a network company, chatted in accented English. I was close.

Walking around Tysons Corner is not as dangerous as climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, but one must be careful. There are few sidewalks, and pedestrians are so seldom seen that drivers don’t know what to do when they encounter one. While walking carefully along a back street, I passed by a construction site. Along one side of the street was a number of utility covers, many with the name “MFS” stamped on them. In bright orange paint, workers had spray painted warnings not to dig, or to be careful with backhoes and other earth-moving machinery. Along with these warnings were spray-painted the names of those whose cables were under those covers: MCI, Level 3, MFS, Verizon, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, etc. — over a dozen, encompassing all the major backbone providers and many of the major ISPs of that day. 

I had found it. Regardless of the dispersion of the switches after 9/11, here was a major switching point—perhaps still the major switching point–for Internet traffic. I stepped on the cover. Was this how Hiram Bingham felt when he found the lost city of the Incas? Maybe not, but on that day, it felt good to touch the Internet.

A few posts ago I spoke of the wonderful Amercian Computer Museum, in Bozeman, Montana. Here’s another: the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum, in Paderborn, Germany. Paderborn is a town of about 150,000 inhabitants, located in north-central Germany in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was named after the Pader River, which is “born” in a series of springs inside the old town wall, thus providing its residents a source of water in the unfortunate event of a siege. It is obviously not one of Germany’s major cultural capitals, but it is easily accessible by air, road, or train. The surrounding countryside is very pretty.  Whenever I visit, I think of how Americans would do well to emulate the Germans’ ability to house a large and dense population with little of the suburban blight that fouls much of the American hinterland.

But back to the museum. It bills itself as “the biggest computer museum in the world,” which apparently has also been verified by the Guiness Book of Records. It is indeed big, occupying a multistory building about three or four miles outside of the town wall. But it excels not just in quantity but in the quality of its exhibits. It has an extensive permanent exhibit on the history of information processing devices that makes an old-time “internalist” historian like me very happy! It also has many interactive exhibits, both computer-driven and mechanical, for adults as well as for children. My colleagues and I at the Smithsonian have struggled with this issue–of making interactives fun and educational at the same time, and I would say that the HNF does this best.

The photo of the museum shows the building wrapped with the digits of pi, as part of a new exhibit on mathematics and number. Exhibits about math are not the easiest to present to the public, but this one does a great job. I came home with a refrigerator magnet that depicts a taxi, with the number “1729″ on top. I will leave it to the reader to find out why this is one of the coolest souvenirs I’ve ever gotten from a museum, and why I posted a photo of a stamp commemorating Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Not long ago you might have had a hard time deciphering this, but I’ll give you a hint: Google, “taxi,” “1729.” Too easy.

We have to figure out a way to host a meeting of IT historians there…

The other day, after being asked to contribute as a tutor for freshers, I had a nosey sneak through the faculty freshers’ handbook. Besides being filled with answers to freshers’ refreshingly naive and silly questions, this handbook struck me by its constant referring to computing: procedures to be performed by e-mail, documents to download from the uni intranet, etc. There was even a note reminding on the basic polity when communicating with lecturers by e-mails. This came as a shock for me. In my not so ancient times, I never ever communicated with lecturers by e-mail. On the other hand, I remember much personal panicking at the prospect of a chat during a lecture break, my silences while sharing a coffee with a ‘professor’, and, sweating while giving a polite, yet firm – well itwas aimed so – knock on the office door.

Nowadays, in order to keep with the flow of modern life, one has to become a bit of a geek, that is computer literate enough to use computers towards shopping or paying bills. Those who do not cultivate a minimum level of geekiness, or don’t have the means to join in this modern spirit for not having a computer at home, miss out on the opportunities only available on-line, such as discounts on electricity bills thanks to opting for paperless bills. They suffer from the socially disruptive Digital Divide. As recently reminded to me by the recent TIRO study on teen uses of the web, today, geekiness is a social, cultural and even intellectual duty. Geeks have their journals and forums, and intellectuals and academics meet up through mailing lists, and forums too, forums like that of the Vintage Computer Forums. In fact, everybody goes on-line: aristocratic families, sports and book fan clubs, political parties, even presidential candidates. We may tend to normalise it, but cyber-practices are more than ever at work remodelling modern societies from within through the cyberisation of shopping, of communicating, of writing, of enjoying arts, etc. Individuals’ computer addiction was in my opinion already a worrying phenomenon. Now it is society as a whole that is getting increasingly attained by a similar computer addiction. Somehow it’s got good points – cheaper flights, more transparent public and economic policies for instance. It’s got problems too. What is friendlier? An electronic birthday card received on time or a late paper one received by post? What teaches you more about life? E-mailing a lecturer’s e-mail address or negotiating your way through facing him face to face to ask for some supervision time?