Note: This is actually a much later video from the 1990s, supplementing Sculley’s original vision with a framing presenter and more use cases for the future technology.

While the overall idea was the domain of science fiction in 1987, the individual pieces needed to make it a reality were well into development. Knowledge Navigator was, in fact, a conservative bet to someone immersed in the high technology of the age.

Apple’s new Siri product, born of research from the prestigious SRI, showcases how far we’re come in 25 years. There may not be a man in a bow tie personifying our computer, but we can now interact with our information conversationally, and that’s powerful. For days following Tim Cook’s Siri presentation, bloggers were quick to call Siri the embodiment of Knowledge Navigators vision. What’s really spooky is, as Andy Baio pointed out, there are things in the Knowledge Navigator video that point to it taking place in September 16, 2011 — just shy of Apple’s October 4th announcement.

This isn’t the first time comparisons were drawn between Knowledge Navigator and the present-day state of the art, however. We all want to believe we live in the promised future. Jim Carlton’s 1997 book Apple proclaims:

A decade later, the Internet’s World Wide Web would explode, providing the same ability to scan vast databases as the Navigator promised while communicating with other people through the computer at the same time. […] Sculley was also years ahead of his time in predicting the importance of big 1990s trends such as the computer’s new ability to combine video and sound. For all his later failing as CEO, Sculley would go down in computer history as a great visionary and seer.

It seems Knowledge Navigator is still serving it’s original purpose. It’s providing us with a vision of the future and giving us something to measure our progress against. It may be another 25 years before we see something exactly like it, but developers will keep striving toward it and continue celebrating each part they successfully create.

Since it’s a holiday weekend, here’s some additional reading/viewing that’s well worth your time:

Knowledge Navigator Implications (1988) : Steve Wozniak, Alan Kay, Ray Bradbury, Alvin Toffler and others pontificate on the features included in the Knowledge Navigator vision and how we might interact with computers in the future.

Bud Colligan weighs in : In the comment section of Andy Baio’s piece, Apple’s Director of Higher Education Marketing from 1985 – 1988 describes the genesis of the Knowledge Navigator concept.

The Making of Knowledge Navigator : The video’s co-creator describes the ideas & some details behind how the video was made.

Dave Greelish interviews John Sculley (part 1) (part 2) : A late 2011 interview with John Sculley, revisiting his days at Apple and the decisions he made. They also discuss Alan Kay, his Dynabook concept, and the Knowledge Navigator.

So let me sum it up: a Jackson Pollock painting is Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock.

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) grew up in a world where recorded music was everywhere, and new technologies brought near-perfect “high fidelity” stereophonic recordings into the home. Not only could you buy your favorite song, you could buy your favorite performance of a song, and musicians had an incentive to make each performance different from the studio version to sell more tickets & “live” records.

Freed from the need to make each performance the same as the last, musicians were able to reduce a performance down to its essentials. Instead of sounds organized by easily performed measures, refrains, and codas, musicians like Hendrix used their instruments as amplifiers of emotion, props in a audio-visual display of raw feelings. Rock out a soulful solo, play the guitar with your teeth, then set it on fire.

Jackson Pollack (1912–1956) died while Hendrix was still a kid, but he came of age in the heyday of the Brownie camera, a simple camera whose $1 price tag made it ubiquitous. His drip period started about ten years after color film hit the market. To that point, most paintings were portraits of people or moments frozen in time. Even pointillists drew recognizable forms. But affordable color cameras meant anyone could capture their own images of Aunt Gertrude in her new hat.

Early Brownie camera (courtesy Wikipedia)

Like Hendrix, Pollack was inspired to reduce painting to its essentials. No longer tied to traditional forms, he experimented with materials and abstract ways of expressing his conflicting emotions through paint and canvas. The image hanging in a gallery is only the output of one performance, echoes of the motions, grunts, and groans as he literally attacked and embraced his media.

Today’s young computer engineers and designers pecked at the keys of a computer long before they could read the letters on the keys themselves. There’s no sense of intrinsic amazement when they sit down in front of a PC. The banality of computing, coupled with cheap, disposable microprocessors like Arduino, is leading to a new generation of devices that don’t look like traditional computers.

IBM 5150 (courtesy Wikipedia)

Products like Supermechanical’s Twine are the Woodstock guitar solo of the information age.

Twine is a wireless module tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The module has WiFi, on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors. […] The Spool web app makes it simple to set up and monitor your Twines from a browser anywhere. You set rules to trigger messages — no programming needed. The rules are put together with a palette of available conditions and actions, and read like English: WHEN moisture sensor gets wet THEN tweet “The basement is flooding!”

 

- Twine sales pitch

 

Twine

Stripped of the need for affordances such as keyboard or display, Twine expresses a single emotion: apprehension. A Twine on your basement wall embodies your fear of flooding. The Twine on your washing machine is your guilt for letting laundry sit between cycles. It may not be as beautiful to the ears as a Hendrix guitar solo or as visually stunning as a Pollack, but the essence is the same.

This is an amazing feat. It also shows the challenges facing chip designers who want to push the limits of how fast chips can go.

For some reason — perhaps I’m feeling overly nostalgic this week — this story reminded me of the Commodore 64. For those who don’t remember this darling of the 8-bit personal computer era, the C64 ran at a paltry 1MHz, or 1/8429 of the speed those AMD engineers achieved. But the clock speed wasn’t just a limitation of the 6510 processor inside.

Indeed, the processor actually ran at “approximately 1MHz”. In many early machines, the crystal oscillators for generating the video signal also were responsible for the system bus. Steve Wozniak started the practice of using a 14.31818 MHz oscillator in American Apple II’s, which is 4x the 3.579545 MHz frequency needed to make an NTSC color TV signal. Divide it by 14, and you get the CPU clock speed of early Apple II’s and the Commodore 64: 1.023 MHz.

In both the Apple II and the Commodore 64, the video chip and the CPU share the same memory, because RAM wasn’t exactly cheap back then. The RAM essentially runs at 2MHz, with the CPU and video taking turns accessing it. Now, the 4116 DRAM chips in the Commodore 64 are designed for a 375ns cycle, or roughly 2.6MHz. So you’d need to replace the RAM with chips designed for faster clock speeds.

But then there’s also the matter of keeping everything in sync. In its built-in C64 compatibility mode, the Commodore 128 can actually run its CPU at 2MHz. But enabling this feature disables the display. A faster CPU can’t share the RAM with the video chip. And since the CPU clock is derived from the color video signal, the fastest you can clock the CPU is 14.31818 MHz unless you turn things around and drive the colorburst clock from the CPU clock, instead of the other way around.

What a mess! Maybe the big, exciting thing about the 8 GHz processor experiment is the proof that we’ve decoupled all the clocks inside our computers, that we’ve made crystal oscillators so cheap we can throw a bunch inside one computer. We can use dangerous liquids to clock our processors to insane speeds yet still have video and access RAM!

Newcomer starts out with some flattering words about the PDP-11 minicomputer where the C language matured into the language many of us learned in school (at least the K&R version of it). But after a couple paragraphs of pleasantries, the reader is caught in a whirlwind of facts, figures, and quite convincing arguments that perhaps some truisms programmers are taught don’t apply to modern CPU architectures.

For example, Newcomer points out the popular for(;;) idiom for infinite loops in C is preferred over while(true) because the original PDP-11 C compiler generated inefficient code for the latter. But modern compilers, and even later compilers for the PDP-11 knew how to to make the while version more efficient than the for one.

As the title implies, the bulk of the article deals with exception handling in C++, the most famous object-oriented offshoot of the original C language. For years, we’ve heard about how expensive exception handling is, while chip designers and operating system designers worked to make sure exceptions only had a tangible effect when they actually occur.

I’ll admit, tonight’s cabernet got in the way of me absorbing all the explanations. But I did walk away with the sense that Newcomer has only peeled away one layer of the onion here, and we’re going to start seeing more revelations like this, hopefully backed by the same extensive research and testing.

On a personal note, this reminds me of one C++ class I took in college. The teacher had just finished explaining object properties, and I raised my hand to ask what the syntax was for specifying the width of each property in bits (bit fields). You can do this with structs in C, and I loved using this feature to cram two small values in one 8-bit byte, but my teacher was puzzled as to why anyone would need to do that. I started researching why this was left out of C++ and came away with a deeper understanding of how having megabytes of RAM available made computers perform faster (they don’t have to deal with hacky bit field optimizations like that, among other things) and how modern compilers optimize for alignment.

There’s a good chance the compiler was laughing at my “optimizations” and ignoring them.

One new podcast I subscribed to is Critical Path from the 5 by 5 network. The show features 5 by 5’s Dan Benjamin along with Horace Dediu, analyst and consultant to the telecom industry. Each week, they look at the telecom/mobile industry through the lens of Apple, which is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and influential companies in that space.

But if the show were just about Apple, it would be incredibly boring and would, no doubt, be lost in the sea of Apple-related podcasts jockeying for listeners’ attention. Instead, the show sometimes looks at other big players in the tech industry, and the mobile space in particular, to give a deeper sense of what ideals and past investments might have made a company choose option B instead of A. Episode 5, for example, looks at the last ten years at HP to put their abandoning their PC business and Touchpad device into context.

This sort of context is important, as nothing really happens in a vacuum. It’s context that welcomes comparisons between history and an exquisite tapestry, and it’s context that helps us understand why seemingly bad ideas sometimes work out in the end.

Context was the inspiration for the relaunched csixty4.com, and I love seeing someone else embracing it. Check out their show, especially episode #5 and let me know what you think.

I mourn Ritchie’s passing the say way I mourn Jobs’. Both had strong influences on the computers we use today and how we use them, each in their own particular way. It still blows my mind that I carry a Unix-based computer in my pocket every day. Though projects like Plan 9 have brought new ideas to the OS world, many of the original Unix concepts persist because they are simple and stable.

Likewise, the C programming language’s influence can be felt in many modern languages, with C’s syntactic mix of curly braces and semicolons finding their way into so many places.

I used to carry my copy of The C Programming Language 2nd Edition everywhere I went when I was in college. It was my Bible in a way. When I needed advice in life, I’d open it to a random page and start reading. C is a simple, yet powerful language and Kernighan & Ritchie’s eponymous guide made even the most technically complicated parts easy to understand. I guess I was hoping it could do the same for the rest of what faced me.

So, let us again raise a glass to a giant in the industry, a visionary, a pioneer. Thank you, dmr, for everything you gave us.

My vintage Mac collection on a very sad occasion

He was also human. I shouldn’t be so surprised, but damnations came right along with praise for the man. He was an asshole. He was a dick. He was a douche. He was greedy. He screwed over Woz on Breakout. He denied being Lisa’s father.

There’s no denying that Steve Jobs did a lot of stupid, immature things before he came back to the company he helped create. He experienced success after success at an early age and let it go to his head. He was CEO of a major company and his personal net worth was over $200 million in 1980, when he was 25 years old.

We all do stupid things and look back at them 10 or 20 years later and think “what the hell was I thinking?” There’s so many things I wish I had done differently in my twenties, but you don’t get that chance. All you can do is grow from them.

I’m sure a lot of you have had this experience where you’re changing, you’re growing as a person, and people tend to treat you like you were 18 months ago. And it’s really frustrating sometimes when you’re growing up and you’re becoming more capable, you’ve solved…maybe you have some personality quirks you’ve kinda gotten over, whatever it may be, and people still treat you like you were a year, 18 months ago. It can be very frustrating.

Steve Jobs, 1997 keynote

He lost Apple. NeXT almost completely flopped. Pixar almost threw in the towel before Jobs wrote one last check to fund Tin Toy. And I think the first half of the 1990s humbled him. I’d like to believe he took stock of what he had left. Who were his real friends, and who truly loved him?

Laurene stayed with him through those dark days. She wasn’t in it for the money. You can tell how much she loves him from that picture of them after his last keynote, where he’s resting his head on her shoulder.

And I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but he reconciled with Lisa.

From that low point, Steve Jobs helped turn Pixar into what it is today, and led Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world. But I’m not convinced he could have done it without falling on his ass first. Sometimes, that’s the only way we learn. We learn what not to do, and we learn what really matters. In the late 1990s, as he entered his 40s, Steve Jobs started talking about family in his interviews.

To me, the story of Steve Jobs isn’t about computers, or gadgets, or even a company. It’s about becoming a better person. Not a perfect person, just a better one.

That’s why I raised a glass to Steve tonight. Here’s to digging ourselves out our fuck-ups, learning from our mistakes, and becoming better people because of it. Here’s to turning failure into success.

Here’s to the crazy ones.

The Centris 610

• Released 02/10/1993 and cost $2,520 ($3856 in 2011 dollars)
• 20MHz 68LC040 CPU
• 4MB RAM on the motherboard, expandable to 68MB
• 512K VRAM, expandable to 1MB. Adding VRAM bumps the resolution to 1152 x 870 w/8-bit color or 832 x 624 with 16-bit color

Low End Mac considers Apple’s whole Centris line a “road apple”, as the company cancelled it after just nine months. Officially, the Centris 610 was replaced with the slightly more capable Quadra 610, sporting a full 68040 processor instead of the crippled “low cost” 68LC040 which lacked a floating-point unit. Many Centris owners upgraded their own computers, swapping the CPU to make it a Quadra or replacing the motherboard completely with that of a PowerMac 6100. When I found an untouched Centris 610 in good shape on eBay, and for only $30, I pounced.

What I got was a beautiful Centris 610 with no yellowing, but with nothing else working. After being on for ten minutes, the computer went into a loop where it rebooted every second. The PRAM battery was dead. The floppy drive wouldn’t read disks. And the hard drive wouldn’t boot.

Let’s try the power supply

When I saw it reboot over & over, my first thought was the power supply.  Fortunately, Other World Computing has (or at least had) replacement Centris/Quadra power supplies and they got one in my hands in just 2 days. Sadly, that didn’t fix the problem. But, at least I have a spare power supply now.

A new logic board

Fortunately, Vintage Computer Fest Midwest/ECCC gave me an opportunity to sell off my excess Commodore gear. The first thing I spent the money on? A refurbished logic board for the Centris, and boy does it work beautifully. It’s from the low-end model of the Centris, though, which doesn’t have built-in Ethernet. That will have to be added later on with a Nubus card.

Replacing the hard drive

Now that I had a working computer, I hooked up a SCSI CD-ROM drive and booted up the Apple Legacy Software Recovery CD, an outstanding collection of system software & apps for vintage Macs, Apple IIs, and even the Newton series. It was fun seeing System 7.6.1 boot off the CD, but what I really wanted was System 7.5.3 installed on my hard drive. Things are never that easy, though, are they? The hard drive this computer shipped with reported “no media”, so I had to pull apart an external SCSI 9GB hard drive. The install went off without a hitch on this drive.

Why won’t it boot?

The System 7.5.3 install finished and the computer rebooted, but it wouldn’t load the OS. It claimed the installer didn’t put the right System software on there. That didn’t make any sense, and it turns out the operating system just didn’t like my single 9GB partition.

I completely forgot about the days when Microsoft’s FAT32 and the Mac’s HFS couldn’t see volumes bigger than 4GB. There’s 3TB of storage on my desk right now, so it just seems weird to think there was a time we thought 4GB was huge. But that’s the way it was when the Centris came out, so I repartitioned by drive into a 1GB “boot” partition and two 4GB “data” partitions. I reinstalled System 7.5.3, crossed my fingers, and rebooted.

What comes next?

Some guys buy old junker cars and tinker with them on the weekends. This Centris 610 is going to be the same way for me. The next steps are:

• A 14″ CRT monitor or maybe a small LCD so I don’t have to steal the external monitor from my laptop
• An Ethernet card so I can relive the experience of hanging out on IRC and building web sites on such primitive hardware
• A new floppy drive so I can use the Centris to make disks for my Macintosh Plus

Homage or just a cool idea?

Movieline says “Old school Mac users, you’ll know what I’m getting at here” as the two-toned blue face dates back to System 7.6.1 (1997). Though it’s been demoted from OS mascot to mere icon, the familiar image now represents Finder, Apple’s file management tool.

But the two-faces concept is far from original. On another slow news day earlier this year, blogger Cattani Simone (see Cult of Mac article) asked if the iconic, er, icon is itself an homage to Pablo Picasso’s painting Two Characters (Deux Personnages) (1934):

I can believe this theory more than the Dragon Tattoo one for the simple reason that Apple artists Tom Hughes and John Casado admittedly took inspiration from the Spanish artist in their famous “Picasso logo” that represented the Macintosh until the blue faces came around.

Pablo Picasso’s art has definitely influenced Apple’s graphic design. But, I think it’s a stretch to say the Dragon Tattoo poster is influenced by Apple in turn. What do you think?

(tip of the hat to MacWorld)

I recently learned of another exciting documentary on those early days, the BBC’s take on the British computer scene around that same time. Their 2009 film Micro Men covers the battle between Clive Sinclair, prolific inventor and entrepreneur, and his former employee Chris Curry, founder of Acorn.

American geeks probably aren’t familiar with this story, even though the winner continues to change our world every day. See, Acorn took a gamble on a new CPU paradigm called RISC in 1983, and produced the first Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) processor in 1985. ARM Holdings is still around, and their chips power today’s most popular mobile devices. Android phones run on ARM. The A4 & A5 chips that power current iPhones and iPads have ARM Cortex processors at their heart. And, Microsoft just recently announced that ARM processors will power Windows 8 tablets.

While Micro Men is billed as a documentary drama, the filmmakers kept things light-hearted without resorting to cheap jokes about now-quaint technology.

Sadly, the film has never been released on DVD or for legal download (problems getting the music rights?). But it is up on YouTube in 8 parts. Here’s the first, and I hope it’s enough to convince you to sit down and enjoy the whole story: