Tonight I’m participating in a panel at the Berkeley School of Journalism on “Weblogs, Information and Society” — along with Dan Gillmor, Ross Mayfield, Donna Wentworth, Ed Felten and Ernest Miller. Should be interesting. They’ll be Webcasting it, too.
Archives for April 2003
VisiCalc memories
As the father of twin three-year-old boys, I don’t get out much, I’m sorry to say. But I did head down to Silicon Valley last night for a special event hosted by the Computer History Museum. Titled “The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc,” the panel discussion featured Dan Bricklin, who dreamed up VisiCalc; Bob Frankston, responsible for coding it; and Mitch Kapor, the father of Lotus 1-2-3, which succeeded VisiCalc in the spreadsheet marketplace. Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi moderated.
The story of VisiCalc is the stuff of software-industry legend: It is widely viewed as the original “killer app” for personal computing (though Simonyi said that that term was actually first applied to Lotus 1-2-3 and only later retroactively extended to VisiCalc itself). People would see a demo of the spreadsheet, or see a friend using it, and decide to go out and buy a computer so they could use it.
VisiCalc first achieved its popularity on the Apple II, but it ceded its market to Lotus when the IBM PC arrived: 1-2-3, which was coded to take advantage of the PC’s 16-bit processing (the Apple II and CP/M computers popular before the PC were 8-bit) seized the moment of this “platform transition” to take the lead. (The panel, which was being hosted at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, did not touch on the process by which Lotus, in turn, lost out to Microsoft’s Excel, as part of Microsoft’s cementing of its “Office suite” dominance in the ’90s.)
Though this is an oft-told story in the annals of computing, I learned a number of new things from listening to Bricklin and Frankston.
Bricklin explained that his father was a printer and that’s how he learned the importance of prototyping, doing quick mockups for customers first before you committed to stuff that was hard to change. He showed a manual page from a typesetting terminal, the Harris 2200, that also served as one inspiration for the spreadsheet, with its separate layers of data, calculations and formatting. He also mentioned that it was his background in computerized typesetting that inculcated in him the principle of “keystroke minimization” — because in that field, people were actually paid by the keystroke.
Bricklin and the other panelists agreed that VisiCalc succeeded because it was different from the kind of financial forecasting software that already existed — it was a free-form, general purpose tool, an electronic “back of the envelope.” It allowed non-programmers to do things at a level of complexity that, previously, you had to learn programming to accomplish.
Bricklin and Frankston recalled that their initial efforts to promote VisiCalc did not meet universal enthusiasm. Experienced computer people weren’t bowled over, Bricklin said; they would dismiss the spreadsheet with, “Hey, I can already do most of this in BASIC.” People who had no experience with computers tended to think that computers could do anything under the sun, and so VisiCalc didn’t wow them. “But when the accountants saw it — there was an accountant [at a particular computer store], he started shaking — he said, ‘This is what I do all day!'”
Kapor closed out the discussion with a tribute to this pioneering piece of software: “VisiCalc literally changed my life. It was a complete inspiration. I don’t think people remember what impact it had. It had an elegant minimalism — it got out of your way… My goal in life was to design something that could stand next to VisiCalc without embarrassment.”
As someone who was an undergraduate in Cambridge at the same time in the late ’70s that Bricklin was dreaming of a “magic typable blackboard” at the Harvard Business School, I found Bricklin’s photos from that era (posted on his own Web site here) evocative. Since I spent a lot of time in that era working on Compugraphic typesetting machines, I was amused and intrigued to hear him acknowledge his debt to the world of that technology.
Bricklin also displayed a copy of Inc. magazine from Jan. 1982, with a cover story on “The Birth of a New Industry” and a cover shot of Bricklin and Frankston. (You can see it on Bricklin’s site here.) As the photo appeared on the screen at the front of the lecture hall, someone in the crowd shouted, “Same shirt!” Then and now, Bricklin favored the plaid flannel look.
IP tagging of comments
In an effort to further discourage spamming, Userland has set up a feature that tags comment posts with IP numbers. So if you don’t want your IP number posted, don’t comment…
Gimme a W! Gimme an M! Gimme a D! What’s that spell?
As the statues of Saddam fall and waves of euphoria swell through Fox-News-land, unchecked by cautions from Bush and Rumsfeld, one little issue haunts the war effort: The reason we went to war in the first place remains strangely elusive.
The imminence of the Iraqi threat that the Bush administration identified as its reason for invading Iraq now, rather than wait for further U.N. inspections to do their work, was a matter of “weapons of mass destruction.” Iraq, we were led to believe, was a teeming arsenal of chemical poisons and biological weapons, and was on the verge of developing nuclear capabilities. At any moment Saddam might hand over such weapons to terrorists so they could wreak havoc on the homeland. There was no time to waste.
So far, however, the war in Iraq has been remarkably free of usage, or even sightings, of “WMD.”
There are many possible explanations: Maybe Saddam hid everything really well. Maybe he didn’t want to use these weapons because he knew that would convict him in the court of world opinion. Maybe he simply didn’t have such weapons on nearly the scale the U.S. charged.
We may never know the full story, but we will learn a lot more as the U.S. tightens its grip on Baghdad and the countryside and begins a more systematic search. Sooner or later, we will have a pretty clear idea whether Iraq was or was not teeming with WMD. A lot hangs on this. And if it turns out that the Bush administration’s claims in this area were inflated or wrong, it will be very interesting to see how the issue gets spun.
Spam attack
OK, it looks like the spam monkeys are at work in the comments fields here again.
As we get the technical tools to deal with this the situation will improve.
In the meantime, let’s note this for what it is: a ridiculous, juvenile and utterly antisocial effort to quell speech. It is, literally, an effort to drown out others’ voices. The spammers can’t affect anything published on the main page of this blog, but they seem to get their kicks from making it hard for other people to post comments.
The absurdity here is that, more often than not, the commenters are people who have hung around this blog to take issue with my arguments about the war. So if there’s some bizarre Freeper motivation at work behind the spam, some kneejerk neanderthal anti-Salon-ism from the right, it’s backfiring: all it’s really achieving is making it tough for the posters who have gamely and thoughtfully been contesting my pessimistic posts on the war.
But then spammers rarely do make much sense.
Agonist’s agony
As one of the many bloggers who has praised Sean-Paul Kelley’s site The Agonist for its timely feed of war news, I was disappointed to read of his admission that he reused significant quantities of material from Stratfor without attribution.
I don’t know enough about Kelley to understand why this happened. But two conclusions from this affair seem pretty obvious: The first is that, while what Kelley did could have happened on a more traditionally edited news site, the absence of any kind of editorial review before publication gave him extra rope to hang himself. The second is that the editing still happens, only after publication, and performed, as it were, by the readership. This means that blogger-journalists don’t have much of a safety net — their errors and ethical lapses will get caught not as part of a learning or mentoring process between editor and writer, but in the glare of the public spotlight, before a general readership, after they have done whatever damage they are going to do.
What I simply don’t understand is why any blogger would use unattributed material from another site and think that he could get away with it. One of the main values of blogging is the ease of linking; you can quote liberally, but always link back. If you got an idea or were made aware of a Web page or just happened to read something somewhere that sparked a posting, putting the link in is not only good ethics, it adds depth and usefulness for your readers.
There’s an old saying in the editing world, espousing the virtues of concision: “When in doubt, take it out.” (My friend Josh Kornbluth once wrote a whole song on the theme.) The bloggers’ variation on this principle ought to be, “When in doubt, link it out.”
Winds of war
Is Saddam alive or dead? If George Bush doesn’t know, I certainly don’t. But it’s clear from the last week of the war that, so far at least, U.S. forces have achieved the “best case scenario” I outlined just about a week ago, which looked extremely unlikely to me then.
There’s a lot more that can and will happen between now and the war’s end — may it come soon. In the meantime, the Republican Guard has collapsed, the British and American forces have won more control of the south and the Iraqis have been unwilling or unable to deploy chemical weapons against their invaders.
Now all the U.S. has to do is find some real, verifiable “weapons of mass destruction,” turn Iraq into a democracy, and persuade the world’s hundreds of millions of Muslims that it was all for their own good.
Update on RCS problems
The problem with the comment server (which also affected all the other RCS functions, like Recently Updated) was the result of individuals spamming the server with repetitious lengthy posts. This problem also affected the main UserLand comments server.
UserLand has implemented a maximum limit on the length of a comments thread. The good news is that this deals with the problem. The bad news is that this limits the length of comments threads.
Longer term fix in the works: allowing bloggers to delete posts.
Server slowness
I know the Salon Blogs Radio Community Server (which provides our list of recently updated sites, our traffic-based “rankings” and our comments feature) is flaky, funky or downright down right now. This server is operated by our partners at UserLand. I’ve emailed them to alert them to the problem. Hopefully we’ll get a fix soon…
God is my co-president
Yesterday Joe Conason pointed us to this “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” story in USA Today. It seems President Bush has give up eating sweets for the duration of hostilities. In other news, the story reports:
Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time, says Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a close friend who talks with Bush every day. |
I guess we’ve sort of known this for a while now, but it’s stunning to read it relayed in this offhand manner — as if it were on the order of “Bush thinks he has the right team to rescue the economy” or “Bush expects to find allies among congressional moderates.”
But then, since Bush’s election majority was, ahem, thin, a belief in the Divine Right of Presidents may help him get through those long, dark, sugar-free Oval Office afternoons.