The Age Of Crazy Dreamers
Вставка
- Опубліковано 17 жов 2024
- Join Team FranLab!!!! Become a patron and help support my UA-cam Channel on Patreon: / frantone
#franlab #parc #alto
Music by Fran Blanche -
Fran on Twitter - / contourcorsets
Fran's Science Blog - www.frantone.co...
FranArt Website - www.contourcors...
Truth, I speak from experience with research labs at IBM, where they had to make a certain percentage directly attributable to product, what happened was that researchers became dancing monkeys, to the tune of short-sighted capitalism
I've heard the research from the IBM labs was legendary back in the day.
Large corporations have also captured our universities and use them as places where, in theory, more "pure research" is done ---- except that research as well is often steered towards commercial purposes. It's basically a way for the corporations to shed some of the costs of pure research and fob it off on someone else, including the taxpayer.
I have an IBM report on teleportation.
Yes capitalism corrupts everything.
Go back a few decades before Xerox PARC. There used to be tycoons like Edison and Sarnoff who knew how to use an industrial research lab in a business. They would give a lab a specific technical problem to solve, like "develop a color television set," and they'd do it. Weak corporate leaders cut the labs adrift, so that labs like PARC did what they thought was worthwhile and which the sponsors didn't use. Eventually, big companies got tired of funding the labs.
I was in an industrial research lab early in my career. People did try to push the technology envelope and often succeeded. But around 2000, the suits changed the funding model so that the labs had to find their own funding from the business units. Only the business units didn't want to fund research. Result: Researchers had to scrounge work as contract programmers.
Bell Labs, for example, used to be considered a critical national resource. In addition to fundamental research like transistors and the cosmic microwave background, they did defense work like build spy gadgets to tap Russian submarine cables. AT&T Labs can't do that now. They're no longer considered a critical national resource.
The industrial research labs died of corporate stupidity.
Nah, from what I understand AT&T lets the NSA just come in & tap whatever still yet? from what I've read... so..least AT&T is doing something besides earning money hand over fist?
I grew up in 50 and60s. An exciting time for sure
Thanks Fran for bringing back some memories. I lived in rochester and I have been inside Xerox thinking outside the box program and Kodak too. My first time was a tour and that was 78, I was in high school then. The next time was in 82 when I was going to RiT,and we got to work inside building 51. We were setting up wireless and testing different frequencies for loss packets per meter along with the newest companies like Harris Rf.
Wow! Because of you I'm a little smarter today. Thanks Fran for this incredible insight.
Fran, I am now 68 and grew up during those times. My goal was to work at Bell Labs. After I got out of the Army….I got my degree and ended up at Texas Instruments. The culture was still there in 81 but was dying. I worked on the development of Token Ring and all sorts of other communication technologies. Then, I moved on to other startups, racked up 8 patents, published some books, and then it (R & D) basically ended exactly as you describe. I’ve always looked at that for the price of one B-2 bomber ($500 million) just think of where we could be now if this had been made available to entrepreneurs! Really sad to me as how we lost our lead in technology. But, I do have memories of working with some of those responsible for what we take for granted now.
I miss that way so much Fran. Working together not alone like being under a rock.
A very good rant. I remember those days.
Thanks for the thoughts to think;)
Well I'm glad that the couple of quid a month I point at FranLab is at least keeping that principle going. If the corporations had half a brain cell they'd have realised that by now, but I'm not holding my breath.
Great video, Fran! Amazing insight into the mistake the corporations made, in interpreting the mistake as having wasted money, instead of realizing that their mistake was not valuing their employee's inventions.
But I disagree it will never be repeated; at some point in the future there will be some sort of societal or economic collapse, and the age of rebuilding might include the New Age of Crazy Dreamers.
Yes I think there has to be a kickback at some point. Current methods are not working overall. We often have to get to crisis before we realise we were doing it best in the past.
Definitely some insightful albeit wistful musings on an inimitable period of time that IMO was ushered in by the fateful global IGY inspired initiative of the late 50s which was further amped up by the cold war fueled creation of NASA as well as freeform, immersive and collaborative (Reggio Emila modelled) thinktank projects borne of the 2 halcyon decades of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and planetary exploration efforts. This inevitably gave rise to all the product based tech that we take for granted today.
I'm old enough to remember those times, and to have known people in these places, and it ain't so any more.
Great video Fran, so very true. May I add Philips' NATLAB in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (compact audio cassette, CD among others)
And their fantastic 70-80s technology museum, the Evoluon. 🙂😎
@@stevenverhaegen8729 Natuurlijk 🤗
@@MarcelHuguenin heb ook gode herinneringen aan de EE electronische bouwdozen. Superegeneratieve ontvanger voor airband, versterkers, hartslag meters, etc. 🎉😅
@@stevenverhaegen8729 nooit zelf een gehad maar ik herinner me ze wel. Had er graag een willen hebben.
nobles, clerics, soldiers and peasants
now we're tech workers, service workers, accounting, and executives
--
I just sell my skills for food, clothing, shelter, and toys.
--
That place sounds amazing. I'd heard before, but not in detail. Thanks, Fran!
After seeing everyone's paradigms shift almost daily it's a wonder that the old farts on the boards of directors allow any research at all!
They don’t. It was all off shored because it (allegedly) could be done for a lower cost.
One of my favorite novels is Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. The novel is about some programmers at Microsoft in the early -90s starting up a company and also is a time-capsule of the whole silicone valley tech scene (they actually rent a property in Palo Alto for the start-up). Anyway, one of the characters was always going on about Xerox Parc...
Listen... if your going to talk about something like this.. elaborate more please. ?
@@MRSketch09 What do you mean?
I was one of those curious kids who had the privilege of tinkering for tinkering’s sake. It was remarkably full of liked minded curious folks. After working in typical product oriented companies, I got a shot Bellcore. It was the research lab of the regional Bells. Money was truly no object. I felt guilty getting paid to work in the candy store.
I noticed a while back that the Boston Museum of Science has an Alto, but it's weirdly displayed in this small sort of corner storage room with windows, along with a bunch of other random pieces of the collection kind of cluttered together. I'd love to see it (and a number of other things in that jumble) on view more openly and in their own dedicated displays.
I saw an Alto (along with, among other things, an Apple 1 and an Enigma) at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney a few years ago. Neat technology.
Another exhibit was on Victorian underwear (!) and when I got talking to one of the staff about the intricate lace patterns and their connection to my work (via Jacquard looms) she produced a deck of Jacquard loom punched cards. Nerd heaven!
At Stanford Engelbart had envisioned a personal computer in the 60’s when Jobs was not even a teenager. Wozniak had received training from HP and their garage was not far from Stanford. They were just quicker at making Engelbart’s concept more available using the smaller and cheaper components that the electronic industry began to produce in the mid-70’s period.
I look forward to seeing what you are inventing, Fran! (Hopefully you’ll share)
well said. that was a redeeming quality of that particular phase of capitalism. now corporate culture is focused on quick turnover.
I guess you've never heard of Sullivan PARK. Corning has just that in Erwin New York. Yes there is Development of existing products but there is also whole buildings for fundamental research. Ever heard of Hemlock Semiconductor? Quest Diagnostics is also a spin-off from this Lab. Lots of new Young people coming here.
I really enjoyed the book The Idea Factory about Bell Labs history. Oh to be a fly on the wall during that time (or to have a time machine). Exciting times.
Not to mention the contact available among people with wide ranging interests at places like Bell Labs!
What PARC didn't seem to think of is a reasonable price for Star and also even Steve Jobs for the Lisa.
The Lisa looked cool, but was ultimately unusable, slow and too expensive to build en masse. But making it gave them boundaries and informed the next phase of improvements on their other products.
I could probably do great at PARC, pure investigation with no commercial goal and all that rat race. Now we can have that at hackerspaces and makerspaces to some extent... unless they're clearly commercially driven.
I think the point missing from the monologue is the role the cold war and DARPA (ARPA) had on funding critical research. Many employees from Stanford augmentation research program were subsequently hired at PARC. Xerox were making a killing from photocopiers and in the end did not see how things were about to change. Still, a lot of companies that did get in on computers crashed and burned.
Standing on the shoulders of giants !
Now standing on the shoulders of gnats.
Without crazy dreamers, we would still be living in the dark ages!
The same thing is also happening in engineering. Many engineering firms have gone out of business, and a number of companies have eliminated their central engineering departments. The managers say, let the plant staff do all the engineering work. Since they have to spend their time "putting out fires" related to production imperatives, they cannot do a good job of documenting their work by updating drawings and manuals. It is particularly bad in the field of controls engineering, where I've had to spend a lot of time running down interconnections in existing plants that were being upgraded, just to figure out what kinds of "on the fly" fixes were made to the control systems.
I read many years ago, when a top management fellow at IBM stated, "Why would anybody want a personal computer?"
There is a scene with that scenario, in the movie "The Pirates of Silicon Valley".
"they call it the American dream because you gotta be asleep to believe it". George Carlin. Also, "cause I'm hungry/for dreams I'll never see.." The Allman Brothers
I thought you'd be at VCF East. The livestream they're doing on UA-cam is very intermittent.
FYI, Apple gave about $10K worth of Apple stock to Xerox as a licensing for using the GUI and stuff. Xerox didn't want anything to do with it so they quickly sold it (today that amount of stock would probably be worth a few tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars). So Jobs didn't quite "take" from Xerox - they did offer compensation for it. Though it was mostly demonstrations of ideas - things like overlapping windows were actually created by Wozniak who didn't know the Alto didn't support things like that.
Pure research is still very much still a thing, but, as you said, spread out over a wider area. A few nerds at a small college campus, for instance. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The Internet makes pure research easier for everyone.
I used to work for a small college, and it's amazing what a few nerds can do with limited resources.
Pure research isn't gone, it's just changed form a little.
Perhaps applied research is more important now
@@Coneman3 It is, no doubt. I think Cold War 2 is about to start ( not World War 3..), and applied research will be very important!
I think the new Cold War will eclipse the old one, and research if all types will be critical...
2:25 "Follow your Bliss" Is this a reference to Joseph Campbell?
5:55 - yup. Well, some of it was perhaps from SGI 20 years later, but yeah. :) (And... I dunno, maybe more of that has prior history than I realize?)
This reminds me of Technology Connections' series on RCA's development of the CED. RCA was a heavily into research not just to develop new products, but also just for its own sake. When RCA decided to develop the CED concept, they made many of their researchers focus on this product, which caused much consternation in the research side of the company. The CED, while having some interesting tech, wasn't what the market wanted and failed not long after it's launch and could have been a primary factor in RCA's downfall.
What if a few channels pool resources? I am thinking along the lines of Adam Savage's Apollo project Egress, or the glass making from scratch by Cody (Cody's Lab), Andy George (How to make everything) and Grant Thompson (The King of Random)? I think if channels like yours, "The thought emporium", "Nile Red", "Applied Science", "Simone Giertz", "Laura Kampf", were to collaborate on a project that should create opportunities! That also would mean that people who are accustomed to work alone but I think a lot can be gained! If I just see what these channels have been able to pull off! Your DSKY, Your Egress contribution, an electron microscope, Aero Gel, a radio telescope, everyone of you has built up a complete labs or shops! Then there is the expertise! I mean you got the highest title in engineering! Then there are the dedicated communities all of you have gained! I bet they would all be delighted! I think the spirit you describe is alive and kicking hard on youtube it only needs to organise itself in new ways!
I spy an Amiga manual! lol
Mouse too.. I know Amigas were great for musicians.. Octa Med for Franlab?
The Japanese are still employing pure research. Examples are companies like Toyota & Honda simply improving proven technology vs short term gains bringing out flashy sexy new concepts.
The middle word in IBM is Business and that is who IBM and Xerox catered to. The PC was outside of their business model. Short sighted? Absolutely. I have been a systems software engineer in the mainframe arena since the mid 70's. I came up with an email system in the 80's. They considered it a waste of time. Also came up with a much better life sharing system than Facebook years before Facebook. Nobody saw value in an easy to use and view life diary API, complete with its own messaging and security. I was simply in the wrong environment. if it wasn't written for big banks and industry, why bother? Oh well. Because I am not a marketing guy and couldn't bank roll my own "dreams", I stayed in my steady and well paying day job and saw everyone else make billions off lousy APIs. Lots of dreamers and really excellent software just slipped into obscurity. History is full of folks like us.
There is film of parc from not long before it was shut down. I think I remenber it being used in a 60 minutes story. Would have been made near the time of the apocryphal Steve Jobs visit.
Hey. A love your videos, but I nedd subtítulos in spanish. Please . Can be interesting learning your speak in spanish. I 'm Horace from Argentina. Im sorry my english is very bad. So I love you. Kisses
It's really interesting that Xerox leadership lacked the strategic vision to execute on the potential of the ideas developed at PARC and ultimately the personal computer. Also, these raw concept think tanks DO still exist at places like DARPA, JPL, the NRO agency, etc. but they're funded by the DOD and their discoveries are not always made public straight away.
Yup. I've worked for companies trying to make products, and they want to innovate, but they have no vision and refuse to take any risks or invest in any creative design process to discover anything new. The issue seems to be the people with all the money are looking at all the past trends in a very one dimensional way. If there isn;t an existing market for something, and existing data on what sells etc, they can't imaging spending money on something. The same thing happens in the music industry. It's the root of so much frustration in my career, I could rant about it all night.
Yep, I wouldn't have a career as a network engineer if it weren't for Xerox. They invented Ethernet, which pretty much all networking is based on. The modern Internet would look very different without Xerox's work on Ethernet.
The book on PARC is "Dealers of Lightning." Probably the only invention Xerox made a profit on from PARC was the laser printer, which was of course based on a copy machine.
The computer mouse was NOT invented there, it had already been invented by Douglas Engelbart. See him in the 1960s "Mother Of All Demos" on UA-cam.
I said the Three Button Mouse.
Back in the day these companies - AT&T, IBM, Kodak, Xerox, etc. - were all monopolies. With no competition to worry about they could afford to spend money on stuff like PARC and Bell Labs. Long-term business development rather than short-term investor returns was helpful. The monopolies paid the bills.
Compared to PARC in 1976 my job sucks but by 2023 standards it's not bad. A bit of a remote worker skunkworks setup, my boss tells me "Laura, figure out $newtechnology" and I go do it. The last $newtechnology was mobile app development. I looked at several platforms, narrowed it down to Flutter or MAUI, my boss said MAUI because we have lots of Microsoft ecosystem happening already. I'm a kid in a candy store with all the new toys. I'll take it. 😀
We have lost a lot with the loss of these corporate research labs. As an electrical engineer starting work in 1975 I often consulted the "Bell Labs Technical Journal" for ideas. That journal was the equal of any of the IEEE technical journals. When the Bell System was broken up, Bell Labs gradually disappeared along with the "Bell Labs Technical Journal" and that is a shame.
We’ve gone from a fairly innocent times to very cynical times. Everything has to maximise profit and con the consumer as much as possible. Sad
I thought Alto was a saxophone. My professor was at Park. He did the "radio key vs. field problem." It was hard, apparently. Where is your valid click? Everyone takes it for granted in the software libraries now.
Alot of great discovery and invention, die off due to impact and effectiveness affecting the whole industry, example:
Royal Raymond Rife developed the Rife machine in the 1920s.
Dr. Tullio Simoncini known for claims that cancer can be cured with known for his claim baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) fight cancer.
Another is a US inventor 50s ~ 70s, (can't find his video on UA-cam now) who invented a magnetic suspension bed, that would last for 100 years, but no manufacturer wanted something like that.
Today all the corporate research money is kept in shareholder and CEO pockets. Their families will be comfortable for generations, innovation be damned.
A side benefit of the pure research model was a protected environment where and idea could be thought through a little and mature in a safe environment. Now with product the driver and getting to market as fast as possible to beat the competition nothing gets thought through to make the products durable from a technology point of view. The internet of things comes to mind. It’s get it out a quick as possible, does not matter if in future it will be a heap of trouble abs we will have to start again because we did not pause to think.
I don't know that it's "never to be repeated." Perhaps I'm an optimist, but I have been seeing pendulum swings, where large corporations have been getting monetarily hammered for cutting out R&D in exchange for patting themselves on the back with share buybacks. I'd put an especially ironic Exhibit A as Google, where they previously had the "20% time" policy for engineers' pet projects. Those inventions helped make Google as large and ubiquitous as it is today with some pretty cool tech. Now, after years of cutting R&D and consolidating product lines, they're getting their collective butts kicked by OpenAI. (Google CEO Sundar Pichai has gone so far as to call this development a "red alert.")
I'd put Intel in a similar boat, and I'm sure there's a handful of other examples at the ready I'm not thinking of now. After the last couple decades of profit-at-all-cost capitalism, I think this is a trend that could really help open the bean counters back up to the idea of general research. There's even an existing corporate term for this -- "diversification."
What Amiga do you have? :-)
One also needs to understand that the pure research happened because companies were flush with cash because they could overcharge everyone. Bell Labs was funded by AT&T who was given a government monopoly on long distance calling. Perhaps you might remember when a long distance call cost dollars a minute, and that money was guaranteed to AT&T who then spent it funding research. These days, long distance is practically free - you can call across the USA for free nowadays, and calling overseas is pennies per minute.
Likewise, Xerox charged a lot for their photocopiers, and the Alto itself cost 5 digits back then - something you rarely see in a computer you get today (oh, you can configure a $20,000 PC today, but you generally don't have to). Kodak did a lot of it too, funded by everyone buying Kodak moments. As did IBM, funded by a virtual monopoly on business equipment like typewriters and computers that were purchased by the minute.
These days, margins are much smaller so any money is dedicated to improving the bottom line. But as a result, things are a lot cheaper. You could say flying in the past was a lot better, but a plane ticket also cost a lot more money. I guess you could say back in the past, companies had more money than they knew what to do with and they spent it freely. But these days the quest for lower prices (I'm sure you'll agree life is better with cheap or free long distance, cheap plane tickets, cheap computers and consumer electronics, etc) means companies have to be smarter about spending money. Microsoft still has a pure research division (Microsoft Research), but then again, it's probably cut down now that things like cloud, Linux and other things happened. So really - did you want to go back to the past where your TV cost you a couple of year's disposable income but that extra money produced pure research, or these days where things cost less (even with inflation) but do way more?
In 1979, I was a clever nerd. Clever enough to realize all I would ever be able to do to pursue my scientific and technological dreams was to whore for a corporation or the military or become a college professor and teach another generation of "dreamers"I gave up the idea of education after high school as dead for me . Turns out I did not know how right I was.
Battelle in Columbus, Ohio is an independent not-for-profit organization that advances science and technology.
it's a pity 😟 everything gets blurred 😔
I suspect that the participants here will enjoy the movie "The Pirates of Silicon Valley".
Only about money now!
We stopped trust busting, de-regulated everything and left it all to those snot nosed punks. What a world we live in...
Cos used to get tax breaks for r&d, not sure if that's changed.
That's an interesting point, before the 80s, in this golden era fran talks about taxes were super high (if you use today as a standard), so the incentive to dump profits and such back into pure R&D was preferable to taxes. The 80s also turbo charged corporate take overs, where they would buy up these old legacy companies and break them into pieces and scrap the parts that didn't make money, sell off the rest, and use that to fund the next take over. The environment is completely different now, it's all about product and short term shareholder dividends.
Indeed they used to throw food as even transmitter schematics in the fish bowl and then sit on the top of it searching for the goldfish. The same today. Only today there is no goldfish anymore. Only piranchas.... dressed in gold.!!
It’s worse than shortsightedness; it’s our Military industrial complex. That’s the only place that truly open research is happening. They’ve got exotic tools and inputs at their disposal. The results are classified. The public scientific community is now lagging behind by about 30 years. With university academics fighting to prop up their own ideas instead of discover truth, our society may never make up that gap. Not without a large theatrical event.
I will say that there has been nothing IT in the last 35 years that has caused me to say 'Wow'.
When a solar flare wipes it all out we’ll go back to first principles without a choice
It's just a matter of time.
I think we may have already passed the valley of the bad news on that font. Radio Shack and Fry's electronics went out of business but now we see a "maker movement" doing stuff. Some new research is being started on a very small scale. From this acorn, an oak may grow.
❤
Hypertext was invented in CERN mind you...
Which was based on Notecard, from PARC, mind you.
@@FranLab NoteCards - 1984, Hypertext - 1965. 1945 if we go as far as memex. yea..., nah, as certaing australian would say. :)
Xerox with the Alto, Commodore with the Amiga, IBM with the PC, all companies that could have been the: Apples, Googles, & Microsofts of today, but instead are becoming all but forgotten, why? Inept incompetent, bottom-line-mentality executive management. These tech companies were being managed by people who know nothing about tech (or management) & were more concerned with dinner parties, golfing, & yachts, rather than science, innovation, & engineering..they all stuck their heads in the sand & went down with their doomed flagship products, instead of adapting to the times
The managers at Xerrox were still just "Makin' Copies".
I agree. Commodore's success was built on innovation, which meant that the R&D team were the goose that laid the golden eggs. As time went on, they starved their R&D budgets and that was the end of the company. Today's innovation is tomorrows obsolete technology, and many products no matter how amazing they are for their day, can often have a short shelf life e.g. The Compact Disc CD, was a miracle for it's time, but now is basically no longer in use as it's been totally replaced by newer technology.
I think R&D is still there but done with startups now. If an engineer or scientist gets a crazy idea, rather than ask their employer for R&D money and make their employer rich like in the old days, they branch off on their own and get venture capital money to do it.
Or they got Federal Subsidies under the guise of research and development like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did.
90% corporate tax rate.
This is currently all but lost in America, but currently exists in Abu Dabi.
Yea - ambitious outspoken out trans women atheists who dream big do very well over there. Not!
@@FranLab
Oh yeah... I forgot 😒.
Blame the bean counters, MBAs & investment banker. Must have profits today, it's somebody else's problem tomorrow
Any work under capitalism is inherently alienating and very rarely for the betterment of humanity.
Pretty much everything that keeps your life comfortable has been brought to you by capitalism. How many items do you own from true socialist states (Chinese commerce is capitalist, so that doesn't count)? Your car, your TV, your mobile phone, your domestic equipment, etc, etc? Even in former communist countries, domestic products were made in the capitalist image to keep the populace happy. pseudo socialists will never give up the capatalist goodies.
Problem is everyone needs a return on their research investment. That hog-ties free thinking. I can't think we'd ever go back...isn't that awful...
splendid
That's how you got amps that have controls that go to 11.
I thought you'd be at VCF East. The livestream they're doing on UA-cam is very intermittent.