I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Can we see the future from here?
After the Second World War, it was clear that the telecommunications infrastructure of many countries needed an upgrade. The digital computer had been invented, and was emerging from the lab into the economy. In the USA, the giant early warning and control system, SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) was being built to cope with the threat of nuclear war, and needed systems and sensors to be connected across the country. The old copper cables of the telephone and telegraph systems were not up to the job.
Fortunately, experts, researchers and engineers had a solution: they would use light to transmit information rather than pushing electrons through copper. However, they did not start with the flexible, glass optical fibres that we are familiar with today: they believed that glass could not be manufactured with sufficient transparency to carry light over long distances and that, even if it could, the photons would escape at the bends.
Don’t settle for horses when you could have dragons
Sometimes, when we are talking about technology, we quote Henry Ford, who said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.’
Except that Henry Ford never said these words. They were first associated with him in 1999, when an article by John McNeece suggested that, ‘There is a problem trying to figure out what people want by canvassing them. I mean, if Henry Ford canvassed people on whether or not he should build a motor car, they’d probably tell him what they really wanted was a faster horse.’
How hard can it be? The power of optimism and naivety.
‘ . . . and now I couldn’t do it because I could see right off there’s no way you could do this. But at that time, we lacked the benefits of age and experience.’ (Ed Roberts, creator of the Altair 8800, the first home computer.)
‘I was so nervous, I felt this is just not going to work - and it worked!’ (Steve Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, on running BASIC on the Altair 8800 for the first time.)
‘We didn’t know what we were doing.’ (Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, on creating the Apple I.)
‘How hard can it be?’ What do you think when you hear those words?
Revealing invisible ingenuity
If you are ever in Paris and looking for something to do, then it is worth a visit to the Musée des Arts et Metiers. Don’t be misled by the name: although it translates to ‘Museum of Arts and Crafts’, you won’t find any William Morris wallpaper or Rennie Mackintosh chairs: it is a museum of technology.
What you will find is hall after hall of inventions, models and instruments, from the 18th century to the 21st century, charting the development of technologies that have shaped the world. There are early phonographs and radios, steam engines and looms, suspension bridges and space robots. There is a secret camera built into a hat, the preserved laboratory of Antoine Lavoisier, and Foucault’s pendulum, swinging backwards and forwards from the roof of a church, steadily measuring the rotation of the Earth.
AI - a catch up guide to early episodes
Have you ever tried to start a major TV series partway through? You hear everybody talking about it at work, and it sounds thrilling. Then you watch the latest episode, and are baffled by names, places and relationships. Why is this woman so angry with that man? Why are those two factions fighting? And why are those people wandering in the wilderness, apparently disconnected from the rest of the plot? You switch to the series guide on your streaming service and realise that, to catch up, you are going to have to watch the three previous seasons. Perhaps you should just watch that cooking show again.
Trying to understand AI can feel like this. To many people, the appearance of generative AI a few years ago was a sudden, magic and unheralded event, followed by a never ending stream of releases, products and announcements. It’s hard to make sense of the present, let alone look to the future.
Your Moonshot doesn’t have to be a Moonshot
In 1962, NASA faced a difficult technology procurement choice.
They needed a guidance computer for the Apollo Moon missions. Did they go for a design based on new technology, working with researchers at MIT, or a design based on proven technology from their existing suppliers?
They chose the new technology: rather than discrete electronic transistors, they would use silicon chips, which combined multiple transistors into a single component. These chips weren’t like the chips of today, though: rather than millions or billions of transistors, they contained just a few transistors, each representing a single logic gate. Thousands of them were needed to build the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
Technologists are always crying wolf (because of all the wolves)
The computer had failed. Unfortunately, it was the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), the machine that controlled the flight of a small, fragile spacecraft to the Moon and back. Fortunately, it wasn’t in space: it was on the ground, in a simulator.
Margaret Hamilton, the leader of the MIT team programming the AGC, often had to work weekends to meet the urgent schedule of the Apollo programme, and sometimes brought her daughter, Lauren, to work with her. Lauren liked to play in the simulator.