How I got the iPad right in 1994 but was wrong about the Information Furnace

January 9, 2012

Today is the 5th anniversary of the announcement iPhone by the late Steve Jobs.  It is hard to imagine that it was just such a short time ago. Something seem to happen so quickly in technology while other things  seem to take a very long time.

I recently came across an article written in June of 1994 (almost 18 years ago). You can find the article at the end of this post or you can go to this link.    It talks about the evolution of computing in the home and in particular discusses something called “The information Furnace”  a term, I believe I created, to describe a Home Server. In 1994, most homes did not have even a single computer.  Typically the computers in the home of early adopters were used for productivity applications like Personal Finance such as Quicken or for hobbies.  Probably less than a million homes were connected to on-line services like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL – which was less than 1% of the nation. They used dial up modems.   Broadband connectivity was just starting to be tested.

Of course the number of homes that had more than one computer was extremely small.  Home networking as we now know it did not really exist.  The floppy disk was the way information would be moved from one computer in the home to another.  This was called sneaker net many years later.  This was also before the development of what we now cal WiFi.  That meant that early networking within the home required running Ethernet cables.

I was  convinced that  computers would dominate home interactivity. Many at the time thought it would be the interactive set top box. Because I was so involved with the creation of residential broadband technologies in my role as Vice President, Business Development at Intel,  I knew we were creating the technical foundation of a new medium.  A medium  that would impact all aspects of our lives from the way we communicated, learned, shopped, were entertained and informed. The article mentioned above was written about a year before Amazon was established.  A few months after it was published, I was quoted in Fortune Magazine as saying “that the killer app for the Internet would be advertising.”  Google was started about four years later and started selling advertising a few years after that.

Now before you think this post is all about how insightful I was, and I was, it is really about how things turned out differently than I thought and wanted.  It really is about a failure to implement a vision and an exploration of the possibility that things could have ended up differently.

In that very same article (again 1994), I coined the term i-pad (see the Article).  Sixteen years later, Apple announced the iPad on Jan. 27th, 2010. Coincidentally, it happened to be my  65th birthday.

So now back to the story.  I envisioned  pervasive computing throughout the house.  At that time most computers were desktop devices and rather expensive. So I thought there would be one central computer in the home that would have the broadband connection.  Then there would be devices around the home that would provide access to this central computer
(remember I am old enough to have lived through the time sharing days).  The central computer would have the main storage for the home.  For instance it could maintain a family calendar, home files,  etc.   I also felt that this would reduce the complexity of managing information since all information (including  media) would be located in just one place (of course it would be automatically backed-up).

At that time, I was engaged with a number of engineers in the Intel Architecture Lab (IAL).  I was funding a number of programs within the Lab then licensing the resulting technology for equity in early stage companies.  So I am pretty sure that that I discussed these concepts with members of IAL and probably they had a major impact on my thinking.

The problem was that Intel was a chip company and we had a very strong strategic relationship with Microsoft.   We actually had many software designers but every time we got close to some area that Bill Gates considered  Microsoft’s birthright there would be a major battle and Intel would give in.

Microsoft was actually slow to understand how the home computing would develop.  They believed that intelligent set top’s would be the way along with game machines and various appliances.  After working with Microsoft and General Instruments  (the leader in cable boxes at the time) on the development of an Interactive Set Top Box, I became convinced that this was not the way things would develop. This view was also held by Matt Miller (no relation) who was the CTO of General Instruments.  Together, Matt and I persuaded  GI and Intel decided to develop residential broadband technologies and to do it without Microsoft.  Microsoft spent a lot of effort to develop Set Top Box software and made various deals with cable companies including investing a billion dollars into Comcast in 1997.

However, I was not able to get executive management at Intel or Microsoft to understand the need for a home-server.  Andy Grove never really bought into my vision of how computers would be used in the home and invested a great deal of money into a flawed scheme to use ISDN to do video conferencing in the home.  Microsoft would not announce a home-server until 2007.

So computing evolved in the home with more and more homes having multiple computers and eventually sharing a home network.  This network had at its center a router which allowed the devices in the home to easily share one broadband connection. This was one of the tasks that I thought the Information Furnace would do.  But complexity of sharing information in the home increased.  This provided an opportunity  for Apple, to address this need by creating software to synchronize information between computers and devices (iTunes/ iPod is an example). At the same time Web service companies (like Yahoo) dealt with the complexity of email, calendars and contacts by storing them on the Net. Microsoft even bought HotMail in 1997 and started up MSN.

Now most of the functions that I had envisioned for the Information Furnace will be provided by Apple’s iCloud.  Other companies will create similar capabilities.

In away, it is a better solution that the Information Furnace since these capabilities can be professionally managed and maintained. They can be improved without consumer involvement.  But it has taken a long time in coming, and we’re still not there.

Of course the way it played out had a major impact on the companies involved.

Image

AP Article

PCs Evolving Into Information Furnaces :
Technology: Experts predict computers
are evolving into control centers, linking
the telephone, TV, thermostat and other
household electronic devices.

June 30, 1994 | EVAN RAMSTAD | ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — In the metaphor-mad world of technology, there’s a new phrase making the rounds, one that experts believe describes the direction that personal computers are taking. After 20 years as an independent box, the PC is evolving into a control center that ties together the
phone, TV, thermostat and other electronic devices in every room in the house. An information furnace, they call it.

“It’s equivalent to central heating,” said Avram Miller, Intel’s vice president of corporate business development. “This analogy with power is very good. If you look at electricity, electricity was designed to do only one thing–lighting. Clearly, there’s a lot more to it than that now.” Like a furnace, the PC of the future could be hidden from view, in the basement, a closet or drawer. The devices it links would take different shapes depending on their use and location. A unit in the den might have a keyboard and screen while one in the living room might be a big screen with stereo speakers and a
player for programs on compact disc. The incorporation of telephone-answering machines into consumer PCs last summer was an early
example of this trend, which will be a key topic at the annual PC Expo this week at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center.

Intel CEO Andrew Grove has titled his keynote speech for the show “The Ubiquitous Information Appliance.”
The acceleration of the trend is important for Intel to drive demand for advances in its key product–the microprocessor or “brain” of a PC.
Packard Bell Inc. earlier this month rolled out PCs with built-in TV and radio receivers as well as phone answering and fax capabilities. With them, a technician played a Bach compact disc, the radio and TV and worked on a word-processing program simultaneously.
It’s not just today’s electronic items that could be hooked up but those on the drawing board of technologists and inventors. Last week, Timex Corp. and Microsoft Corp. even demonstrated a watch that can take in messages from a computer. “One of the devices that’s interesting, we call it an I-pad, an information pad,” Miller said. “It would be a device that has a flat-panel screen. You can write on it, touch it. You might be able to speak into it and it might speak back. It would be wireless, cheap and have different forms in the house.”  Some early forms of an “I-pad” are Apple Computer Inc.’s Newton, Motorola Inc.’s Envoy and IBM’s
Simon devices, which have both computing and communication features.
“You will see all kinds of combinations be possible,” said Safi Qureshey, chief executive of AST Research
Inc. in Irvine. “We want to provide the glue so the user can go in between all of these different access mechanisms.”

The concept of a computer network in the home is rooted in the workplace. Portable computers, for instance, linked to the main one in an office are allowing more people to work at home or on the road. “The same technologies are going to be used in the home environment,” said Alan Soucy, vice president of mobile computers at Zenith Data Systems. “They’re going to be repackaged, more specific, more like an appliance.”
The vision isn’t just Intel’s or the computer industry’s. At a cable TV trade show last month, General Instrument Corp., the leading maker of set-top channel controls, described a plan for “component” TVs built around a computer-like box. The monitor–which in time will be a flat panel screen–and game player, video recorder or telephone would all be separate pieces.
“Exactly how much it all gets centralized in one place, I’m a little hard pressed to predict right now,” said Jeff Roman, vice president of technology and new business development for General Instrument.
The first personal computer sold to the general public, the Altair 8800, appeared in Popular Electronics magazine in December, 1974. It was a box of circuits and lights that cost about $250 but had no software
or screen and required 50 commands, executed by flipping switches, just to get started. Today, the most popular PCs take just a few minutes to set up, have dozens of megabytes of software
already installed, and can link through a phone line to millions of others worldwide.

Very few people anticipated the computers of today in 1974. Even fewer know what to expect in another
two decades. Something as futuristic as an information furnace, while still vague, is probably only a decade away. There is certainty in the industry only about the next year or two.
“It’s not possible to conceive 20 years from now,” said Intel’s Miller. “The computers of 20 years from now will probably be 10,000 times more powerful than they are today”

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Rotterdam 1969-1974: The Thoraxcenter

December 28, 2011

Towards the end of 1968, I accepted a position at the Thoraxcenter in Rotterdam. My task was to create and run the computer dept.  It was actually two depts.  One was part of the medical school at Erasmus University and the other was part of the  Dijkzigt University Medical Center.  Accepting the position was both and easy and difficult decision.  It was easy to accept an offer that would mean relocating to Holland, a country I had visited before and liked.  I was pretty negative about the USA at the time, particularly because of the Vietnam War.  And to make matters worse, Ronald Reagan was governor of California.  I was employed  by UC San Francisco Medical School  and worked at the Langley Porter Institute so I actually work for the state  But it was hard to leave Joe Kamiya who was not only my boss, but also my mentor and friend.  Furthermore, while I was very interested in our work in brainwave bio feedback (I designed some of the first equipment to do brainwave bio feedback)  and the idea of designing systems to diagnose and treat heart patients was not nearly as interesting.

Professor Paul Hugenholtz MD, was the founder and Executive Director  of the Thoraxcenter (Thoraxcentrum) .  He was a Dutch cardiologist who had spent many years working at  Boston Hospital and doing some experimental work with people at MIT.  Paul’s vision for the Thoraxcenter included fully integrating computer technology into the care of patience.  This was  a pretty advanced concept in 1968.   Paul would call me in San Francisco early in the morning  from Holland to try to convince me join his staff. I eventually agreed.  I was to report to Jerry  Russel who was an american bio-technologest.   Jerry also had experience in using computers in cardiology.  He had decided  use computers from Digital Equipment Corp and ordered two PDP-9s for the Thoraxcenter.    I already knew how to program  the PDP-7 and sometime before I left Joe’s lab, we had also gotten a PDP-9.  So this was a familiar  base for me.   I don’t remember what exactly what happened but sometime soon after my arrival, I ended up reporting directly to Paul Hugenholtz.    Paul was/is and amazing man.  Here is a link to a pretty detailed interview with him about his life.  Paul, thought me much and I will always be grateful to him for his support and coaching.  The day I arrived at the Thoraxcenter, I was greeted by his assistant, Arianne van der Klooster, who became my wife of 25 years (we are no longer married but still close)  and the mother of my three children.

This was my first management  position. I had just turned 24 years old.  I also had not graduated from college and was about to fill a position on the academic staff.   I think by the time I left some five years later to immigrate with my family to Israel, there were over 30 people working my group and and held a position that was something between an assistant and associate professor.  We accomplished much both in terms of the development of  computer technology and in terms of cardiovascular medicine. It is almost funny to think about the technology we had to use and how we improvised so much which is really the main point of this blog post.

Let me start by describing the basic set up.  We had two nearly identical PDP-9s.  The PDP-9 had an 18 bit word length (today computers have either 8, 16, 32 or 64 bit word lengths).  The maximum memory was 32,000 words. To put into bytes (8 bits) which we now commonly use to describe computer memory, it had 72,000  bytes (72kb).      Most of the photos I take on my iPhone are about three times as large as the total memory of the computer.  We had no disk memory.  We had a small tape unit which had a capacity about equal to the main memory.  We did not swap programs.  All the software had to be in main memory.  We got really good at writing very tight programs in assembly code as you can imagine.  One of the computers was used for our real time Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Monitoring System.  The other was used for program development.  Only one programer could work on that computer at a time.  The programing computer was also used as backup to the mission critical ICU system.  To facility that ability to switch, we had a small bus switch which would move all the peripherals  we used for the clinical system to the backup/programing computer.

I think the computer system monitored heart rate, blood pressure, temperature  and breath  I don’t remember if we were able to monitor arrhythmia.  I doubt it.  We actually got the raw signal in for the EKG, blood pressure and breath.  We used a Digital to Analog Converter which was multiplex to sample four signals for six patient and from that we computed the key values we monitored Not only could we provide the nursing staff with continuous instantaneous values but the could set alarm thresholds. We were also able to provided graphs so that trend lines could be seen.   There  were six patients on line, I believe.   The displays at the nurses desk were TV monitors turned on their sides.  We used a head per track video disk to create the images and text. This desk  was actually developed for the television industry.  But the craziest things was the keyboard.  At first, we used rotary  phone to send commands from the nurses to the computer.  In other words, the nurse would dial a command.  The computer would monitor the signal from the phone and count the pulses.  Later, we built a specialized keyboard using keys that were designed for elevators.  The company that developed the specialized equipment for us was Mennen Medical. ( I would later work for that company in Israel where I was able to commercialize some of the work I had done at the Thoraxcenter. I also joined the staff at the dept. of cardiology, Tel Aviv Medical School as Adjunct Associate Professor.)   Later, we  wanted to increased  to look at other aspects of the EKG such a t-waves but we did not have enough computing power.  It was then that I ordered a PDP-15 which was the successor of the PDP-9.  But I treated it in a way like a microprocessor.  I just got a small version without any peripherals and we created a high speed connection to the ICU computer system. It was the beginning of my love of networking computers.  I had a special love for the PDP-15.  When I was still working at Langley Porter, I found that there was a design problem with the PDP-9 which made it difficult to use for real time programing (it had to do with the interrupt structure).  I modified the micro code of PDP-9 to fix the problem and Digital took that change and applied it to the PDP-15.

We then got one of the very first PDP-11s. I think it might have had 32kb of memory.  We used it to develop a system for the catheterization lab.  That system was later licensed to Mennen Greatbatch.  We also developed software for some of the first work in echo-cardiogram as well as creating a computer simulation model of the heart.  It would take the computer a whole day just to have one heart beat I think.

I have been working with computer for 45 years.  The capabilities have grown by something great than 50,000 times.  I remember making circuits with just one transistor, a few resistors and a couple of capacitors.  If you look at the evolution of biological intelligence and compare it with computer intelligence, there is just one conclusion that I can make:  That in my life time we will go from a single cell to a human capability. And then what?  More about that some other time when I explain why the universe is the way it is.

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Promise we make to our future selves

December 23, 2011

I found this Ted talk interesting (as most).  It dealt with the relationship between ourselves now and ourselves in the future.  It is a topic I think about often.  We make trade offs all the time between what we would want now and what we will want later.  Human beings have a pretty good ability to project into the future.  But I am also interested in the relationship and obligation of our future self to who were are now and what that means for our future self.

Let me give an example that plays a big role in my life,  to illustrate this.    As frequent readers of this blog will know, I had studied music composition in my late teens.  I felt that I had a gift  for composing.  When I started working with computer in 1966 and dealing medical research, I pretty much gave up composing.  Over the years, I continued to play piano but more as something to relax me.

I joined Intel in 1984 and until 1988 and was based at the Oregon Facility. In 1998,  my  wife was accepted into a Ph.d program at Stanford.  Intel kindly relocated us to Palo Alto and I worked out of the Santa Clara campus (which certainly had  very positive consequence for my career at Intel).  I decided to take piano lessons again and found a teacher named Glenn Spencer who thought Jazz Piano.

Glenn was a good teacher and very interesting man who sadly died too young from cancer.  Glenn was the founder and leader of a Midi  user group called Musig. Midi is a software protocol that was first developed in 1982 and is still used today to transfer information between electronic music instruments, computers and other devices.  I got interested in Midi and joined Musig. I started learning about the capabilities of Midi.  I bought an electronic piano that had some programmable  features.  Musiq had periodic lectures from companies that were developing Midi products.  One of these companies was OpCode and it a leading company in Midi software.  It had one of the best  if not the best  Sequencer called Studio Vision.  A Sequencer is like a word processor for music.  When OpCode started up, most Sequencers were special purpose hardware.  Personal computers were just starting up.  OpCode developed products for the Mac.  I was amazed when I saw Vision demonstrated by someone from OpCode at one of the meetings.  I understood how powerful the combination of an electronic  keyboard,  and a synthesizer where.   Synthesizers were around since the 60s when Robert Moog introduced the first commercially available product.  The synthesizer did just that, it synthesized  sounds of musical instruments. Later, sampled sounds would be used.

A whole new world of technology related to music opened up for me.  It was very exciting.  I wanted to get involved.  I also thought that there was an opportunity for Intel to develop some technology that would allow the actual product of the musical sounds to be done in software.  You can read a bit about that part of the story here.  I organized a meeting with the CEO of OpCode, Chris Halaby (who is strange not mentioned in the Wikipedia article about OpCode).  I had a number of discussion with Chris and eventually  he asked me to join the board of OpCode which I did in an individual capacity and not in my role as VP Corp, Development at Intel.  I bought a Mac to run the companies software.  I got a really good synthesizer/sampler from Roland which was one of the leading companies in midi hardware.  And there I was with what was pretty much a music studio in my home office. I first used it to recording my playing so that I could improve my piano skills.  But one day something I did not expect happened. I began to compose  music again.

I knew I had a talent for composing.  It came to me naturally.  My friend Rich Falvey had thought me the basics of music theory one afternoon and I wrote my first piece a few days later.  I was 15 years old and never played a musical instrument.  I started to learn the piano but only so that I could play the pieces of music I was writing.  I never thought I would be a pianist but over the years my piano skills developed.  But there I was again in my mid 40s, writing music.  Now I had amazing tools to capture my compositions.  I could compose at the keyboard, edit on the computer and orchestrate.  I began to write complex orchestral  music.  In my teens, I just wrote for the piano or for small combinations of instruments and singers.  It was all that I could hear in my head and I had no other way to hear it performed unless I could get musicians together.  There seemed to be no limits.  I could experiment with my music change the instruments, the tempo and even create new sounds.

I would stay up late at night with ear phones on my head and write music.  I began to work on one piece in particular that had a very powerful effect on me.  I found it overwhelming.  It was not so much that I was impressed with myself for being able to create this music but it was more that I was actually overcome by the beauty of it.    But I was also suffering.  I really needed to spend long amounts of time and concentration to work on this piece.  But I did not have that time.  I had a very demanding  and exciting job  at Intel and a family I loved very much.  So I made a decision.  I decided to stop composing.  But I also made a promise.  I  promised  myself of the future that one day when I had achieved my professional and financial goals, I would come back to composing.

So here I am with this promise I made to myself of the past some  twenty years ago. have even greater tools to work with. I have kept up on music technology.  I play the piano a lot.  I am still improving and take lessons in jazz piano and theory. But  I would not be here today, comfortably  retired since my mid 50s, if it was not for the efforts  I made in my 40s.  I have yet kept that promise.  I think I know why.  What if I find out that I am not longer capable of composing with the skills and talent of that 40 year old me. What if I find out that I am not capable of keeping the promise.

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Obama, I am willing to run as your Vice President but only if you listen

December 7, 2011

Dear Barack,  the person that I wish would be come president is the man I voted for in 2008, you. But you turned out not to be the person I thought you were.  Some how you thought you could play the political game and win. You thought you were a giant but you even a giant will sink if it stands in quicksand.  I am thinking about running against  you.  But before I do that, I have  an offer. I will run as your vice president.  But only if you listen to me.  I think you are a good person but you are lost. You need help.

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These are the good old days for Apple and not just because Jobs has passed

November 27, 2011

Companies like products, have life cycles.  Apple is very unusual because it was able to reinvent itself.    In particular, Apple went from being a niche  PC player with a relatively small market share to the leader in revolutionizing music (iPod), the cell phone (iPhone) and creating and leading the tablet market (iPad).    But each of these product categories has its life cycle.  We can see that now with the decline of iPod sales.  The iPhone is on its 4th generation (the iPhone 4S is  just a mid life kicker for the iPhone 4).  We expect  to see an iPhone 5 sometime next year.  How will this product be different?  It can’t really change much in size so it can’t change much in terms of the display now that we have a so called retina display (where individual pixels can not be seen).  The camera can get better but how much better?  Siri can get better but it does its processing in the cloud so it has not much to do with the phone.  Of course, we can get 4G but is that really so important on a phone?  Anyway, I suspect  that the iPhone 5 will be a great success?  But then what?  Eventually there is not that much to add that is meaningful.  So  you either have to reduce price to expand the market our you just have a replacement market. I left out adding more memory?  I am a pretty heavy user of technology.  I have a 64gig iPad but I only really use 32gigs.  I have a 64gig iPhone but I use even less on my iPhone because I do not watch movies on my phone (much).  4G would be helpful to those that us the cellular system for the their iPads.  But most people only us  Wifi on the iPad.  I think the iPad has one or two major product cycles and then what.  Back to cutting prices or having just a replacement market.  And what of the Mac’s.  Apple is doing a good job of increasing the MAC share of desktops and notebooks with innovative and well designed products like the Macbook Air.  There is more head room in traditional personal computers.  But we are still up against limitations.  I have a 27 inch screen that I am looking at right now.  I would not want the screen to be much bigger.  I will of course want more computer memory in the future (I use SSD) and because I am part of the Apple Eco System, I will keep buying macs ever few years.  So here is my point.  Apple became the most valuable company in the world (or close to it) because of the iPod, iPhone and iPad.  I believe that these products  will reach limits that will either force price cuts to explained their markets or slower or declining unit growth.

The guys at Apple are pretty smart and certainly Jobs was.  So what are they thinking?  Well they want to go after the TV industry.  Obviously, home audio visual equipment and the way that media has been delivered by the cable and satiliet companies can be greatly improved on.  But there are many vested interests in particular with respect to the delivery of content.  I don’t see how Apple will be successful in this space but I guess we will have a chance to find out next year.   If they do succeed they will have to do this at a pace that will allow growth even with the decline in the i devices that I predict.  And that means they would have to accomplish this on a world wide basis.

So lets end by looking at a different company and device: The Amazon Kindle Fire.   It is a two hundred  dollar product that  does not compare favorably with the iPad but is a lot cheaper.  It does a great job on books, is ok on video and email etc.  But there is nothing stopping Amazon from staying at the 200 dollar spot and adding functionality and capabilities as the cost of technology declines.  Their plan is to make money on the content.  They have to lock their customers into their own eco system.  It will be harder for them but they have a lot going for them including relationships with so many potential customers for the Fire.

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Do I really need to travel with seven devices

November 20, 2011

This is nuts.  Look what I am traveling with:  1)Macbook Air, 2) iPad, 3) Kindle Fire,  4)Kindle,  5), iPhone ,  6) iPod Touch and 7) AppleTV.  In addition I carry various  thumb drives, a digital camera and wear a flitbit.    And guess what?  They all do different things well.

Macbook Air
Fantastic computer!  It is my main squeeze.  I connect it to a cinema display,  blue-tooth  keyboard, mouse and track-pad when I am home. It serves as my office computer.  Before the most recent model which uses SSD memory, I had a Macbook Pro for my desktop and a Macbook Air as my portable computer.  But the newest version of the Air has enough power and I eliminated my Macbook Pro. Actually it is part of my music studio.

iPad
I mostly use the iPad as a media device.  I watch TV remotely via the sling player, use HBOGO, the DirecTV app etc.  I do read books on it when I need back lighting and will watch TV programs, podcasts and iTunes University while flying on a plan.  I also use it to look at twitter when I am having breakfast, or read the New York times.  I rarely read my email on it and I almost never create anything on it.

Kindle Fire
Just go this.  Frankly, it is the only one on the list I do not really need.  I got it, to understand it’s role better.  I think the the combination of its $200 price point and the Amazon Eco System will make it a winner. I am not sure I will keep using it but we will see.

Kindle Classic
I love my Kindle.  I have had every model.  I read mostly on the kindle.  I love its light weight and its non reflective screen.  It is the only device I can read with while in bright sun light.  I don’t do anything more than read on it. But I am glad that Amazon makes it possible for me to move between the Kindle, iPad with the Kindle App and the Kindle Fire and even keeps track of what page I am on.

iPhone
Love my iPhone.  It is always with me.  I use it to check email when I am out and about.  I use finding all kind of info (maps, google, yelp etc).  It is of course my phone (voice and text).  But I also skype and Facetime on it.

iPod Touch
I really don’t need this one but I have had it for a long time.  I use it when I want to listen to podcasts or music and don’t want to take my phone (mostly when I am abroad).  I like it size.  I also like that I would not be very upset if I lost it since I have had it for years.

AppleTV
I bring an AppleTV with me when I travel so I can connect to hotel Flat Panel Displays (if they have HDMI) and watch movies that are either stored on my Macbook Air or streaming over the net. I can also watch podcasts and share video and play my music through the sound system of the hotel room.

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Steve Jobs Bio: A review sort

November 6, 2011

I just finished Walter Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs.  I would say it is informative but not insightful.  For tech junkies,  especially of the Apple genre, the book has  detailed information about the history of Apple and especially how product and business decisions were made.  This history  is  presented in a clear and factual manor.  Steve Jobs controlled the flow of information out of Apple with a tight grip, until he could no longer close his hand. Isaacson was able to get this history from Jobs in a comprehensive  way and from those at Apple that Jobs allowed to speak with Isaacson (I am sure they all checked in with Steve).  Jobs wanted to control how history would see him.  That is why he sought out Isaacson to do his bio. Jobs said he was doing this for his children, so that they could know him better.  I don’t think this was sincere .  Of course, he  knew that the bio would have to deal his dark side  and the awful way he had treated people including members of his own family. He  knew that he could work with Isaacson in such away that the sting of his behavior  could be minimized and that his accomplishments would dominate the book.  Isaacson was  afraid to fall into the Jobs  reality distortion field and fought hard with himself to maintain his objectivity.  But in the process, I think he may have lost the essence of what made Steve Jobs be Steve Jobs.  Isaacson might of gotten close in discussing how Jobs felt both abandoned by his biological parents and at the same time felt special because he was chosen by his adoptive parents.  But I don’t think this was really what drove Steve Jobs. I think this was just something he fed to Isaacson and was an example of Jobs manipulation.  It had a profound effect on the book with Isaacson coming back to this theme time and time again.  Jobs may not have known what made him the person that he was but if he did he would surely not have shared it.

Steve Jobs was a remarkable man with great gifts.  He was driven by his product visions.  He wanted to leave a mark on the world and he did.  Apple and Steve Jobs were the same in his mind.  The more he realized that he would die the more he wanted to make sure  Apple would live.  As he was dying he put much, if not almost all, of his energy in to making sure that Apple would not only survive but dominate.  Because Apple was Steve Jobs.  He probably saw his wife and children much as he saw his own dying body – as something that had to be left  behind.

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Facebook stop stealing my blog posts

November 5, 2011

I listened to an interesting interview (aren’t all) on Fresh Air about the war between google, amazon, facebook and apple (notice Microsoft was not even mentioned.  By the author of this article on the same topic in Fastcompany Magazine.  Clearly many companies are fighting to control the user/customer.  When I was at Intel in the days of the Wintel, Microsoft and Intel would promote the concept of open systems.  I use to joke, that open systems was what people did on top of what we sold.  It was easier in those days to understand the food chain. It was vertical.  But now all kinds of companies feed information and in a sense their customers back and forth between them.  You can even use your Facebook ID and Password open your Foursquare account as an example.  But what companies really want is to keep the user on their platform and not let them go to another sight.  So they bring information from other platforms over.

Now this is starting to piss me off.  I am happy that my blog posts show up on my Facebook Profile but I am not happy that Facebook copies over the posts so that my Facebook “Friends” can read the post there and comment there and never go to my actual blog (linkedin and Plaxo also do this).  I want people to come to my blog because once there they may read other posts.  Also WordPress gives me get statistics on how visits and how they go there and which of the links I carefully embed in my blog were actually use.  I get none of this from Facebook.  I get “like” and sometimes a few comments.  I have to figure out how to stop this.

 

Posted in Social Networks, Technology | 2 Comments »

Avram, the Merchant Seaman

November 4, 2011

Reading the Steve Jobs bio made me want to share a bit more about my past just in case Walter Isaacson does not write my bio.

I got my high school diploma because my mother pretty much  bought  for me from a private school called Drew in San Francisco were we lived..  I took a bunch of tests, showed up a few times and there I was a  graduate.  It was clear by that time that I would never succeed in college and I had no interest in going there anyway.  My teen years had prepared me for little more than being a poet, political protester, fledging jazz pianist and composer and one of the skinniest guys around (107 pounds and 5.8 tall).  I was human laser beam and could walk through walls by turning sideways.

My maternal  grandmother, Della Silverman, was married to her second husband, Jack Silverman.  Her former husband, Mark Harris, my grandfather had committed suicide  in 1948 at the age of 50.  Not too much later, Della married Jack.   He was an interesting man that played a pretty significant role in my life from time to time.  For instance, Della and Jack lived for many years in Las Vegas where Jack worked in a casino as a dealer and Della managed the gift shop at the Sahara Hotel.  My younger sister, Beverly, and I would visit them for the summer when we were young. She would park us at the hotel pool.  I remember Betty Grable watching out for me as did a number of show girls.   Jack thought me how to tip the captain to get a good seat at some of the Vegas shows (Bev and I saw most of the Rat Pack).  I use to joke that I gave 20 dollars to the captain of the airplane to sit up front.

Anyway, there I was turning 18 and every one in the family was worried about my future. They thought  I would end up as a failure.  My mom did not care since she would love me no matter what.  Then Jack had an idea.  I should join the merchant marines, specifically,  the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards.   They had a training facility in Santa Rosa (strangely my home in Kenwood CA is just ten miles away), and he could get me in (by paying some people off).  Since I had no other plans I said yes.

The training school  was located  Santa Rosa, California and had two programs.  One was for  cooks and the other was for stewards and waiters. I was enrolled in the stewards program where we learned to be waiters (of the five star type) and stewards (which was like being a maid with trousers).  Associated with the school was a retirement home for merchant seamen.  So these guys had their rooms tended to by the trainees and they had the same kind of meals you would get on a luxury liner (Baked Alaska was a favorite desert I recall).  They were mostly a group of assholes.

I actually enjoyed learning to wait tables.  I could take the orders for a table of ten people in my head.  I loved carrying a fifty pound tray filled with plates of food (which turn out to be very damaging to me which I will explain later).  I liked the other trainees.  About half of them were gay and it was the first time I really interacted with gay men. One of them thought me how to use  creams to keep my skin in good shape.  I also developed a close friendship with a man named Nate who  was also the head waiter at the Purple Onion in San Francisco.  He did not really need to be trained but he had to go through  the program part of the time to get his diploma. He wanted to sail to Japan.   I would spend my free days staying with Nate and his Japanese wife at their apartment on Bush Street.   They were the guardians of two Japanese  twin girls my exact age.  The girls were singers and had steady job in San Francisco.  I  fell for one of them, Kaiko and we were sort of dating.  But we were always chaperoned. I would go to the club where they were performing and then a large group of us would go to some after hour club where we could dance.  I still remember  dancing with her to “I left my heart in San Francisco”.  I only got to kiss her a few times.  She and her sister did not speak english and I started learning  Japanese.   I really got into Japanese culture for a while.  Unfortunately, I took a roll of photos which were taken of  the two of us to my grandfather, Bill Goldfinger to develop. He owned a camera shop on Post Street near Market Street.  I did not know how much he hated Japanese people (WWII). He would not talk to me after this for many years.  Eventually, Kaiko and her sister went to Las Vegas to work.  I was invited to join them but I decided this was not the life I wanted to live.

Merchant  seamen jobs were controlled by their union.  If you were qualified for certain time you would put a card  in for the job.  The cards would age up to 90 days and then reset.  The person with the oldest card would get the job.  So you had to kind of bet on a bunch  of factors to decide what and when to bid on a Job.   I really wanted to get a job on the President Roosevelt because it was one of the few ships that sailed around the world.  I would have gotten it I think if I had not almost died first.

One day as I was waiting to put in my card, I felt a very strong pain in my left chest.  If I had that now, I would think I had a heart attack but I was only 18 and was eating a cheeseburger at the time.  I called my mom in terror because the pain was so great.   She said I should go directly to my doctors office.  So somehow I drove there.  He examined me and then called an ambulance.  The next thing I knew, I was at Mt. Zion Hospital with what they call a Spontaneous Pneumothorax.  Mine was really bad.  They tried a number of treatments but nothing worked.  My left lung was collapsed and would not heal.  They ended up having to do a Thoracoscopy which involved opening my chest wall (I am missing a few ribs) and basically gluing my lung to the chest wall.  Anyway, I was in the hospital for a number of weeks and almost died.  I was left with the equivalent of 1 1/2 lungs and a massive scare.  The really awful thing was I was not able to put my card in for the Roosevelt.  But I did mange to get a gig on the President Cleveland as the Steward for the officers.

The ship was it own world.  There were thousands of passengers and four times as many crew.  The crew was divided into those that interfaced with passengers or officers  and who had blue union cards and those that did not and had red union cards. Most of  the red card holders  where chinese and did not associate with the rest of us other than at the gambling  tables that were set up for the crew.  Of those that interfaced with the passengers, about half were gay and half were straight.  I found that out the fist night we sailed when I was walking around in ship and found a party going on with some of the most beautiful women I had ever seen (they were not actually women).   So we sailed to Honolulu where I went to the beach.  It was crazy because I had the biggest and yet unhealed  scare up my back.   I didn’t care. I was alive.  When we were at sea, I  get up early and go up to the highest deck on the ship and watch the sun rise.  Given the earth curvature, I felt that I was sitting on a dime.  Everything in ever direction was round.

While at the school I had developed a friendship with an American Japanese person.  He was a  Nisei (second generation Japanese) named Ken. He could speak Japanese but not that well. However, he married a very sweet woman from Japan and brought her back to San Francisco. I spent a lot of time at their home.  When we  went to Japan (Yokohama ) for the first time, Ken took me on a little trip.  He knew that I was still a virgin (at 18) so he took me to this bar.  It was actually very nice and there was no one there.  Then a very sweet 18 year old girl was introduced to me.  Her name was Miyoko.  I still did not know what was going on. She took my hand and brought me to a room.  I will not go into details but when I left, I was no longer a virgin.  Then Ken came back with two girls. I remember I said “I did not know you could do it with two”.

Things were pretty dangerous on the ship. There would be fights with knives and people actually got killed. Sometimes men were thrown over board. I am not kidding!!  I have not idea how I survived.  The fist time I went to Hong Kong (Hong Kong in 1963 was very different then now), I went to a bar where the officers that I served happen to be. Each had to buy my a drink.  We were on the mainland (Kowloon).  I got totally drunk.  I wanted to go to Mt. Victoria because  I had seen the movie “Love is a many  splendor thing” . So I got onto a Star  Ferry boat.  And of course I choose to buy he lowest class ticket.  I ended up on the bottom level of the boat where the Coolies were.  It was a sea of black clothes.  I got scared as we were traveling across the bay and got closer to the side of the boat. Then I fell over.  They stopped the boat and and I was pulled in.  I was all wet but took a tram up to Victoria Peak.   By the way, Hong Kong was a third world country in 1963 with people sleeping in the streets on bare mattress.

After Hong Kong we went to Manila.  There were bars that said “please check your guns”. I was warned to stay away from the bar girls because they were really transvestites. I did.  People constantly tried to rob me especially young children. I was once shot at.  I did not like the place but Ken and I found that we could sell cigarettes for a lot of money and then buy purses which we could sell in Japan for a lot of money. They we too the money back to the USA were could buy Yen cheap (black market) and then buy cigarettes in Japan which we sold in Manila to buy purses and around and around we went.  By the time I was 19 years old I made about $100,000 in todays dollars  this way.  I stopped in around Sept. 1963 when I met Holly.  But that is another story.

 

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Posted in Avram's Past | 3 Comments »

The Republican Nominee was not on the stage at the debate

October 19, 2011

The next president of the United States could well be a republican but it will not be any of the clowns we have been seeing at the republican debates. I believe that none of the current list of candidates will get a majority of the votes but rather it will be split. While Romney may have the most he will not have enough to secure the nomination. The voting process is very complicated. In addition to delegates that are elected via the primary or caucuses, there are delegates that are just important members of the party. I remember the days when political conventions did not have a clear winner going in. The was a lot of arm twisting and back room deals and then someone was nominated from the floor. I could see Christie or someone like that getting the nomination without ever having to have run for the primary. That person would be “drafted” and would say they had no choice. They would also not have the baggage of having run in the primary. I think that person would have an excellent chance of beating Obama unless Obama gets smart and has Hillary run as his VP. The republican convention will be held in Tampa Florida starting on August 27, 2012. The democratic convention is scheduled to be held during the week of September 3, 2012.

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Posted in Government, Political Views | Leave a Comment »

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