Where Wizards Stay Up Late

The same person who asked "why search engines don't work as well as they should" also asked about a history of the internet. I gave her my copy of Where Wizards Stay Up Late. She's an intelligent person with advanced degrees and couldn't believe that there was an "internet" before the web.

What I found striking, when I first read the book years ago, was that the development of FTP was completed in 1972 (RFC 354). That was was the birth of the internet: the means by which files are transmitted from computer to computer over differing networks. It took 20 years from that point for the internet to enter the mainstream.

If you're interested in the history of technology and science this is a wonderful book. I was fascinated by the development of the internet as a series of distributed networks. Simply put the problem was not "how do you protect the system from attact" but how does the system survive after the attack. (Remember, in the beginning, the "internet" was a DARPA project.)

Baran's idea constituted a third approach to network design. He called his a distributed network. Avoid having a central communications switch, he said, and build a network composed of many nodes, each redundantly connected to its neighbor. ...

Theoretically it might might be possible to set up a network with numerous redundant connections ... But there was a technical limitation, since all signals on the telephone network were analog signals. The telephone-switching plan prohibited more than five links to be connected in tandem, because signal quality deteriorated rapidly with the increased number of tandem links.

At the same that Baran was developing his concept of distributed networks digital technology was coming onto the scene.

Wow! The first few chapters describing the breakthroughs were astounding.

Why Smart Executives Fail

I just finished Why Smart Executives Fail by Sydney Finkelstein. I think it is as important a read as The E Myth. I loved the section on Webvan. (I remember reading about it as it was gearing up and thinking it was a great idea.) Webvan was to take on the supermarkets and drive those dinosaurs out of business. Customers would order their items on line and have it delivered the same or next day, and instead of a 4 or 6 hour delivery window there would be a 30 minute window. Billions were spent; Bechtel was hired to build distribution centers; competent, experienced directors were hired and yet Webvan was out of business barely 2 years after opening shop.

Finkelstein, in this example, as in many others, showed the difference between "great expectations" and outcome.

"Even today, writing about Webvan, it's easy to get excited by the vision. But the business model was fatally flawed from the start.

The supermarket business is notoriously low-margin to start with, so where was the money goint to come from. ... Throw in free home delivery, and you've got to become the Superman of productivity to make a profit. ... When you add up the costs of building the Webvan infrastructure - easily $1 billion plus -- it's hard to see how the numbers can add up. Now imagine that there are literally tens of thousands of competitors - call them supermarkets - that can easily add home delivery, that do not need to spend millions (let alone billions) to do so, that already have customers and market presence, that offer products of essentailly equal quality to your own, and are - surprise! - not really dinosaurs after all, and you have an idea that is getting less good with each passing minute.

The Pinball Effect, James Burke

It's a fun and easy read for someone who loves the history of science and technology. I think it would be terribly convoluted for someone who has little to no knowledge on the subject. As much as I like the The Pinball Effect it is fundamentally flawed book. I'm not talking about the few historical flaws, but nstead the books unstated and underlying premise that correlation equals causation.

James Burke is an educated man and would never argue that point but each chapter, while fun to read, implies that each discovery/invention led to the next and the next. It's tantamount to saying that the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand led to WWI which led to the allies dismembering the Ottoman Empire, which led to Osama bin Laden and 9/11.

We all see the correlation but there is no causation. History is not so neat.