Doug Engelbart, visionary

EngelbartGeniuses can be found on every street corner in Silicon Valley, but visionaries are much less common. Geniuses are good at completing tasks while visionaries are the first to recognize tasks that need completion. And of all the visionaries none were greater or had a longer range view than Doug Engelbart, who died last night at age 88.
To most people who recognize his name Doug Engelbart was the inventor of the computer mouse but he was much, much more than that. In addition to the mouse and the accompanying chord keyboard, Doug invented computer time sharing, network computing, graphical computing, the graphical user interface and (with apologies to Ted Nelson) hypertext links. And he invented all […]

By |July 3rd, 2013|2013, Breaking News, Computing, Family, history, People|30 Comments
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IBM to customers: Your hand is staining my window

Ginni_RomettyA month ago I began hearing about impending layoffs at IBM, but what could I say beyond “layoffs are coming?” This time my first clues came not from American IBMers but from those working for Big Blue abroad. Big layoffs were coming, they feared, following an earnings shortfall that caused panic in Armonk with the prospect that IBM might after all miss its long-stated earnings target for 2015. Well the layoffs began hitting a couple weeks ago just before I went into an involuntary technical shutdown trying to move this rag from one host to another. So I, who like to be the first to break these stories, have to in this case write the […]

By |June 20th, 2013|2013, Business, Companies, Computing, Software|351 Comments
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Snowden and the NSA reflect a millennial climate change

mt_snowdonSnowdon (not Snowden) is the name of the tallest mountain in Wales and while by Swiss or Colorado standards it may not seem like much the weather on Snowdon is unpredictable and has taken many lives. I climbed Snowdon as a schoolboy with my class and that day on the mountain another school group was lost in a blizzard and some boys died. This is what first came to mind when I heard about National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaking documents and fleeing to Hong Kong. Like his namesake mountain, this Snowden is trouble for those who are overconfident or unwary.

I’ve written about this general topic many times over the years and doing a […]

By |June 18th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, Computing, Government, Internet, Politics, Privacy and Security, Technology|84 Comments
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If it’s Ethernet versus Godzilla, then Godzilla is DOCSIS

Two weeks ago I was at the Computer History Museum to help observe the 40th anniversary of Ethernet. It was literally 40 years to the day since Bob Metcalfe drew his first sketches of what became the world’s dominant OSI Level 2 network technology. It was a fun and festive day that ended, believe it or not, with dancing. But some of the celebration didn’t make sense to me. Or, rather, it seemed to me that important parts of the discussion were missing.

When, for example, did 802.11 WiFi become a part of 802.3 Ethernet? That claim was made over and over during the day and helped power the argument that Ethernet is today a $100 billion business. Yeah, right.

Parts of that argument are true. […]

By |June 17th, 2013|2013, Internet, Technology|11 Comments
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Father’s Day

Mom & DadToday was Father’s Day in the USA and that white-haired guy in the picture was my father. It’s the last picture I have of him, taken a few months before he died, ironically on my birthday. I was expecting a call, just not that call. That was in 1991. I had an InfoWorld column due that day and I wrote it, as I recall, about him. They indulged me.

We men spend our lives alternately emulating our fathers and rebelling against them, a process I was surprised to see lasts long after death. They give us their faces: certainly you can see a lot of him in me, though his face is mooshed a bit from landing a […]

By |June 17th, 2013|2013, Family|14 Comments
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