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Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Mailland and Driscoll; MIT Press) describes the mass market early 1980s French system that shared many characteristics with the Apple and Google app store systems. A monopoly provider allowed third parties to build and offer applications to a captive audience, prevented via technical means from patronizing unapproved application vendors. The captive users were billed by the monopoly periodically.

As a computational platform, Minitel was composed of three components: terminals, servers, and the network infrastructure to interconnect them. Unlike the videotex/teletext systems being assembled elsewhere in Europe, Minitel was designed to encourage the development of privately owned third-party services. In this respect, Minitel was an early example of a technical platform intended to support an economic platform or “multisided market” by bringing together potential user-consumers with service providers while extracting a small rent for making the match.

The PAVI [switch into which the terminals dialed] also played a part in the enforcement of Télétel censorship. If a service was found in violation of Télétel rules, the PAVI would be programmed to refuse to connect incoming callers. The PAVI determined, call by call, which servers were accessible, to whom, and under what conditions.

While the standard X.25 protocol enables all hosts on the network to act as routers, or packet switches, the DGT implementation of X.25 did not.38 In this nonstandard variant of X.25, therefore, the DGT deliberately prevented the decentralized, privately owned servers at the edges of the network from acting as routers.39 Only the operator-controlled nodes were allowed to route packets. This meant that virtual circuits that would have been possible using a standard X.25 implementation were prohibited, thereby forcing all user traffic to pass through one of the State-run gateways

On the other hand, the servers that hosted content were all privately owned as well as decentralized to the edges of the network.33 This stood in contrast to the other European videotex experiments, particularly those in England, Germany, and Switzerland, where all content was hosted on centralized servers operated by the monopoly PTT operator. In those systems, potential content providers rented space on a shared central server.34 In France, however, it was left to the content providers to purchase and administer their own servers. These privately operated machines were then added to the edges of the network through a digital data line leased from the State-controlled public data network, Transpac.

users were not required to input any payment information at all. The DGT instead would bill users directly by adding a simple “Télétel use” fee onto their monthly phone bills. Since everyone who had a phone line would get a free Minitel, and since both the Minitel ecosystem and public switched telephone network (PSTN) were managed by the DGT, all one would have to do to use the terminal would be to plug in the electric socket, connect the phone line, et voilà, you were online.

The Kiosk billing system was, in many ways, the “killer app” underlying the runaway success of Minitel.50 The Kiosk also reflected the French political tradition of centralization found in so many other aspects of the system.51 Like the PAVI gateways in which it was implemented, Kiosk placed the DGT at the center of all online activity.

As early as 1980, the service providers’ association indicated that it did not want the DGT to be involved in the commercial side of Minitel: “Billing and collection shall be handled by the service providers only, the DGT must only intervene as an information carrier.”54 Billing, it reasoned, was a site of potential innovation and competition best managed by private enterprise.

Instead of Kiosk, early Minitel service providers requested that a chip card payment technology be implemented.55 Payments through credit cards could have been accommodated in an architecture where content servers were allowed to act as switches, since all the payment information would have been included in the packets being switched. A chip card system, in other words, would have enabled the decentralization of payment on Minitel.56 By rejecting the chip card proposal in favor of the Kiosk system, the DGT established itself as the single administrative gatekeeper of all commercial activity on the network.57

The Kiosk system positioned the State as organizer, controller, and taxer of all economic activity.

At least in the early days, signing up as an application provider did not move on “Internet time”:

Consider the story of three jobless yet enterprising individuals who in 1985 attempted to launch a Minitel site. Dubbed Amphitel, the proposed site consisted of an online guide for the city of Grenoble and featured online travel services for tourists. The site’s founders partnered with the Sopra corporation, a major information technology services provider, and secured funding from Credit Agricole, one of the largest French banks.

They first wrote to their congressperson, one Bernard Montergnole, to request assistance in navigating the Minitel regulatory framework. The congressperson, not up to speed with that aspect of the law but eager to support digital innovation in his district, wrote to the minister of communications, M. Georges Fillioud, on February 4, 1985, requesting an opinion as to what authorization must be secured by the enterprising trio in order to roll out their service onto the Minitel network. The communications minister, though, was not up to speed either and had to request an opinion from his legal department. On March 26, 1985, almost two months from the congressperson’s letter, the answer came from Jacques Vistel, a State Council justice delegated to the communications ministry, to explain to the minister that if the service is a mere e-mail system, then no authorization was required, but that if the service used electronics as a means of transmitting information to the public, then the entrepreneurs must retrieve official authorization forms from the local prefect and formally request an authorization to provide their service over the network. The prime minister’s legal service archives, where this exchange was recorded, do not indicate whether or not this politically correct service ever made it online.

The authors are not impressed with what Americans have built for themselves:

In 2010, Apple removed the WikiLeaks app from its App Store, making it more difficult for iPhone users to access content published by WikiLeaks. The decision by Apple to block access to WikiLeaks through its platform was not motivated by any legal mandate—WikiLeaks was protected by the First Amendment—but rather by public relations considerations.

Unlike Minitel, with its implied commitment to the French public interest, privately run platforms like CompuServe and the Apple Store are governed by an opaque, centralized form of authority—gated communities à l’Américaine.

If Apple does not want an app to be part of the iOS ecosystem, the developer of the app cannot sue Apple. In contrast, because Télétel was a public platform managed by the State, French service providers were afforded due process. Only illegal content could be rejected, not content that the platform operator did not like.

So while the platform was not fully open and chilling effects certainly existed, due process principles ensured that legal content could eventually make it through—a level of openness that has never existed on the prototypical walled gardens built in the United States.

In almost every way, the Apple ecosystem mirrors the design of Télétel—except that it lacks the transparency and openness of the French system.

Unlike Télétel, Apple is not operating in the interest of the public. Whereas all censorship decisions on Télétel were subject to due process and could be appealed in a court of law, Apple exercises absolute control over the communication that takes place on its platform. The public has no interest, no representation, and no recourse to settle disputes. Likewise, where Télétel published an open standard and allowed any hardware to join the network, the Apple ecosystem is accessible only to Apple’s own devices. As a result, Minitel fostered the development of a strong, competitive, private hardware industry at the terminal level as well as the host level, which supported the development of French companies like Alcatel and Matra, and ironically, US companies such as AT&T and Texas Instruments, whereas every increase in Apple’s platform penetration mechanically increases Apple—and only Apple’s—hardware penetration. The difference in the exercise of control over engineering decisions extends also to the software and services provided on each platform. Whereas Minitel developers were free to use any technologies to create their services, iOS developers are limited to the programming languages and development tools approved by Apple.

Minitel was running without encryption and therefore the government had the technical ability to censor communications, but apparently chose not to.

Individual users were not subject to State censorship, and as a result, Minitel became an important platform for fringe political and cultural activity.58 For instance, during the massive antigovernment student demonstrations of 1986, Minitel became “a peerless tool for information and communication” used to organize the protests.

More: Read Minitel: Welcome to the Internet

 

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Just in time for the 40th anniversary of its 1978 launch, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Mailland and Driscoll; MIT Press) is here to remind us that a consumer Internet was pioneered by the French.

Let me do a few posts on this book. Let’s start with the overall system architecture. We tend to think of TCP/IP as inevitable, but it was not the world’s only way to do packet-switched digital communication. Minitel ran on X.25. Terminals would dial up switches, which would then connect the terminal to the server of the user’s choice.

The authors explain the overall concept:

In the early 1980s, growing a platform like Minitel was especially difficult because the general public did not yet see the point of going online. … One strategy for attracting a critical mass of users and service providers to a new network is to “prime the pump” … This is exactly what happened in France. The State ordered millions of terminals from private manufacturers (which prompted the creation of new manufacturing lines) and gave away the equipment, free of cost, to every French telephone subscriber … The State further incited this fresh user base to actually connect to the network by creating a free, online phone book, l’annuaire électronique. Finally, it substantially lowered the barrier to entry for end users by not implementing an up-front subscription model but rather charging users based on their connection time and adding the resulting fees onto users’ monthly phone bills … To support the creation of new services, the telephone company rebated about two-thirds of the connection fees to the service providers.

By default, Minitel terminals were designed to decode and display pages of data in videotex format. In the late 1970s, videotex referred to an emerging family of media technologies intended to bridge the twin pillars of midcentury telecommunications: the telephone and television. The simplest implementations of videotex broadcast a revolving set of static “pages” including a mix of text and images to be displayed on a home television. One can imagine such a system being used to circulate announcements about weather, civic matters, or a calendar of local events. This was called teletext.

Télétel was the official brand name of the overall ecosystem that connected Minitel terminals to videotex services.

Crucially, it created a gateway between the preexisting, switched telephone network and newly built public data network, Transpac. Transpac was a packet-switched network using the (then cutting-edge) virtual circuit X.25 protocol.

How about the terminal hardware?

The [early 1980s] Minitel 1B is a self-contained data terminal. All the hardware fits into a molded plastic case approximately eight inches tall, ten inches wide, and ten inches deep. The front of the Minitel 1B is dark brown, and the rear of the case is a lighter beige color. The keyboard is attached to the bottom edge of the front of the case by a hinge. When not in use, the keyboard folds up and is held in place by a latch at the top of the case. In the rear, the case bumps out to accommodate the electron guns of the built-in cathode-ray tube. A large knob embedded in the case controls the brightness of the display. On one side of the rear of the case, a small plastic window lifts up to reveal a serial port with a five-pin DIN connection. On the other side, two long black cables lead out. One cable ends with a standard “Type-C Europlug” AC power plug, and the other ends with a standard T-plug for connecting to the French telephone network. Unlatching the keyboard reveals a small glass screen, or l’écran, approximately eight inches across. A square power button and small red LED are below the screen. The keyboard, or le clavier, includes sixty-four keys. The keys are “chiclet” style, similar to the Sinclair ZX-80 or IBM PCjr, with a few millimeters of space between each. In addition to twenty-six letters, ten numerals, nine punctuation keys, and a space bar, the keyboard includes both a shift key and unlabeled modifier key. The effect of the shift and modifier keys is indicated by a set of color-coded alternate characters printed on the surface of the keyboard. Ten keys at the top of the keyboard correspond to Télétel commands, such as sommaire (table of contents) and envoi (send).

A true “dumb terminal,” the Minitel supplied a reliable interface to remote information services while performing minimal computing of its own. It is often said that the Minitel did not have a CPU or memory, but this is not strictly true. While the Minitel 1 was not a generally programmable computer, a microprocessor was necessary to operate the modem, serial port, keyboard, and screen. Similarly, the Minitel 1 did not have an operating system or BIOS but rather a small set of software burned into ROM that implemented decoders for the keyboard and display as well as protocols for serial communication and error correction. Additional volatile memory was used to store the current state of the screen and provide a buffer for user input. More expensive models such as the Minitel 10 included additional hardware and software features, including a built-in tone generator and automatic telephone dialer.

The Minitel modem was an asymmetrical duplex modem—a communication standard that had been continuously negotiated and refined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) since 1964.27 In practice, this meant that the Minitel could receive (demodulate) data at 1,200 baud while simultaneously sending (modulating) at 75 baud.

One unusual feature of the Minitel 1B was the option [when uploading a large file] to “flip” the transmission rates (retournement du modem).

Although the official documentation only hinted at this use, the Minitel could act as an external modem for a standard PC. This was an enormous opportunity for microcomputer hobbyists in France. Whereas a comparable PC modem might cost fifteen hundred francs, the Minitel was free. The process of connecting the Minitel to a PC was not simple—both soldering and programming were required—but the cost-saving hack was documented in widely circulated magazines for the microcomputer enthusiast.

An obvious commercial application?

Smart cards were already in wide use in France as bank cards and prepaid phone cards. The prototypical Minitel card reader was the LECAM, produced around 1987 and rented to Minitel users by France Telecom for a monthly fee. The reader was the same width and depth as the Minitel 1B, and designed to be clipped to the top of the terminal. The reader contained a generally programmable computer that could run software stored on smart cards. This promised to extend the functionality of the standard Minitel in a variety of ways, including turning it into a point-of-sale terminal for processing credit and debit card payments. This application was especially notable at a time when most US merchants still used manual “zip-zap” carbon imprinters to record card payments.

Careful attention to standards?

The DGT attempted to encourage the creation of new services by publishing high-quality documentation of the Minitel standard as well as pamphlets detailing design patterns for efficient, user-friendly systems. The investment in developing Télétel services was further protected by the stability of the system. The core characteristics of the platform stayed constant for the system’s life. In contrast to the rapidly changing microcomputer market, a Minitel service written in 1985 would continue to function, unchanged, in 2012.

How about the servers?

The typical Minitel server was built on a minicomputer running a multitasking operating system such as Unix. The capacity of a server to handle multiple simultaneous connections was limited, on the one hand, by its network interface and, on the other hand, by its host software. Before Minitel rolled into full-scale production and ran over the public data network, Transpac, servers were connected to the telephone network by a bank of modems, each of which could handle one user at a time.

Unlike the British implementation of videotex where the production of content and its distribution were completely integrated, the CCETT separated the network protocol (which developed into X.25) from the protocol controlling the visual display of data (Antiope). By separating these two layers, the CCETT videotex system was effectively “medium free.” In other words, the French standard for videotex/teletext did not proscribe one or another medium for transmission.

The points d’accès vidéotex, or PAVIs, were specialized computers sitting in the logical center of the platform responsible for overseeing the exchange of data between old and new communication media.

To provide a gateway function, the PAVI was composed of five interfaces: a user-facing directory service, a database of known Télétel services, a database of known subscribers, an RTC modem, and an X.25 Transpac modem.

Each PAVI was built on an Alcatel-CIT E-10 switch. Whereas the Minitel 1 is a small, approachable device, the E-10 is massive, filling six large cabinets in a temperature-controlled environment.

Why did the French push this out to consumers? The authors say that deficiencies in the state-directed telephone system provided motivation:

At the end of the 1960s, France had one of the worst telephone networks in the industrialized world. The waiting list for a copper pair installation for 90 percent of clients was three years while at the same time in the United States, 99 percent of installs were completed within three days. In 1971, the penetration rate in France was equivalent to that reached by Denmark in 1930, Sweden in 1935, the United Kingdom in 1956, and Italy in 1964.

In 1975, the government decided to overhaul the country’s patchwork telephone network and replace it with a completely automated system. Consistent with the ambition of previous grands projets, the new plan—dubbed “A Phone for Everyone” (un Téléphone pour tous) explicitly sought to provide universal service to both voice and data. For data, a high-speed public packet-switched network was necessary. An upgrade of this magnitude was expensive, however, and the fees generated through telephone calls alone would not be sufficient to cover the added cost. Instead, it was necessary to not only improve on the existing network but also develop novel revenue-generating services that could recoup the heavy investment.

The French also wanted to build their own thing so as not to be dependent on IBM, which they saw as likely to dominate the world of computer networks as it had dominated mainframes(!).

How successful was it? There were 800,000 terminals and 500,000 active users… at the time of the system’s shutdown in 2012. At the peak (early 1990s), roughly one fifth of French telephone subscribers had a Minitel terminal. There were over 6 million terminals and nearly 90 million connection hours per year (Minitel was expensive to use, so people limited their time online).

More: Read Minitel: Welcome to the Internet

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I talked to a few friends in Manhattan who had gone to the anti-gun march on Saturday. It turned out that they weren’t truly “anti-gun.” I offered them a point of view to agree with: now that the US has 327 million people we can’t live under laws, such as the Second Amendment, designed for a spread-out country of 3-4 million. If you pack rats into a lab experiment tightly enough they are going to snap so why should they have guns?

But they wouldn’t agree with me! They wanted more bureaucracy. Restrictions on gun ownership that would somehow reduce shootings even as 99% of the guns remained. They were aware that the FBI and local police had ignored tips regarding the Florida school shooter, but they had faith in government bureaucracy to keep them safe.

[I don’t think that they were trying to soften their position to avoid offending me. The folks that I talked to know that I don’t own any guns.]

Readers: what did marchers in your area say they wanted?

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Occasionally the New York Times runs out of stories on its core topics (e.g., “Can you believe the racism, sexism, and stupidity of Republican voters?”; “Let’s speculate on whether this attractive young woman got paid to have sex with a wealthy senior citizen and then got paid some more not to talk about it”; and “Hitler was right when he said that there is a secret committee that controls all world events, except that it isn’t Jews on this committee, but Russians”). The result this week is an article on a Polish guy who has crossed the Atlantic three times… by kayak.

Here’s the part that raises a burning question for me:

Kayaking is an absurd form of long-distance ocean travel. All the big muscles in the body are useless. … He intended to keep muscle tone in his legs by swimming, but he had to abort that plan because his body in the water attracted sharks.

If you’re going to be out in the ocean for 3+ months, why not adapt the Hobie MirageDrive pedal mechanism (introduced late 1997). Keep paddles, of course, for arm tone and in case the pedal drive fails, but why not at least start the trip with the capability of going as fast as possible with all of the body’s strongest muscles?

[The heroic journalist does not ask this question. Instead she wants to know about the 70-year-old’s feelings, his wife’s feelings, and their sons’ feelings. Maybe this is why it is extremely rare for engineers to become journalists?]

One comment from a reader:

I’ve seen the boats ocean rowers operate, they are so big that the operators are simply orienting them in prevailing currents and wind. They are essentially sail boats, albeit small ones without sails, but wind and water is driving the bus. So while these guys are on their own, and do cross oceans there is a little trickery about how it is accomplished. I’ll be impressed when it’s done like speed records on the salt flats- first in one direction then the reverse.

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In the old days societies put a huge amount of effort into trying to make sure that teenagers had sex only within the context of marriage. A Facebook friend, however, recently posted “Banning child marriage in America: An uphill fight against evangelical pressure” (Salon). He and his friends heaped derision on the idea that it was okay for a woman under the age of 18 to be married (the laws will be gender-neutral, but these Facebookers envisioned only female teenagers being married and/or they didn’t care what happened to male teenagers). Here are some samples:

Religion has been responsible for scams, unhappiness, fear, and murder over the centuries. Religious leaders scare people into the belief that there’s an invisible man in the sky…and other ancient fairy tales…for their livelihoods.

it has always amazed me when a fair number of people, at this point, have asked me (upon discovering my absolute lack of any belief system whatsoever) what stops me from killing people – ? To which I’ve always responded, if your belief in some invisible superpower’s book is all that stands in the way of you doing so, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

It seems that we’ve gone from “casual sex bad; marriage good” to “casual sex good; marriage bad” in not all that many years.

Readers: Can you explain the passion of middle-aged Hillary-supporting Facebookers for preventing young women (as noted above, they don’t care about young men) from being married? It doesn’t seem to be personal. None of these folks have daughters, nieces, or other relatives who are getting married as teenagers.

[Separately, I’m not sure why it matters whether young people can get married. All 50 states offer no-fault on-demand (“unilateral”) divorce. A teenager who is married on June 1 and doesn’t enjoy the union can file a divorce lawsuit on June 2 and, with or without a lawyer, be guaranteed to win (see Real World Divorce to figure out if there will be any cash proceeds as well!). Unless the teenager wants to be remarried immediately, it isn’t clear why a divorce would be urgent. In California, for example, a 12-year-old can file for a restraining order that would keep the new spouse from contacting him or her. If a teenager has a child, he or she can file for sole custody, child support, etc. See “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” for more on what the law professors call an instant de facto divorce. Depending on the state, all of this may be accomplished with preprinted forms designed for laypeople without lawyers. In the litigation-heavy/lawyers-more-common states such as Massachusetts, a plaintiff can usually rely on the defendant being ordered to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. Marriage isn’t like a tattoo that is hard to undo, so why restrict Americans from getting married at what would have been a normal age not too long ago?]

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The NYT specializes in articles promoting subsidies to encourage Americans to have children (paid parental leave, tax credits, free pre-K day care, free day care for older children (“K-12”), etc.) and articles promoting expanding U.S. population via immigration (by one Boston+Seattle every year from immigrants (1.5 million in 2016) and one Austin, Texas every year from children of immigrants (roughly 1 million per year).

Mixed into this daily soup, however, is an outlier: “California Housing Problems Are Spilling Across Its Borders”:

A growing homelessness crisis. Complaints about traffic congestion. Worries that the economy is becoming dominated by a wealthy elite.

Those sound like California’s problems in a nutshell. But now they are also among California’s leading exports.

Just ask the citizens of this city, where growing numbers of Californians and companies like Tesla have migrated to take advantage of cheap land and comparatively low home prices. A four-hour drive from Silicon Valley, across a mountain range and a state line, Reno is finding that imported growth is accompanied by imported problems.

As a result, the Reno housing market has gone from moribund to scorching. As of February, the median home price in the metropolitan area was about $340,000, more than double its recessionary trough of about $150,000, according to Zillow.

Today the typical Reno rent is just under $1,700 a month, up about 30 percent from five years ago, according to Zillow. One result has been a surge in Reno’s homeless population. The city’s shelter, just a few blocks past a bus station, is overflowing with residents and recently added a propane-heated tent to accommodate all the extra people.

It is not that interesting that a country that is comparatively bad at building infrastructure can’t handle population growth (more than 3X over the past 100 years). What’s interesting, though, is that the readers, who have been fed a constant diet of pro-population growth articles, are beginning to sound like zero-population growth zealots:

“Overpopulation” the term that must NEVER be mentioned. It has to always, be something else.

When I was a kid, US population was 160k. Now it is 320k. California and a lot of other places were a lot cooler back then. And we didn’t have to fight over water.

At a certain point you can’t blame Californians. Blame the overall out of control overpopulation of this planet, the concentration of knowledge and wealth in certain corners of the country and world, and not enough arable/desirable land to house the 8 billion miracles.

It is called overpopulation. How this escapes our national political conversation is beyond me, and urgently needs to be discussed.

California would not be so terribly overcrowded, and housing cost would not be nearly as high, if we did not have many millions of illegal immigrants in our sanctuary state.

We must consider immigration, both illegal and legal, as having an impact.
Where do we keep putting the millions of people who come into our country annually? We’re most certainly not building enough new housing anywhere. Another huge issue is water. Not an endless resource.

Dear nyts, lefties, open border types, etc. do you STILL not see the connection between the most generous, liberal, near open borders immigration policies in the world and the crowding that is going on in this country?? Sorry, but common sense tells us, that to continue to pack ever more people into a finite space is going to lead to exactly what is happening pretty much everywhere in this country that is anywhere desirable to live. Btw, Idaho is now the fastest growing state in the country. The u.s. is the third most populous country on earth. Most of the people coming here are from rediculously over populated countries. Anybody care to make any obvious connections and see where this is leading us?

Ah yes, “intelligent growth”, another PC term that simply means more of the same with a nod towards at least acting like something approaching rational thought is guiding the insanity that is driving the country forward. Give us examples of places where “intelligent growth” has been implemented.

Overpopulation used to be an issue supported by the left. Since it is mostly driven by third world growth, the PC police put an end to it. They decided it was prejudicial against those people.

Just remember capitalism’s biggest lie: Growth pays for itself.

And start considering that the planet has too many people and that we must do something about it.

The quest for constant growth of population and GDP is killing all non-human life on Earth and is the fundamental reason for every environmental problem. In addition, every immigrant from a developing country to an industrialized country increases their carbon footprint, resource use, and negative impact on the ecosystem worldwide.

If NYT readers won’t support government policies to further accelerate U.S. population growth, who will?

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“5 Women Accuse the Architect Richard Meier of Sexual Harassment” (nytimes) contains an interesting nugget:

Richard Meier, the celebrated architect and Pritzker Prize winner who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles, established a graduate scholarship in January at his alma mater, Cornell University’s architecture school. Intended to honor the 55th anniversary of his practice, the scholarship was designed to “recruit and retain the most talented women applicants.”

How are universities able to do this? Let’s leave aside the question of fluid gender and what it would mean to be among the “women applicants.” We’ll assume that there is some definitive way for a university to decide which applicants are “women.”

How is this legal for a university that gets a river of taxpayer funds? Women are a majority of college students, roughly 56 percent (see Atlantic), so the argument can’t be that this is for a favored minority group and therefore discrimination is virtuous.

Separately, I wonder if we could get university bureaucrats excited about the idea of funding for a luxurious social club limited to undocumented immigrants (we can’t fund their tuition because they shouldn’t have to pay any; see Free college education for anyone willing to identify as “undocumented”?).

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We were chowing down on fresh cookies at Rectrix Aviation yesterday and Sheryl Sandberg appeared on the TV. Mercifully the volume was down at zero, but a text summary underneath read “Sandberg: We welcome regulation.”

An 8-year-old asked “What does that mean?”

My answer: “It means that Facebook is a monopoly and they want the government to help them exclude competition.”

Related:

• Lean In (book review)
• Facebook uses a Malibu-flying engineering manager to promote careers in engineering (my favorite Facebook-related item)
• Facebook is bad for us (psychologists have proven it!)

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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (Brian Dear 2017; Pantheon) tells a story of business blindness.

The programmers of the powerful CDC mainframe had all of the technical knowledge, and more, of the PC pioneers, but they didn’t want to drop everything and rush to the PC. The business folks behind the mainframe were similarly mentally locked into their well-trodden paths of sales and applications.

The CDC/PLATO folks actually built a modern distributed system, with a microprocessor in every terminal (“desktop PC”) and communications lines back to a server.

Instead of orange pixels, they were grayish white. The new terminal, called the IST (short for Information Systems Terminal), looked more like an early personal computer. A big, wide, heavy base, with a black grille in front, to which a detached keyboard was connected via a thick cable. On top of the base was a monitor, a special elongated CRT with a square display featuring exactly 512 x 512 black-and-white pixels and, mounted directly over the surface of the CRT’s glass, a reflective, acrylic touch screen with barely visible gold wires crisscrossing across the display. During the nine months of development, the price of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) memory chips had plummeted even further than Hill had anticipated. “According to the really long-haired predictions,” says Hill, “it was going to come down, by six or eight to one, and it came down about ten to one, right when we were doing our development. The result was that we could produce a memory-mapped video terminal, which as far as I know had never been done before, because it was cost-prohibitive.

“We produced what in effect was a PC,” says Hill, “in 1975.” When one considers the year this machine was developed, and compare it to what else was available at that time, it is suddenly apparent that CDC had just leapfrogged over the entire microcomputer field. Here is Hill describing his machine: “[ It had an] 8080 microprocessor, it had plugin cards, it had a separate monitor, with a cable going to the main box, it had a separate keyboard, it had plugin modems, plugin memory, plugin communications, and we even had a plugin disk driver, that wasn’t part of the standard stuff, but we had it networked, so it was revolutionary. And our big problem was producing it at low cost. And we did that. That terminal came in with something like a $ 1,300 cost, in the first few terminals. And that was beyond everybody’s belief.” By the time the IST was ready to be sold to consumers, the marketing people had marked up the price to over $ 8,000, says Hill. It was the beginning of a long line of very bad decisions at CDC. Hill believed the terminal should have been sold for $ 100 above cost. “If we’d done that, we would have flooded the market because people knew they could use it for other things. It would take loadable programs— we could load programs down from the mainframe into that terminal.”

Note the last sentence. The system had the same capability as a modern Web browser that may download a Java or JavaScript program from the server.

The author says that CDC had roughly $1 billion in revenue in 1969 ($7 billion in today’s mini-dollars) so it was about one seventh the size of IBM. Management went all-in on computer-delivered education, which meant trying to sell to governments such as the Soviet Union, Iran, and Venezuela. The U.S. government delayed the Soviet sale due to security concerns and then killed it after the invasion of Afghanistan (imagine how many trillions of dollars we could have saved if we had let the Russians support the secular government in Afghanistan and not supported the Mujahideen!). The Iranian deal fell apart due to political instability:

CERL and CDC created Persian-language support in PLATO as part of the demos, and eventually the Shah’s government agreed to a deal. However, it required that the IST terminals had to be made in Iran (or at least have a decal with “Control Data of Iran” and Persian script on it affixed to the screen bezel). In the end, the Ayatollah Khomeni and the Iranian revolution ended CDC’s hopes in that country. Several of the government ministers, including Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who had attended the demos back in 1975, were executed. CDC personnel had to evacuate the country, and the company lost a lot of money.

The Venezuela dream didn’t pan out either…

“Venezuela was more corrupt than Iran, if that was possible…. In South America, the Venezuelans were known as the ‘Iranians of South America’ and not just for their oil reserves. You could get anything you wanted in Caracas— anything. Like many CDC international offices, CDCVEN [the acronym CDC used for its Venezuelan business] had its own guy specializing in local bribery and ours was good.” This was CDC’s fixer for Venezuela, “used for more local practical bribery associated with licenses, permits, getting employees and families out of scrapes, etc.” … “My short version,” Smith once explained in an email, “is the PLATO buy became entangled in Venezuelan politics and did not survive the massive political infighting and jockeying for a bite out of it for all concerned (including two or more of our own guys). I do not believe we lost it because we did not bribe. True there was a corporate public effort to clean up our act (I have seen CDC bribe all over the world— even in places like Germany, supposed to be un-bribable) but HQ never backed off of doing business along those lines (anyway it was very difficult to stop the local CDC folks from making deals HQ did not know about). In a lot of countries it was the only way to do business. When the U.S. government started with pressure on U.S. companies to not bribe they started our downfall in the business world….

Are you a big believer in social impact investing? So was the imperial CEO of CDC:

Morris tried to explain to [William] Norris the benefits of pursuing business and education markets at the same time— charging more to business customers so they could charge less to education customers— but Norris did not see it this way. “Norris logically could see it that way,” said Morris. “But his concern was, ‘I’m doing this because I want to make a social impact on education. And if you guys go and turn your attention to selling in the business environment, you’re going to start forgetting about education, and start forgetting about our end goal. I want you to concentrate on education. Okay?’ And so based on that, we did concentrate on education, I still think today if we had sold into the business environment we would have been able to fund more of the stuff that was getting the price down and achieving the educational objectives that we were out to achieve.”

“Addressing society’s major unmet needs” became Norris’s rallying cry, a remarkably progressive mantra for a tech company in the 1970s and 1980s, and one that the rest of the industry and financial world regarded with befuddlement or derision.

In 1984, Randall Rothenberg wrote a profile of Bill Norris and Control Data for Esquire magazine. The article never ran. However, Rothenberg’s recollections of the article’s conclusions shed light on the predicament Norris and CDC were in, particularly with regard to PLATO. “Control Data,” he says, “was an example of what we’d later call industrial policy; its expertise was in seeking government funding for technology projects relating to supercomputing. When the government market for supercomputing for military and economic applications began to dry up (because of, e.g., the advance of minicomputing), CDC, instead of adapting its business model, began to seek new uses within a government welfare structure for its existing supercomputing technology. Using the technology for training, small business development, etc., was a logical extension of this. What CDC could not do was diverge from a model predicated on powerful central control. The whole notion of distributed systems— in computing, in social welfare, in anything else, it seems— was totally foreign to it. So the inapplicability of its technology to the social-welfare aims it was seeking to address was something the company could not work around. Put another way, it had come up with the perfect Great Society solution— twenty years late.”

CDC and PLATO were successful in some markets:

Those industries [that bought and used PLATO] were aviation, including airlines like American and United; power utilities, including nuclear and electric; the financial industry; manufacturing; and telecommunications. “Basically it turned out that they were the industries that were regulated,” says Glish.

PLATO was used to train air traffic controllers within the FAA:

The program was so successful— and the FAA’s budget was so tight— that the aging CYBER computer (and the formerly white terminals, yellowing over time under years of fluorescent light) was still running TUTOR lessons twenty years later, well into the 2000s. Some of the original courseware developers would over the years retire only to be rehired by a desperate FAA needing them to fix or update the lessons they’d developed years earlier— since TUTOR programmers had become scarce.

I think the book teaches an important business lesson. Here was a company that had the capital and the people do make near-infinite money if they had simply shown up in the marketplace and given customers what they were asking for. Instead they got fixated on telling customers what they should want and on selling to a particular cluster of customers. They died (company history) during a time period when enterprises all over the world were greatly expanding their IT budgets and when investors were willing to pay absurd multiples of profits for IT vendors.

More: Read The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture

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One of my Facebook friends complained about Trump’s proposed $10 million military parade:

Our government is actually wasting money this way amidst so many real economic issues? … If they care about vets, invest that money in veterans’ affairs: in their hospitals, in their mental health support programs. In prosthetics and lowering costs of medications, in improving the VAs. This parade is an outrageous waste of resources.

I pointed out that she and Donald Trump were mostly on common ground. Both are passionate about increasing the funding for the VA. Trump’s proposed budget for FY2019:

President Trump proposes a total of $198.6 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). This request, an increase of $12.1 billion over 2018, will ensure the Nation’s Veterans receive high-quality health care and timely access to benefits and services.

A lot of folks think that the VA’s health care system should be eliminated. From a retired colonel (NBC):

The relationship between the VA and the American public used to be a very close one. The VA was founded and then expanded to a huge size to serve the needs of veterans at a time when we had lots of them, when nearly every household included someone who wore, or once wore, a uniform.

That’s no longer the case. Most Americans no longer know anyone in uniform, and so for many, military service, and the obligation to take care of those who serve, has become an abstraction. We say we love our troops, but that’s because we don’t have to be the troops.

And now we have a huge bureaucracy that most citizens know little about, and our expectations have been mismanaged. We think this large government structure can take care of our veterans, but it can’t, no matter who is in charge, or how much money we throw at it. Bureaucracies are excellent at doing routine things in a routine way, but as any physician can attest, medicine is not routine.

We have created a large bureaucracy with thousands of hospitals, clinics, waiting rooms and employees to deliver medical care, and it needs to be abandoned. It makes no sense to have a parallel universe to take care of our veterans, separate doctors, separate facilities, equipment and even protocols. There is no reason that veterans who would otherwise wait for months to be seen at a VA health clinic can’t be seen by private doctors, the same doctors who treat everyone else. The procedure doesn’t need to be complicated: patient is seen by private doctor, private doctor treats patient, doctor sends bill to government, government pays doctor.

[A friend worked as a doctor at the VA and described union agreements and bureaucracy that made it impossible to serve patients properly. Unionized nurses would refuse to assist with critically ill patients when it was time for their break. A unionized nurse also tied up one of his colleagues with a harassment complaint (both the survivor and the abuser identified as non-lesbian females so it was not a “sexual harassment” dispute).

She and Trump both want to keep pouring money down this hole, though (though she characterized the $12 billion bump for FY2019 as “not enough”). I asked “If you see the issues as related, why get into a fight with Trump over a $10 million parade when you agree with him on the VA funding issue ($200 billion per year; 20,000X the cost of the parade)? Are you willing to let him have his parade if he gives you the bigger VA budget that you want?” The answer was “no”.

Since it is not guaranteed that Congress will approve this requested increase, why wouldn’t she go down to Capitol Hill and lobby for support? She has no children or job to hold her back (she has more than 20 years of education and is in “prime age” for working, but is not seeking employment).

[Note that I wouldn’t personally choose to spend $10+ million (out of a $4 trillion total federal budget) on a parade in D.C., mostly because I am generally opposed to taking money from taxpayers in the Midwest to pay for more free fun stuff that residents of the imperial capital can enjoy.]

Trump was a Manhattan Democrat for most of his life, so it should be the case that my coastal Facebook friends would find at least some things to agree on with him. But instead they are outraged and enraged 24/7 on every conceivable issue. I assume that this is rational behavior, but why? What are they getting out of it?

Related:

• Mitt Romney and military funding (a 2012 post on how to save $1.8 billion per year easily)
• Russian military budget (the VA turns out to cost 4X what the Russians spend on their entire active-duty military)

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