Bleeding Edge June 23, 2000

This will be a short column. I am performing a grand experiment and it has not been going perfectly. Check out the timeline below.

I first got interested in computers almost 25 years ago, when I was going to school in Southern California. Not for programming purposes. I am not a programmer. I took some classes using Pascal and stunk. My algorithms were very inefficient. We still had to submit programs using stacks of punch cards. So really inefficient, long programs were really tedious to debug. But I really liked the idea of personal computers. Really!

I went to one of the first personal computers shows ever. Since I never throw anything away (a trait my wife does not find very endearing) I still have all the info sheets from that show. It is pretty amazing to see what things were like back then. Fast processors ran at 2 KILOHERTZ!! Memory was 2 KILOBYTES!! And you pretty much had to build it all yourself, although there were a couple of companies that sold kits. My first computer at home was a TI 99/4 a 16-bit microprocessor computer that was crippled in its implementation. I quickly sold it and bought a Radio Shack Color Computer. This was a joy. Its mass storage was a cassette tape. It had 4 K of RAM that I upgraded to whole 8 K. Most of its programs were in ROM cartridges that were inserted in the side.

I was online by 1982, logging on to Compuserve at a whopping 110 baud (approximately 110 bits per second). I upgraded to 300 a little later. I could send mail, read news and play Colossal Cave but there were no graphics. It was all text.

In 1984, I saw the Macintosh and had to have it. By skimping on meals (easier to do when a graduate student) I was able to use a Rice University special discount to buy one, along with a printer. This was a whole new world and I loved it. I still have this computer and hope it will be worth so much more in the future. I have the original boxes but last time I checked it was going to $10 on Ebay.

I was the first one in my department at Rice to compose my thesis on a computer (a TRS-80) and print it out on a Daisy wheel printer. No need for carbons or the cost of a typist. I could make it as long as I wanted. Cool.

There are so many things we can do today. Writing, sending e-mail, making figures. These are just too tedious to do without the help of a computer. I have seen a lot of changes in the speed and usefulness of computers but there are still a lot of problems. I am composing this on a Powerbook while I am vacationing in Florida. EPCOT may stand for the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow but Seattle probably has greater, faster and easier Internet access. And dialing into Immuex is always an adventure. Not knowing any other way, I had to dial long distance. But I am cheap, so I used my phone card. Took a long time until I could get everything working.

The hardest thing to do is access a network remotely or while in a strange place. All sorts of things can get in the way. And even when you do finally get the chirping of the modem to settle down, the speed is just not there. I am not sure how DSL or cable modems will work when you are on the road in a hotel. Seems to me that unless your hotel has T1 access for its guests you'll still be stuck with slow access. I do not foresee watching Internet videos on my computer from a hotel room anytime soon.

The thing to remember is that almost everything you hear is coming from companies that want to sell you something. Sun and Oracle came up with the idea of Network Computers (essentially making the PC into a smart terminal. You'd access the applications from a central server.) in order to sell servers and databases. Microsoft has just announced the same sort of thing but from the software side. They will sell you access to an application on a server.

The other area this is affecting is on-line journal access. Now, if you pay for a normal ubscription for the year 2000, you get hard copies that are yours forever.Even if you let the subscription lapse, you still have all those from the year 2000. In the future, you are simply paying for access. If you have a subscription for the year 2000, but you let it lapse in 2001, you no longer have ANY access to articles published in 2000. So, potentially, the publishers will have an even MORE captive audience, since you have to pay whatever they ask in order to maintain access to back issues. This has some scary implications.

Again, information will be free. We will all pay to get access to it.

I guess I am a child of the personal computer. I don't really trust companies to decide for me when I can use an application. Or if I can read an article I have already paid for. And what about reliability of the servers? If my PC goes down, I can walk to another. Or I can walk to the library and copy an article from the hard copy. If the server goes down, no one can work. No literature search is possible. And what about security? I don't know. I'll just keep my copies of important software so I will still be able to work even when I can not get connected a network. And maybe I'll start an archiving service and download the PDF of every journal we get. Put it on some of those new 80 gigabyte hard drives.

At least then I could still write. But no one else could read it unless I access a network. And I have been having real problems doing that from Epcot. So I apologize if this is sort of late. And if the Newsletter is kind of skimpy this week. If I get anything posted at all, I'll be so happy. I really want to get back and ride the Rockin-Roller Coaster again.

Thursday
7 PM EDT - try to log on. can't connect. try again 3 times.
8:30 PM - finally connect. try to load Nature page. after 5 minutes I give up. look at e-mail. lose connection at 8:30. give up for the night and go to dinner.

Friday
5 PM EDT - can't logon.
5:30 PM - can't logon. go to dinner.
8PM - log on. check out Nature, Science pages. get Newsletter ready to upload. lose connection at 9:45. can't reconnect.
11 PM - can't connect.

Saturday

8:30 AM - connected and keeping my fingers crossed.