{"id":35442,"date":"2019-10-31T22:04:23","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/the-dream-machine-istoriya-kompyuternoj-revolyutsii-prolog\/"},"modified":"2019-10-31T22:04:23","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T19:04:23","slug":"the-dream-machine-istoriya-kompyuternoj-revolyutsii-prolog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/news\/the-dream-machine-istoriya-kompyuternoj-revolyutsii-prolog","title":{"rendered":"The Dream Machine: The Story of the Computer Revolution. Prologue","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The
\nThis book is recommended by Alan Kay<\/a><\/noindex>. He often says the phrase \u201cThe computer revolution has not yet happened.\u201d<\/a><\/noindex> But the computer revolution has begun. More accurately, it was initiated. It was started by certain individuals, with specific values, and they had a vision, intentions, and a plan. What premises did these revolutionaries base their plan on? What reasons? Where did they intend to lead humanity? At what stage are we currently?<\/p>\n

(Thanks for the translation Oxoron<\/a><\/noindex>, if anyone wants to help with the translation \u2014 contact me via private message or at magisterludi2016@yandex.ru)<\/i>
\n<\/a><\/noindex>
\n\"The
\nTricycles. <\/p>\n

This is what stood out most to Tracy in the Pentagon. <\/p>\n

It was late 1962, or maybe early 1963. In any case, not long had passed since the Tracy family moved from Boston for the sake of their father's new job at the Department of Defense. The air in Washington was electrified with the energy and momentum of a new, young government. The Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, human rights marches \u2014 all of this was overwhelming for fifteen-year-old Tracy. It was no surprise that the boy eagerly seized his father's Saturday offer to walk to the office to fetch some forgotten papers. Tracy was simply in awe of the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon is truly an impressive place, especially when viewed up close. Each side is about 300 meters long, standing on a slight elevation, like a city behind walls. Tracy and his father left the car in a vast parking lot and headed straight for the front door. After going through impressive security procedures at the checkpoint, where Tracy signed in and received a badge, they made their way through the corridor into the heart of the defense of the Free World. The first thing Tracy saw was a seriously-looking young soldier moving back and forth down the corridor \u2014 pedaling an oversized tricycle. He was delivering mail.<\/p>\n

Absurd. Complete absurdity. Yet, the soldier on the tricycle looked extremely serious and focused on his work. Tracy had to admit: tricycles did indeed make sense, given the very long corridors. He was already beginning to suspect that they would take an eternity to reach the office.<\/p>\n

Tracy was surprised that his father even worked at the Pentagon. He was quite an ordinary person, neither a bureaucrat nor a politician. His father resembled a much larger child, an average tall guy, slightly chubby-cheeked, in a tweed sports suit and black-framed glasses. At the same time, he had a slightly mischievous expression on his face, as if he was always plotting some trick. Take, for example, the lunches that no one would call normal if dad took them seriously. Despite working at the Pentagon (read: outside the city), his father always returned to have lunch with the family and then left again for the office. It was fun: dad would tell stories, spew awful puns, sometimes laughing before finishing; however, his laughter was so infectious that everyone couldn\u2019t help but laugh along with him. The very first thing upon returning home, he would ask Tracy and his 13-year-old sister Lindsay, 'What altruistic, inventive, or interesting things did you do today?' and he genuinely wanted to know. Tracy and Lindsay would recall the entire past day, sifting through their good deeds and trying to sort them into the mentioned categories.<\/p>\n

The meals were impressive as well. Mom and dad loved trying new dishes and visiting new restaurants. Meanwhile, dad, who was waiting for the order, kept Lindsey and Tracy entertained with puzzles like, \"If a train is moving west at 40 miles per hour, and an airplane is ahead of it by...\" Tracy was so good at them that he solved them in his head. Lindsey, on the other hand, just acted like a shy thirteen-year-old girl.<\/p>\n

'Alright, Lindsay,' dad would ask, 'if a bicycle wheel is rolling on the ground, do all the spokes move at the same speed?'<\/p>\n

'Of course!'<\/p>\n

'Sadly, no,' dad would reply, explaining why the spoke on the ground is virtually stationary, while the spoke at the highest point moves twice as fast as the bicycle \u2014 drawing graphs and diagrams on napkins that would have made Leonardo da Vinci proud. (Once at a conference, some guy offered dad $50 for his drawings).<\/p>\n

And the exhibitions they attended? On weekends, mom loved to dedicate a little time to herself, and dad would take Tracy and Lindsey to admire paintings, usually at the National Gallery of Art. These were typically dad's favorite impressionists: Hugo, Monet, Picasso, C\u00e9zanne. He enjoyed the light and glow that seemed to pass through these canvases. At the same time, dad explained how to look at paintings based on the \"color substitution\" technique (he was a psychologist at Harvard and MIT). For example, if you close one eye with your hand, step back from the painting five meters, then quickly remove your hand and look at the painting with both eyes, the smooth surface seems to bend in three dimensions. And it works! He would wander through the gallery with Tracy and Lindsey for hours, and each of them would look at the paintings with one eye closed. <\/p>\n

They looked strange. But they were always a bit of an unusual family (in a good way). Compared to their school friends, Tracy and Lindsey were different. Special. Experienced. Dad loved to travel, so Tracy and Lindsey grew up thinking it was quite natural to travel around Europe or California for a week or a month. In fact, their parents spent significantly more money on travel than on furniture, which is why their large Victorian-style home in Massachusetts was decorated in an \"orange boxes and boards\" style. Besides them, mom and dad filled the house with actors, writers, artists, and various eccentrics, not to mention dad's students, who could be found on any floor. Mom would send them straight to dad's office on the third floor when needed, where a desk was surrounded by piles of papers. Dad never filed anything. However, on his desk, he kept a small bowl of diet candies intended to suppress appetite, which he ate like regular candy.<\/p>\n

In other words, dad was not the kind of person you would expect to find working at the Pentagon. Yet here he was, strolling down long corridors with Tracy.<\/p>\n

By the time they arrived at their father's office, Tracy thought they must have walked the length of several football fields. Upon seeing the office, he felt... disappointment? Just another door in a corridor full of doors. Behind it was a basic little room, painted in a dull army green, with a desk, a few chairs, and several cabinets filled with folders. There was a window that looked out onto a wall lined with similar windows. Tracy didn't know what an office in the Pentagon was supposed to look like, but it definitely wasn't this room.<\/p>\n

In fact, Tracy wasn't even sure what his father did in this office all day. His job wasn't classified, but he worked at the Department of Defense, and his father took it quite seriously, hardly discussing work at home. Honestly, at 15, Tracy didn't care much about what Dad did there. The only thing he was sure of was that his father was working on something important and spent a lot of time trying to get people to do things, and it all had something to do with computers. <\/p>\n

No surprise there. His father was passionate about computers. At Cambridge, at the company Bolt Beranek and Newman<\/a><\/noindex> members of Dad's research group had a computer they built themselves. It was a massive machine, the size of several refrigerators. Around it lay a keyboard, a screen displaying what you were typing, a light pen \u2014 everything one could dream of. There was even special software that allowed multiple people to work simultaneously using several terminals. Dad tinkered with the machine day and night, writing programs. On weekends, he would take Tracy and Lindsay so they could play around too (and then they'd go for hamburgers and fries at Howard Johnson's across the street; it got to the point where the waitresses didn't even wait for their orders, just preparing burgers as soon as they saw their regular customers). Dad even wrote them an electronic teacher. If you spelled a word correctly, it would say 'Acceptable.' If you got it wrong \u2014 'Dumbkopf.' (This happened years before anyone pointed out to Dad that the German word 'Dummkopf' didn't have a 'b' in it.)<\/p>\n

Tracy viewed things of this nature as something natural; he even taught himself to program. But now, looking back over 40 years, from a new century's perspective, he understands that perhaps this is why he didn\u2019t pay particular attention to what his father was doing at the Pentagon. He was spoiled. He was like those kids today who are surrounded by 3D graphics, playing with DVDs and surfing the web, taking it all for granted. Because he saw his father interacting with computers (enjoying that interaction), Tracy assumed that computers were for everyone. He didn\u2019t know (had no particular reason to think) that for most, the word computer still meant a huge, semi-mystical box the size of a room wall\u2014a sinister, unyielding, merciless machine that served them\u2014large institutions\u2014compressing people into numbers on punch cards. Tracy didn\u2019t have time to realize that his father was one of the few people in the world who looked at technology and saw the potential for something entirely new.<\/p>\n

His father was always a dreamer, a guy constantly asking 'what if\u2026?'. He believed that one day all computers would be like his machine in Cambridge. They would become understandable and well-known. They could respond to people, acquire their individuality. They would become a new environment for (self) expression. Provide democratic access to information, enable communication, and offer a new ground for commerce and interaction. Ultimately, they would enter into a symbiosis with humans, forming a bond capable of thinking much more powerfully than a person can imagine, but processing information in ways that no machine could conceive.<\/p>\n

And his father at the Pentagon did everything possible to turn his beliefs into reality. For instance, at MIT he launched Project MAC<\/a><\/noindex>, the first world-scale experiment with personal computers. Project managers had no hope of providing each individual with a personal computer, especially in a world where the cheapest computer cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, they could scatter a dozen remote terminals across campuses and residences. By distributing time among these terminals, they could instruct the central machine to deliver small slices of processing time very quickly, making each user feel that the machine was responding to them individually. The scheme worked remarkably well. Within just a few years, Project MAC not only engaged hundreds of individuals in interacting with computers but also transformed into the first global online community, evolving into the first online bulletin board, email, 'freeware' exchanges, and hacking. This social phenomenon later manifested in the online communities of the internet era. Moreover, remote terminals began to be perceived as 'home information centers,' a concept circulating in tech communities since the 1970s. This idea inspired a generation of young geeks like Jobs and Wozniak to introduce products to the market known as microcomputers.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Father Tracy was on familiar terms with the shy guy who approached him almost on the first day of his new job at the Pentagon, whose ideas on 'Enhancing Human Intelligence' echoed the concepts of human-computer symbiosis. Douglas Engelbart<\/a><\/noindex> was previously the voice of the boldest dreams. His own bosses at SRI International (which later became Silicon Valley) considered Douglas a complete lunatic. However, Tracy's father provided the first financial support to Engelbart (while shielding him from his bosses), and Engelbart, along with his team, invented the mouse, windows, hypertext, text editors, and foundations for other innovations. Engelbart's presentation in 1968 at the conference in San Francisco amazed thousands of people - and later became a turning point in computer history, a moment when the emerging generation of computer professionals finally realized what could be achieved by interacting with computers. It is no coincidence that representatives of this younger generation received educational support thanks to Tracy's father and his followers in the Pentagon - part of this generation later gathered at PARC, the legendary Palo Alto Research Center owned by Xerox. There, they brought the father's vision of \"symbiosis\" to life, in the form we have been using for decades: a personal computer with a graphical screen and mouse, a graphical user interface with windows, icons, menus, scroll bars, etc. Laser printers. And local Ethernet networks to connect all of this together.<\/p>\n

And finally, there was communication. While working at the Pentagon, Tracy's father spent most of his working hours on flights, constantly seeking isolated research groups working on topics related to his vision of human-computer symbiosis. His goal was to unite them into a single community, a self-sustaining movement capable of pursuing his dream even after he left Washington. On April 25, 1963, in a note to \"members and followers of the Intergalactic Computer Network\"<\/a><\/noindex> He outlined a key part of his strategy: to unite all individual computers (note, not personal computers \u2014 the time for them had not yet come) into a single computer network covering the entire continent. Existing primitive networking technologies did not allow for such a system, at least not at that time. However, his mind was far ahead. Soon, he was already speaking of the Intergalactic Network as an electronic medium open to everyone, \"the primary and main medium of information interaction for governments, organizations, corporations, and people.\" Electronic unification would support electronic banking, commerce, digital libraries, \"Investment Guides, tax consultations, selective distribution of information in your specialization, announcements of cultural, sports, entertainment events\" \u2014 and so on. By the end of the 1960s, such a vision inspired the chosen successors of the Pope to implement the Intergalactic Network, now known as Arpanet. Moreover, in 1970, they went further, expanding Arpanet into a network of networks, now known as the Internet.<\/p>\n

In short, Father Tracy was part of the movement of forces that essentially made computers what they are today: time-sharing, personal computers, the mouse, graphical user interface, an explosion of creativity at Xerox PARC, and the Internet \u2014 as the pinnacle of it all. Of course, even he could not have imagined such results, at least not in 1962. But that was what he aimed for. After all, that\u2019s why he uprooted his family from their beloved home and that\u2019s why he went to Washington for a position filled with the kind of bureaucracy he detested: he believed in his dream.<\/p>\n

Because he decided to see it become a reality.<\/p>\n

Because the Pentagon \u2014 even if some of the top officials had not yet realized it \u2014 was putting money into making it a reality.<\/p>\n

As soon as Tracy's father finished tidying up the paperwork and prepared to leave, he pulled out a handful of green plastic badges. \"So you're making the bureaucrats happy,\" he explained. Every time you leave the office, you have to mark all the folders on the desk with a badge: green for public materials, then yellow, red, and so on, in increasing order of confidentiality. A bit silly, considering that rarely anything other than green is needed. However, such a rule exists, so...<\/p>\n

Tracy's father slapped green stickers around the office, just so anyone looking would think: \"The local boss is seriously considering security.\" \"Okay,\" he said, \"we can go.\" <\/p>\n

Tracy and her father stepped away from the office door that had a sign hanging on it<\/p>\n

\"The
\n
\n \u2014 and started the return journey through the long, long corridors of the Pentagon, where serious young men on tricycles delivered information to the very face of the world's strongest bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

To be continued\u2026 Chapter 1. The Boys from Missouri<\/a><\/noindex><\/p>\n

(Thanks for the translation Oxoron<\/a><\/noindex>, if anyone wants to help with the translation \u2014 contact me via private message or at magisterludi2016@yandex.ru)<\/i><\/p>\n

\"The
\n
Source: habr.com<\/a><\/p>","protected":false,"gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"html"}]},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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