Nvidia vs. Intel

NV1-based Diamond Edge
Swaaye, CC-By-SA 3.0

Today Nvidia replaced Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with a market cap of about $3.6T, about the same as Apple, as against Intel's market cap about 33 times less.

That is a long way from Curtis Priem's kitchen table, a $2.5M A-round from Sutter Hill and Sequoia, and the NV1.

It Was Ten Years Ago Today

Ten years ago today I posted Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks . My fundamental insight was:

• The income to a participant in a P2P network of this kind should be linear in their contribution of resources to the network.
• The costs a participant incurs by contributing resources to the network will be less than linear in their resource contribution, because of the economies of scale.
• Thus the proportional profit margin a participant obtains will increase with increasing resource contribution.
• Thus the effects described in Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy will apply, and the network will be dominated by a few, perhaps just one, large participant.

In the name of blatant self-promotion, below the fold I look at how this insight has held up since.

Warning: Slow Blogging Ahead

Vicky & I have recently acquired two major joint writing assignments with effective deadlines in the next couple of months. And I am still on the hook for a Wikipedia page about the late Dewayne Hendricks. This is all likely to reduce the flow of posts on this blog for a while, for which I apologize.

Dewayne Hendricks RIP

Source

Dewayne Hendricks, my friend of nearly four decades, passed away last Friday at age 74. His mentors were Buckminster Fuller and Paul Baran. He was a pioneer of wireless Internet connectivity, a serial entrepreneur, curator of an influential e-mail list, and for the last 30 years on the organizing committee of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop.

For someone of his remarkable achievements he has left very little impression on the Web. An example is his Linkedin profile. Below the fold I collect the pieces of his story that I know or have been able to find from his other friends. If I can find more I will update this post. Please feel free to add information in the comments.

Engineering For The Long Term

Content Warning: this post contains blatant self-promotion.

Contributions to engineering fields can only reasonably be assessed in hindsight, by looking at how they survived exposure to the real world over the long term. Four of my contributions to various systems have stood the test of time. Below the fold, I blow my own horn four times.

X Window System At 40

X11R1 on Sun
Techfury90 CC0

I apologize that this post is a little late. On 19^th June the X Window System celebrated its 40th birthday. Wikipedia has a comprehensive history of the system including the e-mail Bob Scheifler sent announcing the first release:

From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler)
To: window@athena
Subject: window system X
Date: 19 June 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday)

I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window
system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code
from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather
than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall
performance appears to be about twice that of W. The
code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are
still some deficiencies to be fixed up.

We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now
actively building applications on X. Anyone else using
W should seriously consider switching. This is not the
ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good
starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment
there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C
interface is in the works. The three existing
applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O
interface, and a primitive window manager. There is
no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to
volunteer? I may get around to it eventually.

Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by
NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945
first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a
tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel
free to get in touch.

Scheifler was right that it was a "good starting point for experimentation", but it wasn't really a usable window system until version 11 was released on 15^th September 1987. I was part of the team that burned the midnight oil at MIT to get that release out, but my involvement started in late 1985.

Below the fold are some reflections on my contributions, some thoughts on the astonishing fact that the code is still widely deployed after 40 years, and some ideas on why it has been so hard to replace.

Blog On Vacation

This blog will be taking a break for a couple of weeks.

The 50th Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop

Source

Last week I attended the 50^th Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. For a crew of volunteers to keep a small, invitation-only, off-the-record workshop going for half a century is an amazing achievement. A lot of the credit goes to the late John H. Wharton, who chaired it from 1985 to 2017 with one missing year. He was responsible for the current format, and the eclecticism of the program's topics.

Brian Berg has written a short history of the workshop for the IEEE entitled The Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop: Its Origin Story, and Beyond. It was started by "Three Freds and a Ted" and one of the Freds, Fred Coury has also written about it in here.Six years ago David Laws wrote The Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop and the Billion Dollar Toilet Seat for the Computer History Museum.

I have attended almost all of them since 1987. I have been part of the volunteer crew for many, including this one, and have served on the board of the 501C3 behind the workshop for some years.

This year's program featured a keynote from Yale Patt, and a session from four of his ex-students, Michael Shebanow, Wen-mei Hwu, Onur Mutlu and Wen-Ti Liu. Other talks came from Alvy Ray Smith based on his book A Biography of the Pixel, Mary Lou Jepsen on OpenWater, her attempt to cost-reduce diagnosis and treatment, and Brandon Holland and Jaden Cohen, two high-school students on applying AI to the Prisoner's Dilemma. I interviewed Chris Malachowsky about the history of NVIDIA. And, as always, the RATS (Rich Asilomar Tradition Session) in which almost everyone gives a 10-minute talk lasted past midnight.

The workshop is strictly off-the-record unless the speaker publishes it elsewhere, so I can't discuss the content of the talks.

The Little Garden

Source

Below the fold is the story of how I got a full-time Internet connection at my apartment 32 years ago next month, and the incredible success of my first ISP.

The reason I'm now able to tell this story is that Tom Jennings, the moving spirit behind the ISP has two posts describing the history of The Little Garden, which was the name the ISP had adopted (from a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto) when I joined it in May 1993. Tom's perspective from the ISP's point of view contrasts with my perspective — that of a fairly early customer enhanced by information via e-mail from John Gilmore and Tim Pozar, who were both involved far earlier than I.

NDSA Sustainability Excellence Award

Yesterday, at the DigiPres conference, Vicky Reich and I were awarded a "Sustainability Excellence Award" by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. This is a tribute to the sustained hard work of the entire LOCKSS team over more than a quarter-century.

Below the fold are the citation and our response.

My Old Car

This post celebrates my weird old car's 30^thbirthday. It is a Mazda RX-7 dated November 1993, carrying the California license RX7 DSHR. I bought it new and in the almost 30 years since have driven it for nearly 140K miles. Unusually for an RX-7 this old, it is almost completely stock and has never been on a track.

Below the fold, I recount an RX-7 saga spanning thirty-eight years and well over a quarter-million miles.

LOCKSS Program Turns 25

Happy 25^th Birthday LOCKSS! The fifteen-year retrospective is here, and the twenty-year one is here, in which I wrote:

Thanks again to the NSF, Sun Microsystems, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the funding that allowed us to develop the system. Many thanks to the steadfast support of the libraries of the LOCKSS Alliance, and the libraries and publishers of the CLOCKSS Archive, that has sustained it in production. Special thanks to Don Waters for facilitating the program's evolution off grant funding, and to Margaret Kim for the original tortoise logo.

Now for some more gratuitous self-promotion. This means:

• I started work on decentralized, permissionless peer-to-peer systems a quarter of a century ago.
• It is two decades since we were awarded an SOSP "Best Paper" for Preserving peer replicas by rate-limited sampled voting.
• Next month it will be a decade since my first post on cryptocurrencies, The Bitcoin vulnerability.
• It is five years since I posted Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree, based on the paper by Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark, showing that all the techniques Satoshi Nakamoto assembled to create Bitcoin were published between 43 and 31 years ago now.

Blog on vacation

I have a stack of books that I set aside for summer reading, so this blog is on vacation for two weeks so I can at least reduce the height of the stack.

Crypto: My Part In Its Downfall

I was asked to talk about cryptocurrencies to the 49^th Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. I decided that my talk would take the form of a chronology, so I based the title on a book by the late, great comic Spike Milligan. It became Crypto: My Part In Its Downfall¹.

Below the fold is the text, with links to the sources.

Brio-Compatible "Big Boy" Model

One of the things our grandson is interested in is trains, especially steam trains. Via gifts from various friends and relations he accumulated a vast collection of the Brio wooden model trains and tracks; it is favorite plaything at our house. I added needed pieces to the collection by downloading models from the amazing selection of Brio-compatible pieces on Thingiverse and printing them using the Creality CR6-SE that I got via Kickstarter two years ago. These included switches, buffers, gender changers and long straight tracks.

E's & D's Adventures in Life
CC BY 2.0

Another part of his train interest is "Big Boy", Union Pacific 4014, "the biggest steam train there has ever been in the whole wide world". So my wife decided that a suitable Christmas present would be a Brio-compatible model of Big Boy. You can't buy one, and I couldn't find one on Thingiverse, so I flexed my Tinkercad muscles and started on what turned out to be quite the saga. Below the fold, the details.

Meta: Fifteen Years Of Pontification

Fifteen years ago today I posted Mass-market scholarly communication to start this blog. Five years ago today I posted A decade of blogging, and a couple of months later noticed it had exceeded one million page views. Now, the blog has accumulated:

• 812 posts, including my personal all-time favorite, 2014's Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks.
• 4038 published comments.
• Over 3.4M page views, of which 367K (~11%) were of last February's short-notice EE380 Talk. Apart from that anomaly, it is an average of about 35K/month.
  

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

Sun Microsystems was founded 24^th February 1982, and died 27^th January 2010. I spent 1982 on sabbatical in Amsterdam waiting for the Sun/1 we had ordered to show up. IIRC I visited their initial offices on Walsh Ave. in Santa Clara in early 1983, and joined the company in September 1985. I owe Sun, and the people who worked there, a debt of gratitude I could never repay.

In those early days Sun was an extraordinarily interesting company to work for, and throughout its 28-year history it spawned an incredible number of other startups. One of them was Nvidia, which is currently the 8^th most valuable company in the world, but there are far too many others to list.

In It Isn't About The Technology I wrote:

In the late 80s I foresaw a bleak future for Sun Microsystems. Its profits were based on two key pieces of intellectual property, the SPARC architecture and the Solaris operating system. In each case they had a competitor (Intel and Microsoft) whose strategy was to make owning that kind of IP too expensive for Sun to compete. I came up with a strategy for Sun to undergo a radical transformation into something analogous to a combination of Canonical and an App Store. I spent years promoting and prototyping this idea within Sun.

One of the reasons I have great respect for Scott McNealy is that he gave me, an engineer talking about business, a very fair hearing before rejecting the idea, saying "Its too risky to do with a Fortune 100 company". Another way of saying this is "too big to pivot to a new, more “sustainable” business model".

In the terms that Wall St. imposes on public companies, Scott was right and I was wrong. In the 8 years or so from my talk to the dot-com crash SUNW made the stockholders an incredible amount of money. But then the money stopped, in some ways for the reasons I had spotted. Being right too soon is as bad as being wrong.

Two Million Page Views!

Woohoo! This blog just passed two million all-time page views since April 21^st 2007.

Unbanking The Banked

David Gerard has been writing a follow-up to his must-read and surprisingly successful Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts, entitled Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over The Money. The Kindle version goes live on Amazon next Monday.

As one of his Patreons, I've been reading the chapters as he finished them. It isn't a laugh-a-minute read like his first book, but like the first it is a copiously sourced account of incredible hubris. Facebook's hubris led them to believe that they could, in effect, become a sovereign currency issuer like a government, without any of the responsibilities that governments assume when they control a currency. Actual governments looked at this proposal and responded "you have to be kidding". Follow me below the fold for more.

Shout-Out To Gutenberg Project

I've mentioned before that my father spent his whole career, apart from WW2 as an RNVR watch officer on convoy escorts, at Harrods, the iconic London department store. He even published a textbook on retail distribution. So I can't resist a shout-out to the amazing work of Eric Hutton and the volunteers of Project Gutenberg who, over the last 13 years, have scanned, OCR-ed and proof-read the entire Harrods catalog from 1912. Below the fold, the details.