Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change
The PC and Internet are not that big a deal. The truth is that a new technology is not inevitable, technology change is not exponential, and the PC and Internet are no more important to society than any major invention of the past. The genesis of this book was at Microsoft, where I began researching technology change. I discovered that much of technology’s long history has been distilled to where it resembles a myth—something like, “And lo, Betamax was created from nothing. VHS followed soon after. And there was a great battle, with VHS reigning supreme.” The actual history turned out to be more involved—and a lot more interesting—than these abbreviations. More important, the popular, simplified perception of technology change was off the mark. An important story about how technology change really happens wasn’t being told. That is the story in Future Hype.
Speaker Details
I learned how to program in high school in the mid-1970s, on a computer designed in 1962. It had four cubes of core memory each the size of a coffee cup (holding roughly 64K bytes) and two 10-megabyte disk drives each bigger than a car tire. Teletype terminals in the school connected to the computer with a 110 bit-per-second telephone modem. From that point to the present, I’ve taken a ringside seat and watched technology change with fascination.After graduating from MIT, I designed digital hardware, about which I wrote my first book (The Well-Tempered Digital Design, 1986). I have also programmed in a dozen computer languages and in environments ranging from punch cards, to one of the first windowing environments, to MS-DOS, to Windows (starting with version 1.0). Along the way, I picked up 13 software patents.The computer industry is enormously varied, and I’ve had the privilege of seeing it from within a number of companies. The smallest was Television Laboratories, a startup of about 10 people. In 1986, back in the PC dark ages, our engineering team designed and built a high-end PC video card with three custom gate arrays running at 100 MIPS and driven by video paint and presentation software—basically PowerPoint a decade ahead of time. My primary contribution was about 70,000 lines of software.In my eight years at Microsoft, I was a program manager on a number of projects, including Windows 3.0 and the first ROM-based version of Windows. The project I’m most proud of was Nomad, a tiny operating system designed for pagers, watches, and similar small devices.
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- Speakers:
- Bob Seidensticker
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Jeff Running
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