PBS Triple Header

On Tuesday, February 5, 2013, PBS Channel 9 in San Francisco broadcast three back to back shows about the history of Silicon Valley starting with "American Experience: Silicon Valley" followed by "Something Ventured" and "Steve Jobs: One Last Thing". The American Experience show started with the story of the "Traitorous 8" led by Robert Noyce leaving Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories to found Fairchild Semiconductor. This event is often considered the birth of Silicon Valley. It then continued to describe the manufacturing of transistors and integrated circuits which were used in the first moon mission which resulted in Neil Armstrong landing on the moon in July, 1969. In the summer of 1968 after Noyce was passed over for a promotion at Fairchild, he and Gordon Moore left Fairchild and founded Intel. In 1971 Intel released the 4004 "computer on a chip" which ultimately led to the personal computer revolution. "Something Ventured" described the deployment of east coast capital to fund west coast innovation and covers the role of some early venture capitalists such as Arthur Rock who raised the money to start Fairchild and Intel. Hopefully PBS will find the money for American Experience to produce additional shows to document the personal computer revolution of the 1970's and 1980's and the Internet revolution of the 1990's. "Steve Jobs: One Last Thing" was an even handed portrayal of the genius of Steve Jobs as well as the traits which antagonized some people. The show describes his rise and fall at Apple and then his return in the late 1990's.

30th Anniversay of IBM PC

The original IBM-PC was released in August, 1981. The IBM-PC was significant because it was the first personal computer sold by a large computer company. Previously personal computers were available from companies like Apple, Atari, Commodore and Radio Shack. IBM's release of a personal computer was a signal to other large companies that the personal computer was a serious product which led to exponential growth of the industry during the 1980's

Thirty years later, in August 2011, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that it would be focusing on higher-margin products and would discontinue it's recently released TouchPad tablet and would explore spinning off it's PC division. HP's stock fell 20% after the announcement.

This news reflects the changing role of the PC based on competition from tablets and smart phones as Internet connectivity devices. Still, the expectation is that more than 350 million PC's will be sold this year.

Thomas Friedman Hits the Nail on the Head

One of my heroes is New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman. In a recent column he summed up why unemployment is so high and why there is so much economic malaise in a few sentences. "The merger of globalization and IT is driving huge productivity gains, especially in recessionary times, where employers are finding it easier, cheaper and more necessary than ever to replace labor with machines, computers, robots and talented foreign workers....to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before..Not only does it take more skill to get a good job, but for those who are unable to raise their games, governments no longer can afford generous welfare support or cheap credit to be used to buy a home for nothing down."

Municipal Wi-Fi Hits Roadblocks

The November 12, 2007 issue of Forbes Magazine (www.forbes.com) included a story about road blocks encountered by Earthlink in setting up municipal Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) networks. Earthlink has installed city wide Wi-Fi service in Anaheim, CA, New Orleans, LA and Milpitas, CA. A similar planned deal with San Francisco, CA has fallen through.

In the process of installing these Wi-Fi networks, Earthlink discovered that installation costs were about twice as much as expected. They found that they needed to install 40 Wi-Fi transmitters per square mile, about twice as many as the 20 originally anticipated.

U.S. 15th in Broadband Lines Per Person

The October 31, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com) reports that according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. is in 15th place in the world in broadband lines per person in 2006, down from No. 4 in 2001. Number 1 on the list is Denmark followed by the Netherlands, Iceland, South Korea and Switzerland.

Microsoft Competes with Google's Search Engine

The November 27, 2006 issue of Forbes Magazine (www.forbes.com) contains an article entitled "Desperate Acts: Google and Microsoft are hungry to get each other's business". According to the article: "Microsoft is expected to spend $650 million next year to let the world know it has a shiny new search service and Web Advertising network"

Microsoft's share of searches dropped this year from 11% to 9%. "Google handled 61% of the 204 billion searches worldwide in the past 12 months."

To compete with Google, Microsoft is upgrading its live.com site with better maps. "Microsoft is flying camera-equipped planes around the globe to create 3-D vesions of 100 cities, at $150,000 per location. The goal is to create a massively detailed, searchable map of neighborhoods and landmarks."

Running out of Internet Addresses

The November 6, 2006 issue of Business Week (www.businessweek.com) includes an article entitled "More Elbow Room on the Net: A pending upgrade will provide an almost limitless number of addresses"

The current standard for IP addresses on the Internet (IP version 4) supports up to 4.3 billion IP addresses (4.3 x 10 to the 9th power). This limit is projected to be reached by 2010.

The new standard for addressing (IP version 6) will support up to 3.4 x 10 to the 38th power addresses. IP version 6 comes with encryption and authenication built in.

The Department of Defense and other government agencies expect to spent tens of billions of dollars over the next ten years to upgrade its telephone and computer systems.

"Federal purchasing officials have already said they plan to require all civilian and defense agencies to upgrade their key network equipment to IPv6 within 20 months."