I’m kind of nostalgic about computers from the 1960’s. They weren’t what we would call user friendly. In fact they were daunting and complex. They were beautiful monsters living in the rarefied air of the glass house where the high industrial design gave them an inspiring futurist sensibility.
You didn’t get to deal with a mainframe unless you were a trained specialist. And fewer still could program them. There was a culture and exclusivity that went along with the mainframe. It permeated the organizations that owned them, and the software systems that were developed for them.
I have a deep appreciation of that culture. I spent nearly five years working at the IBM Lab in Toronto, largely on mainframe software systems for distributed computing. It’s a culture that values quality and engineering over accessibility to outsiders, especially competition.
Does that sound familiar?
That was IBM in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It’s not like they were the only company that could build mainframe computers or develop software for them, but in many ways, it was IBM who made computing (which had been mainly in the realm of research) accessible to mere corporations. They put all the pieces together and made computing a commercial reality.
But they guarded that walled garden jealously. To the point that they eventually faced lawsuits from competitors and a massive anti-trust suit. The suite was ultimately dismissed but it had a permanent affect on the way that IBM did business.
Witness this notice that you will find in many of IBM’s manuals to this date:
I can only presume this is a battle scar from a fight over IBM’s previous insistence that, in fact, only an IBM product, program or service could be used.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for that message to pop-up on your iPhone e-mail application.
Whatever pressure IBM faced from the U.S. Dept. of Justice or its competitors, the real challenge to its business would come from the escape of computing from the glass house. Computers would become cheaper, and smaller, and more powerful. They would show up in corporate departments outside the glass house. They showed up in small businesses, and schools. Then homes. Now in cars, and hands, and the fingertips of anyone old enough to push a button.
In the 1970’s the escape from the glass house started with the personal computer.
My own high school was forward thinking enough to buy one of the first commercially available personal computers back in 1973, a WANG 2200.
This was 2 years before the creation of Microsoft and the now-famous Altair 8800. And 2 years before IBM’s first attempt at a “portable” computer, the IBM 5100. Apple didn’t ship its first kit computers until a year after that. And the first IBM PC shipped 5 years after that.
I never saw it, but my older brother took computer science at high school and brought home the manuals, print outs, and the cassette tapes used to store data and programs. Personally, I was enthralled.
The era of personal computers didn’t destroy the mainframe’s walled garden, it just meant that there were alternatives. If they wouldn’t let you put it on the mainframe, or you couldn’t afford one, it didn’t matter. You got your own computer and wrote the program yourself.
Computing became accessible to a new kind of programmer (no one called them developers back then). They didn’t have to have a computer science degree, or even be in university. Many of them were amateur hobbyists and high school kids. They shared their programming knowledge and programs freely, albeit on printouts and through magazines.
And for the first time, many people who were not particularly drawn to computers and who were not technical or trained, saw something they had up until then only seen in pictures and movies: a computer screen.
Exciting times. Well at least for those of us in the computer club.
The rise of the world-wide-web during the 1990‘s provided a similar kind of cross-over transformation on a much bigger scale. But I didn’t encounter the same kind of excitement around programming and technology until I encountered Macromedia’s Flash in 2000.
At the FlashForward conference in NYC that year, many people remember the presentation by Yugo Nakamura as a defining moment. Yugo’s experimental pieces in art, design, and Flash programming demonstrated not only what could be done with this new technology, but who could do it: A new kind of hybrid artist/designer/programer. That is, the people in that room. It brought the crowd to its feet.
Flash had arrived as the de facto standard platform that creative technologists would use for their most ambitious work until, well, we’ll see. This is probably the most important thing you have to understand about Flash. Most of the technical arguments for it and against it are irrelevant in light of that fact.
The question is, can we go back to a walled garden? And who can make it in? When a company like Apple, a company that embodies creative technology and a high ideal in aesthetics, attempts to create a new closed system like the iPhone and iPad, is this a step forward, or a step backward?
By the way, why are so many other developers so eager to see the demise of Flash? Aren’t all Internet and Web developers “creative technologists”? Aren’t we in this together?
Apple is betting that the iPhone and iPad product, not just the devices and software but the whole business ecosystem, is so unique and advanced that Apple can act like IBM circa 1969. Meanwhile, if you look closely enough, you might just conclude that standardized web technologies now have more in common with the glass house than their promoters would like to admit.
It’s instructive to look at how IBM reacted to the success of the personal computer, and other developments that ultimately threatened to collapse its business. To give you an idea, the company that thrived on proprietary systems became a strange bedfellow to open standards. But the truth was, they embraced standards only where they had nothing to offer themselves. By then, however, the real action was elsewhere.
In technology, the new and exciting is almost always proprietary. Standards are for losers.
But what will that mean for Flash? Stay tuned.
