Major Mile-Stones In Computing

There have been a few milestones in computing. How many? Probably more than I can list, but I want to limit mine to the ones that we either couldn't move forward without or those that really facilitated change. I won't include semi-conductors or transistors. Those are a whole other topic and very important. Without either we wouldn't be having this conversation.

But let's continue. Below are what I consider revolutionary and the reason why.

The Graphical User Interface



Also known as the GUI, pronounced gooey, this let the common person simply point to what they wanted and chose it. It also allowed people to see where to go without having to actually know the command. It also allowed different things to run at the same time. Examples of GUI's are Windows, Apple's interface and Xwindows.

The USB/Firewire Connector



The Universal Serial Bus. What makes this so great? Well, if you want to plug something into your computer, you have to have something called a port. Ports came in two varieties, Parallel and Serial. Their names had to do with how information was transferred. There are different pins for each and both are kind of slow. USB got rid of a whole lot of problems. Most computers have only one serial and one parallel port so you could only connect 2 devices one was a usually a printer and the other was a mouse. And that used all the ports.

What USB did is allow us to have more ports by freeing the parallel and serial ports for other devices. You can also buy a device that plugs into a USB port that makes more USB ports! Genius.

The other great thing is that USB ports are all shaped the same. You don’t have to have a specific cable for your device.

This also allowed mobility in computing. With USB, you can take your USB hard drive to any computer and plug it in.

The Internet

Say what you will, but if it weren't for Microsoft entering the Internet browser fray against Netscape, none of us would have an interest in the Internet. The Internet allows us to communicate and share more than any other device including the telephone or television.

And the longer we go the more stuff will be transmitted over the Internet.

The Compact Disk or CD



The compact disk gave us a tremendous amount of storage cheaply. It also allowed us to place all those floppy disks on one disk. Word for Windows had as many as 23 installation disks at one point. That can be expensive.

CD's allowed all those disks to be put on one CD.

CD's also allowed us to avoid computer viruses on those old floppies. You can only write to a CD one time*. This foiled virus people who had to find another way to sabotage software.

The MP3

The MP3 has revolutionized music the way the walk man did in the early 1980's. The MP3 format combined with other technology will allow us to share information more than ever before.

I see books and music slowly moving to this format. It should become standard in so many devices you won't get away from it. It's secure and reliable as a standard. There are so many applications for MP3's that to list them all would be a waste of time.

The DVD

The DVD or Digital Video Disk has moved far beyond just video. Yes, you can rent DVD's today and watch your favorite movie. The real power is the amount of data a DVD holds. A normal CD holds 700 units. A DVD holds 4096 units. Definitely a difference. Any thing you can store you can put on a DVD. Just like the CD, look for the DVD to allow us to put more in the same space for the same cost.

*There are CD's that can be written to more than once, but for this discussion we will just talk about WORM CD's which means Write Once Read Many, that's the common CD to you and me.

My Time At Microsoft

I'm going to try and kill 3 birds with one stone today. K wanted me to write about Microsoft Vs. The World, I need to write something non-technical at Take The Defaults – Dude, and I wanted to write about the Microsoft Alumni Network. Three birds - one stone. And do it all without it become a Chris Farley sketch where he says, "Remember that time you and I … " with the awkward long pause at the end and the obligatory, "Ya, I remember that." Death to closed questions!

I was an employee of Bill Gates from 1992 to 1996. I was a tech support grunt, but what a great time to be right there in the middle of it all. In those 4 short years I saw …

The release of Windows 3.1
The release of Windows 3.11
The release of Windows 95
The release of a unified Office with similar versions
MS's advent into the Internet with IE 2.0

It was definitely the hay-day of computers. It was a big frickin' wave and MS rode it for all it was worth. Met Bill Gates, Steve Balmer and Paul Allen. Some people are oddly fixated on what it was like to work there. It was a lot of fun. It was casual dress all the time. Casual means shorts and t-shirts. One guy even came to work in his pajamas once. Nothing was ever said. Drinks were free ( Coke, coffee, tea, milk whatever you wanted. )

It's also one of the most technical environments you will ever see. You used the products at will. I saw guys doing stuff way ahead of it's time. One particular discussion I was involved in was the merging of Windows and NT. The goal was always to have one operating system. And with the release of Windows 2000 that happened. I also remember a guy saying in about 1993 that, "TCP/IP is what it will be all about." And it was/is.

I worked with brilliant people and there were days I went home thinking I was a moron. Some had masters, some had GED's. Their problem solving skills were phenomenal. I remember the interviews were amazing. Best interviews I have ever been involved with. These aren't some, "So why should we hire you," interviews. You can't b.s. your way through these and it becomes obvious where your knowledge boundaries exist.

For example, typical interview questions went like this:

I: Tell me what you now about DOS.
C: DOS stands for Disk Operating System and every computer has to have one to run.
I: What's Microsoft's current DOS version?
C: I think 6.0
I: Can you tell me what the kernel's function is in DOS?
C: The kernel acts as a translator between hardware and software
I: What does it use to communicate that translation?

And on and on. By the end of the interview you felt stupid, but the further you got the better you did. The goal was to make the interview go a long time, thus showing your knowledge.

My first interview was a whole lot of DOS questions. They asked me back for a second interview and said I needed to study a DOS manual and whether or not I got the job depended on how well I studied. I geeked by the pool for a month with a DOS manual.

Other interview questions were a whole lot more fun. You had to solve a problem and practically display your problem solving skills. The following are actual questions we asked in interviews. The answers were not as important as how they got the answers.

- If you were going to cover all the major league baseball parks with Astroturf, how much would you need?
- If you have 6 glasses, 3 full, 3 empty and you want the order to alternate empty, full, empty, full, etc. and you can only move one glass how do you do it. ( If interested, I'll post the answer later)
- A chicken, fox and some grain are on a riverbank. You have to get all three across the river. You can only take one animal/item at a time. If you leave the grain and chicken, the chicken will eat the grain. The fox will eat the chicken if you take the grain. What's the least number of trips you need to make to get them all across?

There were office hi-jinks as well. One couple got caught having sex in a conference room, another in a parked car. All the stuff that could potentially go on in other companies.

All in all it was a great foundation technically to start a career. Benefits were excellent. I had no co-pay for insurance and got stocks through good performance and a great ESP program. But the pay was aweful! I made about $20,000 less than many of my peers, but got twice the training, knowledge and experience.

I still run into people who worked with me there and now and then get in touch with them. I left because of opportunity. There wasn't any unless I went to Seattle and I didn't want to do that.

And so we have reached the awkward end of the post where you say, "Ya, I remember that." It's easier if you just post a comment …

Jimmy Eat World "A Praise Chorus" Listen

What's All This MP3 and iPod Stuff About?

Here at "Take The Defaults – Dude" we make a tireless effort to cut out all the crap that tech-nodes would give you to describe something. Why, because I have kids and senior citizens who ask me questions about this stuff. And since I have to be the resident tech-node in my house, I do my research and share my findings.

Does anyone remember 78's? do you know what a 78 is? A 78 is an old format for a record. The 78 refers to the number of times the record would spin in one minute. That would be 78 RMP – rotations per minute. There were also 33's and 45's. You could get more on a disc the slower it spun. But the quality wasn't so great. Remember all the scratches you could get and lint would settle on the record?

So then someone decided to invent an 8-track player. It was good. You could get more on the cassette, but it had those awful "thunks" when the channel changed. Remember you could choose between 4 different channels? Each channel had a right and left track. So 2 tracks times 4 channels equals, you guessed it, 8 tracks.

But the 8-track was short lived because cassette tapes came along. Cassette tapes were much better. You got the same music with descent quality in a smaller package. Notice the trend is always toward better quality and smaller size. That is a rule in the computer world.

But the medium – or stuff that music was stored on – was still volatile and not easy to quickly access. If I wanted to listen to song number 5 and I was on song number 1, I had to fast forward past songs 2, 3 and 4. Or I had to do some gyration and rewind to an unknown spot and flip the tape over.

And quality was still questionable. The source was analog, which is like a telephone call, in waves. By this time digital was popular and could offer a better quality.

I know we are taking the long way around the block, but stay with me, because we are almost to MP3's.

What was needed was something small, something with high quality and easily manufactured. Enter the Compact Disc, better known as the CD. The CD offered a tremendous leap in technology and it had all the sexy qualities of technology, small, easily produced and digital. I remember hearing the 1812 overture in early 1983 at an electronics store. They taped a cotton ball to a string and attached it to a speaker and played the 1812 overture. I had never heard anything that clear and the little cotton ball nearly flew off the speaker when the cannon shots arrived.

It was awesome. So someone wanted to put movies on a disc. How great would that be? But this time, technology was behind. The VHS tape was very popular and cheap to produce but had the problems of the cassette tape.

"So the Germans," as Stephen Ambrose was fond of saying, invented a way to put movies on a computer. It was way too expensive to produce and computers were way too weak to support it. The group formed to study this was the Motion Picture Experts Group – better known as MPEG. And they eventually turned movies into files called MPEG's.

We're almost there.

With the coming of age of computers in the 90's people had more options when they customized their computer. They put pictures and sounds on the computers. But the sound files were really big and took up a lot of room. Then two ideas were married. What if we take the sound file ( also known as a WAV file ) and squish it down to a smaller size and try not to lose the quality of the file when we squish it? And we'll use the sound part of the MPEG movie to do it with. That sound part of the MPEG movie is referred to as "Layer 3" and it's been shortened to MP3!

And that's how we got to MP3's. They are simply sound files that have high quality and small size and digital. Ahhhh, our magic formula!

Time for questions.

So now I know what an MP3 is, what do I use to play them?
As far as hardware goes, you need a computer, car stereo, PDA or an MP3 player. A computer running Windows or Macintosh's operating system will have software that plays the MP3. Through some technology magic, MP3's can be put on a CD and played in a car stereo that plays MP3's. PDA's and MP3 players are very similar. A PDA is one of those little hand held things that is like a little computer. Consider it a mini-computer. An MP3 player does only that. Play MP3's. One of the more popular you have seen on TV is Apple's iPod. The iPod is the second coming of the old Walkman. The iPod did for MP3's what the Walkman did for cassette's and making music portable. But the cool thing is that the iPod has fewer moving parts and can store a WHOLE lot more music than a cassette. Try a couple of days worth of just playing music. Some people are using them to make their own small time radio stations and broadcast them across the internet. They are called Podcasts.

You can also create your own CD's with some software and a process called "ripping". Ripping is pulling songs off of a CD and putting them on the computer in the MP3 format.

Where do I find MP3's?
Well … there are legal and illegal was to get the music and just as much debate over the same issue. You can buy digital music – another name for an MP3 or similar WMA – at Walmart.com, Napster.Com, or Apple's iTunes.com. There are also other file sharing networks that are known to let users trade files over the internet. These are the illegal downloads you hear about.

How much does it cost to invest in these MP3's?
Most MP3's only cost about a dollar a song. Isn't that convenient? You can get just the songs you want for about a dollar a song. A whole album is about $10.

How much do MP3 players cost?
An iPod will run you $200 - $400 dollars, but you can put just about every song you own on it and listen to it, at will, in any order or categorized or randomized. Cheaper models of MP3 players will run about $100 but store far less music. They are really made for the person taking the short walk or lunchtime exercise. The strength of the iPod is that it is so versatile. It can connect to a computer or to your home stereo or car stereo. The down side, in my opinion, is that you really need Apple's software to run it. The software is free, but I guess it's the principle I don't like.

See these articles referenced for the history of the MP3.

A Histroy Of MP3's

MP3 Definition

Connecting To The Internet From Home

The Internet is a very cool place to be. And, no, Al Gore had very little to do with it. Before we talk about connecting to the Internet, let's talk a little about what it is. It was conceived as a project during the Cold War. The United States government wanted to make sure it could communicate during a disaster. I'm sure they had nuclear disaster in mind. So they got a group called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to build something for them. They came up with ARPANET.

ARPANET connected government and mostly colleges – for research purposes – together. Now if you get a lot of different people together you have to agree on the language you want to speak so information can flow more smoothly. So the language they chose, or created, was called TCP/IP. It stands for Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. I'm skipping a lot of time and details to keep this really simple. You can see the whole story at this link.

And so the Internet was born. And it wasn't what it is now. It was mostly stuff you don't really use a lot of today. Stuff like Gopher and FTP.

So on with our topic – connecting to the Internet. You can connect to the Internet in a few different ways: the phone lines, cable lines or satellite.

Recently there have been incredible leaps in technology that allow you to free up your phone and still connect to the Internet. Cable and DSL are the two most common. They are referred to as Broadband. Broadband is a fancy way to say you can handle a lot more stuff coming and going on your computer.

Think of the Internet as everyone connecting, in some way, to a huge water tower. To get the water to your house you need a series of hoses. Just like with real water, the government and universities have the biggest hoses and can let more water in and out. You still need a hose to your house to get the Internet water. The only thing that was affordable until recently was a ½ inch hose. A ½ inch hose only carried about 56,000 units of water a second and that was if you were close enough to the source and no one was driving over your hose.

Now companies are making bigger hoses to connect people to internet water. Cable companies allow more water to get to your house from the Internet. How much more? About 300 times more Internet water! So now you can get about 1,680,0000 units of Internet water to your house in a second. Cool huh?

So how does it get there this magical Internet water? By phone, cable or a new fangled phone line called DSL. The old method took the signal from your phone and converted it from analog to digital. It made a signal that looked like this:



look like this:



Simplified, computers talk in digital or 1's and 0's. On or off. A phone talks like a wave on the ocean, real curvy and up and down. It's hard to tell when something is on or off. That's what a modem does; it takes wavy and makes it either on or off.

More advanced phone lines, called DSL, work so that you don't have to tie up the phone to connect to the Internet. You need a special modem to connect. The cable, or hose in our analogy, is still a phone line that uses a couple of the 4 wires in a normal phone cable.

Cable Internet access uses a special cable wire and a cable modem. It's very similar to the cable TV cable. In fact it is the same cable. Its called RG 6. In this case as with DSL the signal is already a digital signal so it's not really a modem converting from wavy to on/off. It's a special box that helps gather the information.

Below are some pictures of what these connections look like.

Traditional Phone-Modem-Computer Connection


Cable Modem


DSL Modem Connection


Common questions.

Do I need a second phone line to connect to the Internet?
No, you don't. Some people like to get an extra line so they don't tie up the phone.

How much does each method cost?
A plain old modem costs about $20-$25 dollars and is very easy to install. It's like buying a new phone and putting it in your house. You also need to pay someone to connect to, called an Internet Service Provider, or ISP. On average about $10-$20 a month.
A DSL line is a little more expensive and costs about $25 a month.
A cable modem is about $80 and a subscription to cable is about $55 in my area. Your price may vary.

What's the difference?
Phone Modems are the slowest .
DSL is faster (but you have to be close to something called a phone switch, so you may not be able to get DSL) .
Cable is the fastest.
Remember it's all about how much internet water you can get to your house in the least amount of time.