The Fonly Institute

ICT for Afghan self-stabilization

(This post was originally made to the blog <www.phibetaiota.com>, operated by Robert David Steele, founder of the Open Source Intelligence movement, in the hopes that it might reach some receptive ear with the capability to implement. As it stands I have no such capability. Perhaps broader circulation will enable the idea to be picked up. If those who implement it want to claim credit for themselves, they are welcome - it is more important that the idea be attempted than that I receive plaudits.) LF

Afghan Self-Stabilization from Below and Above

Lee Felsenstein, Fonly Institute

As the end game begins for NATO and the US in Afghanistan, and as the potential mineral wealth of that unhappy land is revealed, one confronts despair when contemplating the fate of the Afghans. With the Taliban poised to move once more into the coming power vacuum and exploit a resurgent drug trade as well as establish a protection racket parasitic to the future mining industry, one looks for some glimmer of hope for the Afghan people.

After all, Afghanistan has never been conquered except by the Mongols. The much decentralized, tribal society that makes them vulnerable to decentralized gang rule has confounded each centralized invader who attempted to bring about their own version of order. Is there hope that the Afghan people will be able to expel the Taliban as they expelled the others? After all, the first government of the Taliban was not overthrown by the Afghans themselves, but by military invasion with the passive consent of the Afghan people.

Now, with the outside military forces beginning their final period in-country, and with little if any evidence of a viable government staffed by officials who will not bolt the country with their pockets stuffed, what can give the ordinary Afghans the means to resist as they have resisted other occupations?

The answer, I believe, lies in the essence of government. Government operates by communication. People in government gather, refine, transmit information, both from the populace to the seat of power and in reverse after policies and laws are defined based upon the information gathered. People have political power to the extent that they are included in this process of information flow to the exclusion of others.

Gangs are political organizations in that communications are restricted to members within a defined hierarchy. The power of a gang can be broken when the people on whom they feed as parasites develop their own structure of communication and use it to coordinate countervailing power.

Given that the Taliban is a gang it is necessary to ensure that Afghan communities have access to a communication structure which will enable their own ability to organize concerted action against the parasites. Attempts to set up this structure in the form of a classical government have not been successful.

But is a government really necessary at the outset? I will suggest that a telephone network would provide the necessary means for coordination among communities as well as the basis of trade that would allow a functioning economy to develop. In a land where weapons are everywhere, the missing element for military power is coordination.

Of course, communication infrastructure is one of the first targets of any invading military force to control or destroy. Therefore, one may say, a nationwide cellular network would not survive the depredations of any military force.

However, only a few powers can project force into space. The low-earth-orbit (LEO) network of satellites is immune from threat from armies or gangs tied to the ground.

What if a satellite phone were left with each village and tribe in Afghanistan, with service prepaid by the withdrawing powers, and with means for solar recharging? Batteries and other accessories could be made available to local merchants at subsidized prices. While the Taliban would immediately declare possession of these phones to be a capital offense, enforcement of such a ban would be very difficult. The Afghans are well familiar with concealment and protection of the means to their economic and social existence.

The cost of such an effort would be minuscule compared with the cost of military occupation. Economic development would come as a concomitant to social and political stabilization, not as an aftermath. Practice in developing countries shows that availability of telecommunications enables the creation of markets that were previously nonexistent, and enables the middlemen to move up the economic chain instead of squeezing the producers.

I do not know the capacity of the LEO systems, but great capacity is not needed where communication lead times on the order of an hour counts as near-instantaneous. And more channel capacity can be created.

This space-based telecomm system can give way to ground-based systems as the military threat decreases. Open-source software-implemented GSM base station designs have been under development for years. The costs now understood to be inherent in the operation and maintenance of first-class telecomm systems can be greatly reduced as the costs of computers have been reduced. No significant technical problem remains to be solved – this can all be implemented in fairly short order.

The means to allow Afghanistan to stabilize itself are at hand. It remains to be seen whether adequate support can be brought to bear in time. While it would be fitting for the governments involved to provide this support, it does not have to be done by government action.

Running Into Reality

Running Into Reality

28 Dec. 2009

It's June, 1981 and we are racing to make the first shipments of Osborne-1 computers so Adam can win a bet with Bill Godbout, one of his poker buddies. The amount is unknown, but Adam's self-image is apparently at stake, so June 30 is our deadline.

It's surprisingly difficult. Everything has to go together right – every piece has to be on hand and in working condition. Documenting the process is a full-time job, one that is apparently not being done. Assembly documentation consists of a series of “assembly trees” - lists of what goes together to create the next higher-level assembly. It's manageable when you're documenting complex assemblies like the circuit board, with hundreds of parts. After a couple of levels it gets to the actual computer people will use, and you think that it's done.

But there's more. The diskettes with the software have to be listed, and they can have different versions. Then the whole thing has to go into a box along with custom-cut foam packing pieces, so that's another assembly tree. And somewhere in there there has to be a power cord that will fit the sockets in the country of use. It gets messy fast.

Manuals in the right language, warranty information sheets, labels for the boxes and the pallets of boxes – the assembly trees pile up. It elicits the phrase from Ginsburg's famous poem “Howl”- “Trees, radios, factories - tons! They broke their backs lifting it to heaven!” (well, you have to read the whole thing).

And then you have to ensure that your people follow the instructions. Some of the first units off the line had incorrect wiring in the power panel – the small square black-anodized aluminum sheet where the power cord enters and the circuit breaker and interference filter are located. All the connections are done there with push-on wire terminals, and someone's hand has to choose the right spade lug and push the terminal onto it. Just providing a good drawing of what goes where doesn't always make it happen. Fortunately the circuit breaker will trip when you plug it in, but that doesn't get you very far, and a hot line might be connected to the metal itself where the ground wire should be.

Thus it came to pass that on June 30 the first batch of six Osborne-1's were stuffed into their boxes and loaded into someone's car trunk for the trip to the dealer. We had made it! Adam's reputation would be unsullied! It didn't matter that on July 1 the same computers came right back to be repaired – we had shipped on time!

Not long after that I sat in an executive committee meeting and heard a report from some private investigators who had been hired to go undercover in the work force and ferret out drug use. They concluded that they could find no drug use but that we had a serious quality control problem. This led to the establishment of “quality circles” - committees at the employee level to compare notes and identify quality problems and solutions. Things began to get better in manufacturing.

Osborne's manufacturing process involved a lot of “outsourcing” - not necessarily the international kind that became universal 30 years later, but within Silicon Valley. The circuit boards were assembled by a company named “Testology” in San Jose. They would sell boards to Osborne and warranty them as functional – so if there was a problem later they would take them back and fix them.

Unfortunately, Testology created their own test procedure and Osborne wasn't much involved in the process. Such an arrangement requires that both parties agree on what the test is to be to determine functionality. As the designer of all the timing circuitry I should have been heavily involved in that process. The most I can recall was having dinner with Testology's test procedure consultant. It was a good dinner, but when I began making reference to the operation of the 74LS161 and 163 synchronous 4-bit counters (building blocks I used quite a bit) the consultant went blank - he had nothing to say. It eventually came out that he had represented his qualifications as better than they really were, and that he did not understand what I had been talking about.

Thus it transpired that boards would pass the outgoing tests at Testology and be shipped to Osborne – where they wouldn't work and would be shipped back to Testology. They would pass again there, and would wind up in a loop going back and forth between the two companies. When the end came all of these boards were simply sold to the highest bidder and entered the population of spare parts.

If I had been properly qualified for my position of Vice President of Engineering I would have been alert to any sign that something was amiss – that would have been my job. But as it was I considered myself basically the chief engineer, with a staff of one and a number of expectations which I had no good plan for meeting. No one ever sat down with me and asked me to lay out my organizational structure, my priorities, and the resources I would need to make it happen. No one had told me “Lee, you can't do that with just two engineers, especially if you're one of them!

Later I learned that the VP Engineering represents the engineering department to the Board of Directors. It is an outward-facing position, and the inward-facing position is the Engineering Manager. In startup companies these two positions may be combined, but it is foolish to combine the function of Chief Engineer with these positions, as I had done. What I discovered was that in such a structure where the product is even modestly complex none of those jobs will get done!

In this situation I was trying to get the “double density” upgrade for the floppy disc system designed, and was looking for a consultant who knew the technology (give me credit here for knowing it would take too long for me to learn how to do it). I had made an appointment for one consultant to come and meet with me at a given time, which came and went. I looked for Adam's secretary Marlene, a mature Englishwoman who must have reminded Adam of one of his childhood nannies. She would have been in charge of receiving the visitor, but she wasn't there.

Marlene had had to leave her desk for some reason and, having no backup, had locked the front door! My consultant candidate had showed up on time, found the company locked up tight, and had gone off incensed. Those were the days before cell phones, so he couldn't have placed a call from the front door, and in that industrial park the nearest pay phone was nearly impossible to find.

A short time later that day I met with Adam, along with Ed Richter, an engineer referred by our General Manager Tom Davidson, who had worked with him when he turned an electronic module manufacturing company around. Ed was Dutch, a former KLM Airlines flight engineer, and quite a bit more formal than most of us. I was to report on progress on the double density system, and had to say that my consultant had gone away furious.

Adam began a tirade about how I was letting down “...all those people who had been busting their asses...” when I snapped. Sitting bolt upright and gripping the chair arms, I barked back at him “one of whom is sitting before you now!” Adam, taken aback, was shocked into silence, his head making small bobbing movements. I went on, in my most strident, drill-sergeant voice, “Do you care to conTEST that statement?”

It took several seconds for Adam to recover his voice. “Lee, I'm not going to sit through another one of your tantrums,” he said in an overly-controlled voice, as if I had been popping off several times a day. He went on to lay out what he intended to do – I would be relieved of my position of VP Engineering and Ed Richter would be made acting VP in my place pending approval of the board. I would be given the newly-created position of “R&D Fellow” with full Vice Presidential rank. Clearly this whole solution had been worked out in advance.

When Tom came into the meeting and learned of this he came to my defense - “It wasn't his fault the guy couldn't get in...he woiks continuously!” but he had either agreed to this change or hadn't been in the loop. Ed and I left the meeting with Ed muttering about how he didn't like that kind of emotional outburst, and I had been freed from some responsibilities I wasn't meeting anyway.

Some time later Ed and I went out with a real estate agent to look for a location for our R&D shop which I would run. We settled on a suite of offices a block or so away in the same industrial park. I signed the lease papers myself as an officer of the corporation on a weekend when Adam and other VPs were away. Ed, Pat and I moved our desks there and I was in startup mode again. I was much more in my element.

No Way To Run A Company

How Not To

4 Dec. 2009

It's late fall of 1980 and I'm working every available minute to get the Osborne-1 design ready. The work is going on in multiple locations – my office in Berkeley, the offices of Sorcim (“micros” spelled backwards) in Santa Clara where the firmware (what would now be called the “ROM-BIOS”) is being developed by Richard Frank and his crew and where Tom Davidson, our general manager, maintains an office, and at times in the unfinished third of a tilt-up building on Corporate Way in Hayward where I do thermal testing of the “unit”, as we call it. I put in a lot of time driving from one site to another in my 1977 Honda Accord.

Sorcim has the wire-wrapped prototype with a printed-circuit DRAM section laid out by my electronic musician friend. It's just a circuit board with spacers for legs holding it off the tabletop, a tiny 5 inch CRT monitor (diagonal, meaning the picture is 3 inches high by 4 inches wide), a 5 inch full-height floppy disc drive and a keyboard obtained as a sample from a keyboard manufacturer. When there is some question about the hardware operation I have to pack up my oscilloscope and drive the hour-long drive down there and fix it. At least once I am so tired at the end I can't make it back and wisely check in at the Vagabond Inn motel next door.

A couple of times Adam Osborne himself comes down, ostensibly for a conference, accompanied by a young woman co-worker from his book company. After strutting back and forth a few times and chatting briefly with Richard, Adam would draw himself up and say “well, you guys obviously know much more than I about these things, so we'll just be going”, and the two of them would leave. Clearly the purpose of their trip was not to confer with us but, in a sense, to confer among themselves.

During this time we try to get a metal housing made at a reasonable price. Tom takes me to Galgon Industries in Hayward , where Manfred Galgon and his crew have turned out ten metal cases for our first run of prototypes. Manfred is an immigrant with a thick German accent, and proud of his heritage. “Did you ever see a Cherman miss?” he would challenge. I briefly consider replying “Yes – out in the front office” where one of Manfred's daughters holds down the front desk – but I hold my comments.

Tom is trying to negotiate a workable price for a metal case in production quantities – the quote stands at $150 each – far more than we can afford. Even though Tom had been trained as a machinist he takes his favored approach of “beating up suppliers” in trying to argue the price down. Manfred was having none of that and steadily grows angrier. Suddenly, he erupts, pointing at me while looking at Tom, “him I will talk to!” Swinging his arm to point at Tom, he continues rapid-fire, “him I will not talk to!” and everybody gets out of the room. I would have liked the chance to talk with Manfred about better ways to get the price down, but I have to go with Tom to a nearby restaurant and listen while he laments over a few beers. Galgon remains our supplier for several sheet metal parts, an indication of Tom's respect for Manfred.

Not too long after that episode I am taken to the offices of GVO, an “industrial design” firm, for a conference about designing a plastic housing. The executive we meet with wears a European double-breasted suit, an unusual sight in Silicon Valley, clearly meant to make us feel uncomfortable about our ordinary clothes. After a while, he calls in the actual industrial designer on the project, a tall, prematurely balding young guy named Mike Levitt. He lays out a plan for two plastic housings – the first done by the quick-and-dirty “vacuum form” process in which a sheet of heat-softened plastic is pulled down over a wood and metal mold and vacuum is used to pull it around the mold. The second case, which will take months longer to prepare, would be the usual “injection-molded” type where molten plastic is forced by pressure into a machined metal mold.

Tom goes with the GVO plan, and I begin coming down to GVO to help Mike work out questions and problems. Very quickly I realize that the executive in the fancy suit will be of no help in the process, and discover that I can get in to see Mike through the back door on weekends and after hours when the executive is away. From this I construct the aphorism “always find the back door into a supplier” - that is, develop a direct channel between the technical people on both sides of a problem to get it solved in the fastest and best way.

Industrious as ever, Tom finds a plastics fabrication company in San Francisco, Ajax Plastics, that is willing to throw themselves into the task of tooling up to manufacture our beige vacuum-formed housings. Their lead technical person, Paul Bunning, is a short, wiry fellow who calls himself a “plastics artist” and is willing to put in the long hours needed to prepare for production. They built three molds and arranged them on a turntable so one would be heating, the other “pulling” the plastic sheet and the third “trimming” and removing the cooled sheet. Tom commented at one point “I had to buy a plastics company to get it done.”

Paul's artistic credentials are displayed by a wall hanging consisting of a large sheet of plastic with three ghostly impressions of the Osborne housing bulging part way out. It produces an eerie effect, as if they were invaders from another dimension who had almost made it through to our reality. Some years later, on another project, Paul takes great pride in designing a housing that would be far cheaper to build than the sort favored by industrial designers, and in charging one third of what they would charge. Unfortunately, I can now no longer locate him, and I suspect his tobacco habit combined with the fumes expected in plastics manufacturing brought him to an untimely end.

At the 6^th West Coast Computer Faire in March 1981, where we are the hit of the show with our new product, Adam and I find ourselves walking down an empty corridor behind the scenes. In an expansive mood, he claps me on the shoulder and said “the product is the company – we're going to build it up really big and sell it off really fast!” I hope he knows what he was doing, because in those areas, I certainly know nothing.

At the show no spectator could get close enough to the product to see that the display was wavering from magnetic interference between the power transformer and the CRT monitor, that random characters would appear on the screen, that the insides contained a large amount of double-sticky foam tape, our universal mechanical fix, or that the unit weighed 30 pounds due to the large iron and copper power transformer. Carrying two of them from my car four blocks to the show had nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets.

At the show a man I'd never met introduces himself and pulls out a small electronic assembly – a “switching power supply” from Astec that would replace our huge, heavy power transformer, eliminate the waver I called “the Hawaiian effect” and greatly reduce the amount of heat within the device. It was a godsend, and I immediately design it in.

Around this time Tom confides to me that he is not using purchase orders – his parts orders to suppliers are made verbally. This is unheard of, but it is part of his strategy of negotiations. If the suppliers want to, they could shut us down in a day without legal consequences. It is only their perception of mutual self-interest that sustains the whole house of cards that is the parts supply structure. If we ever falter, Tom makes clear to me, we would face disaster - the parts would keep coming only as long as everything looked good.

Upon starting production Adam demonstrates how little he knows about running a company of any significant size. He attempts to get everyone in a room around a table so he can hear reports and issue orders. You simply can't do this with a company that's larger than about 15 people – management is a full-time job and most of what's discussed is of no relevance to most of the others there. It will radically reduce the company's productivity.

By that time, with the title of Vice President for Engineering, I had set up the engineering department with a totally inadequate two engineers (Pat McGuire and myself). There was a documentation clerk who asked for much less in salary than we thought she ought to have, and a part-time draftsman. I had made a fairly common error of confusing the role of “vice president for engineering” with “chief engineer”. I tried to solve all the problems this brought about by working very long hours, often into the early morning hours. Pat puts together our floppy disc duplication system – an Osborne board with four floppy drives and enough modifications of hardware and software to make it work. Pat often works alongside me when I ran late.

One day Adam and Tom are out of town and we are having our company meeting. I am told by our 23-year-old marketing VP that there is an unacceptable level of errors on the machines we were shipping, and that production has to be stopped until this is fixed. Remembering Tom's warning about never slowing down, I dig in and resist. With the others away, I am the one with authority over production, so I hunch up my shoulders and declare “I won't do it!”

Marketing then demands that we ship all production to them before shipping to the customers. They will test the machines and let them out only when they see fit. I agree, since it would not slow down shipments of parts and endanger our supply lines. Marketing then rents a vacant third of our building and hires a raft of temporary workers to walk up and down along rows of computers, aimlessly poking discs in and out and running programs.

When Tom returns he backs me up. The meetings continue until Pat looks up and asks “has anyone ever cleaned the heads on the duplicators?” Everyone looks at each other. The fellow responsible for this sort of thing had previously been a hard disc drive technician, where the first question asked is always “did you clean the heads”? The same day we place an order with a professional disc duplicating company and our homemade duplicator setup is returned to a shelf in the engineering shop. The errors, which have been due to weak recording of the floppies, end.

The company expands into the space used for marketing's “testing” program, and almost all of the temporary workers stay and become permanent. This is no way to run a company, a lesson I am learning too late to apply.

Dear Old High

(I spent the day of Nov. 1 visiting Central High School, my alma mater, in Philadelphia and talking to students. I was late and missed the first period, so I'm posting here what I would have said. Some alumni friends have commented on my failure so far to make much mention of Central and the part it played in my development, so this is my attempt to remedy this oversight. - LF)

To the Students of Ms. Henry's 1^st period Physics Class at Central High School

16 Nov. 2009

First, allow me to apologize for failing to show up at your class Nov. 1 as I had promised – there were serious delays on the regional SEPTA rail lines, but if I had followed the Silicon Valley adage “if you're not ten minutes early, you're five minutes late” I would have had plenty of time to meet with you. While I could not speak to you directly I can use this essay to say what I would have said in class, and you will be able to pose questions as comments.

I have spoken to 11^th grade students at Central before and once someone was candid enough to ask me “why should we listen to you?” This is a legitimate question, so I will try to answer it. I'm an electronic design engineer who was involved in designing some of the first personal computers. There are many ways to define “personal computer”, but I focus on the ways in which the user interacts with the computer.

In 1974 the newest small computers were called “minicomputers”. They were table-top sized boxes with a lot of switches and lights on their front panels. There was no screen or keyboard – those were on a separate device called a “terminal” that was plugged into the computer. The terminal had its own memory holding the data displayed on the screen, since the screen displayed but did not store data. The computer had its own idea of what data should be displayed, and it had to describe that data and transmit that description through the wire. The terminal would interpret this description and place the intended data in its display memory.

This would all take time and limited the speed with which the computer could interact with its user. The terminal might cost $1500 – quite a bit more in today's dollars - but the computer cost a minimum of $5,000, so the extra amount wasn't too significant. However, when the “minicomputer” became a smaller and cheaper “microcomputer” due to microprocessor technology, the cost of the terminal began to exceed the cost of the computer.

In 1974 I was working with a small group in San Francisco trying to put into service an “electronic bulletin board” that would be accessible in public places – the idea of having a computer in the home was then considered a matter of outlandish science fiction. We needed terminals that could be kept working by the people who used them, or by people they knew. I realized that the TV or a similar video monitor – like a closed circuit TV monitor – could be used as the terminal display. I also realized that the important element was not the microprocessor, which wouldn't be needed for a terminal, but the improved memory chips that were then appearing.

Using these “random-access memory” chips would be more expensive than using the chips common to terminals of the time, but I saw that if you started with the new chips you could build within a structure that could be expanded later into a computer. I wrote up an engineering specification for this kind of computer, printed it up and sold it to members of our small circle of enthusiasts for 25 cents. The structure described by this specification was a combination of computer and terminal with a display memory that was part of the main memory of the microprocessor.

This “shared-memory” architecture allowed for the very fastest interaction possible between the computer and the display – there was no more wire connecting the two and no description language to deal with. Suddenly you could have software that changed things all over the screen simultaneously, and you could now create and run computer games! And best of all, the cost of this high-performance combination terminal and computer was less than the old way of doing it.

I designed a circuit board that could be plugged into the early 1975 personal computer kits giving them this capability, and it was so successful that it was widely copied and became the ordinary way personal computers were built. So you can see, I could claim to be the inventor of the personal computer, if my definition of “personal computer” were widely accepted. Of course, if it were accepted I would still not get money in the mail, so I don't pursue the issue.

I do want to explore the question of why I found myself reaching the conclusions I did when I did. To do this, I need to ask a question – what is the difference between scientists and engineers? Both use complex equipment, mathematics and scientific knowledge to make things happen. Engineers, however, have to answer a question that scientists don't have to – and that question is: “who cares?”

“I've thought of a better way to do this,” for example, but “who cares?” This is not a rhetorical question where the asker does not expect to hear an answer – it's a real question and the engineer has to find an answer. Often that answer will come from how much money is offered for the solution, and many engineers think that this is the only way to answer it.

I answered this question by thinking about the people who would use the device and how it could help them make their lives and communities better. But why didn't someone else come up with the answer before me? I was never a great student in engineering school and there were thousands of engineers working all around me.

I did, however, have one advantage that most others did not have – my Central education. I graduated in January 1963 with the 219^th class (we had two classes a year until the 222^nd class). I was not a great student at Central, either, but I followed in the footsteps of my father (148 - 1927) and brother (213 – 1960) and when I asked myself, as many of you may now be asking, “why am I doing this?” I decided that I would learn the answer later.

The important aspect of a Central education, I believe, is its breadth. I've heard Central students ask “why do we need to know this?” when confronted with material outside their intended course of study. Why would a future engineer like myself need to know how to write, or how literature revealed universal truths about people, or Latin, or about history? When I entered the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley I had to take only one course dealing with some of these areas, and an intense regime of courses preparing us to be engineers.

Engineers at Berkeley were generally regarded as somewhat limited in their knowledge of the world - rather ignorant of anything other than engineering. My Central education gave me an advantage over most other engineers. Somehow, as a freshman I was able to write sarcastic, argumentative and yet readable articles for my residential house newspaper and take on editing the paper a year later. Somehow, I was able to absorb lessons from the people around me that were of use in answering that important question - “who cares?”

I credit my Central education for these capabilities, and it's not that I kept remembering facts I had learned in my high school days – the benefit of a broad education manifests in more subtle ways. Upon reflection I believe that Central set me up to continue to learn – gave me metrics against which to compare my experiences, and gave me tools I didn't know I had when I graduated.

What you are experiencing at Central will, I believe, give you similar tools – if you decide take an engaged relationship to the education available here. That is, if you take the question “why am I doing this?” and accept the fact that you may not have the answer – that the outcome will be that you will later find the answer.

It may not seem like it, but this will probably be the most productive and useful time of your life, so I urge you to go for it. You are all in physics class now, but you will not all be destined for technical or scientific careers requiring a knowledge of physics – no matter. Embrace learning without regard to its practicality – make it a game and play, not so much to win, but to do your best. Handle it this way and Central will come through for you in the longer run, as it did for me.

I still get occasional emails from strangers thanking me for what I did in helping shape the form of the personal computer as a tool useful to many people who couldn't care less how it's built. While these expressions are quite gratifying, I'd like to tell them that the credit belongs to Central High, and I'd like for you to prove me right.

Thank you for the gift of your attention.

Lee Felsenstein

CHS 219

Becoming Analog Again

Becoming Analog Again

11 Nov. 2009

It's fall of 1980 and I'm working on the Osborne-1 design at my office in Berkeley. Pat McGuire is working alongside me, designing the electronics board for the floppy disc drive. Pat had been one of the engineers designing the ill-fated dynamic RAM board for Osborne Associates, a project I helped kill with a negative report on the construction technique. I needed another engineer to design the disc electronics and Adam recommended him.

Pat is a competent engineer with a “P.E.” credential after his name – someone who has passed the “Professional Engineer” exam given by the state. You actually can't call yourself an engineer in California unless you've either passed this exam or hold a bachelor's degree in engineering from an accredited college. Pat is shorter than me with wavy red hair, penetrating dark eyes, and a very clearly-articulated speaking style. He keeps careful, neat notes of all that he works on.

One of the foundations of the Osborne-1 project was that we could buy bare floppy disc drives with no electronics on them at a very good price. We have found three suppliers who will do this, and we need to design an electronics board that will mount on all three and work. Designing this board is Pat's task. He researches the drive electronics boards of all three companies and works out a design that will accommodate all the drives.

Floppy disc drives (FDDs for short) are pretty simple, consisting of a motor driving a hub, or spindle, a stepper motor that moves a read/write magnetic head, and a mechanical system for clamping the head down to the diskette – the mylar disc with the magnetic coating inside the envelope (these are 5 1/4” floppies, not the more recent 3 1/2” ones with a hard shell). The same mechanism clamps the diskette to the hub when the head is lowered. There are also a couple of photosensors that tell when the index hole passes a certain point in the rotation of the diskette.

The electronics board has to handle several functions – regulate current to the motor to keep the speed constant, send current pulses to the stepper motor to move the head, read the photosensor and both drive and read the read/write head. These components deal in analog signals, and the external interface driven from the cable is purely digital. The electronics board therefore performs conversion between the two types of signal.

Like all magnetic record/playback systems, the FDD “head” is a single coil wound around a ferrite (magnetic ceramic) core that is carefully formed to slide over the diskette surface with minimal wear. Unlike hard disk drives, the head does not float on a cushion of air but drags along surface that is both lubricated with stuff like graphite and is turning fairly slowly. I am familiar with the electronic characteristics of this kind of system from the magnetic tape designs I did at Ampex.

You write data by feeding signals to the head that are basically digital – the magnetic field produced drives the magnetic particles on the surface of the diskette into “saturation”, where they stay magnetized in one direction or the other. During readout the coil generates a small voltage when the boundaries between saturated areas passes under the ferrite core. This voltage is only a few millivolts – thousandths of a volt – and the electronics is operating at 5 volts, so an amplification factor in the hundreds is necessary. Fortunately, there are chips that perform this amplification well – the analog 733 type video amplifiers. Pat designs these in, providing the same test points present on all FDD electronics boards, allowing a technician to connect an oscilloscope and observe the strength and shape of the signals.

At one point Pat looks up from his work and says to me “You know, I'm really glad to have the opportunity to take cost into account when I'm designing.” I am surprised – it turns out that Pat's prior experience had been in the aerospace field where the sums of money charged were so high that the mere cost of the electronics mattered little – in fact, the contracts were often “cost-plus” where the higher the costs, the more the “plus” part amounts to. I've been sweating the costs from the very beginning of the project, and I somehow assumed Pat had been doing the same. However, his design work is very good and I've been reviewing it regularly, so there are no surprises here.

Some time in this process Adam brings two candidates for general manager to see me, separately. The first is well-mannered and seems intelligent, though I learn little about him. The second is striking – a short, stocky guy with grey hair named Tom Davidson who speaks loudly and profanely with a broad “dis 'n dat” Brooklyn street accent. His one-page resume has him graduating from the Wharton School of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania with an MBA, and shows several management jobs culminating with a turn-around of the Cermetek corporation, a manufacturer of electronic components.

Of these resume entries, only the last one is factual, as we are later to discover. Adam apparently falls in love with him, the first candidate never gets a call back (as he tells me decades later), and Tom becomes the General Manager – the most critical position in the company, as Adam does not pretend to know how to manage the operations of a startup manufacturing company. Tom is the son of a New York City policeman, was trained as a machinist, served in the Korean war where he was captured and spent several years as a P.O.W., and generally seems the polar opposite of Adam, the British PhD who speaks in measured cadences and projects an aura of calm all-knowingness.

In the meantime, Adam has found a mechanical designer named Housh Ghorbani – a recent Iranian emigre working from a drafting board in his living room. Housh lays out the shape of the case needed to contain all the Osborne-1's components and makes the mechanical drawings necessary for a model-maker to build a single example. In consultation with me he works out a kind of gull-winged platform on which the CRT display and the FDDs will be mounted, with the circuit board suspended from brackets below. The platform will be screwed into the case and will flex under shock to protect the CRT from breakage. This mechanical design will move from one home to another, through three construction techniques, but it survives through the entire life span of the computer.

Things are, of course, pretty closely positioned in this design. The 5-inch CRT monitor sits in the center flanked by the FDDs, and has to be open to air circulation for cooling. Inside the monitor is the high-voltage generating transformer, known as the “flyback”, which creates sharp pulses at 7.5 kilovolts - that's 7,500 volts. The sharpness of the pulses means that echoes of them will appear almost everywhere else in the circuitry, due to physical phenomena that cannot be avoided. The FDDS on either side are susceptible to these pulses, especially to the pulsing magnetic field generated by a flyback with no pretense of shielding. To make matters worse, the ribbon cable connecting the FDDs to the main circuit board drape right over the monitor.

After the product is introduced we notice that its performance is erratic – characters randomly appear on the display screen where none should be. This is embarrassing when we show at the National Computer Conference in Chicago in 1981, though no visitors to the booth point it out. Tom is puzzled - “How kin dat be?” he keeps asking, arguing that there's no direct, line-of-sight path from the monitor to the FDDs – we had put a U-shaped piece of aluminum over the drives as a cover.

I try to tell him that you wouldn't need a line of sight path to get interference – that you could stretch a clothesline between two rooms running it through a tiny crack in the doorway, then wobble one side and the other side would wobble even though the crack through which it passed would not permit waves of such amplitude to pass. My electromagnetic analogies fall on deaf ears. Tom's solution at the NCC is to dismantle some of the demo units and poke around inside them aimlessly.

Back on the workbench I attack the problem. With the case off, I connect the probes of an oscilloscope to the test points on the FDD electronics board – two of them are needed because this is a ”differential signal” that manifests as the difference between the two voltages. Then I take another probe and connect it to the “trigger” input of the oscilloscope. When enough voltage is sensed by this probe the scope will fire off a single sweep of its electron beam, resulting in a visible trace on the screen.

I take the trigger probe and simply suspend it near the monitor. The 7500 volt pulses running at 15,750 pulses per second couple easily to the probe through thin air resulting in nice, strong trigger signals. The scope triggers reliably, and I see a definite pulse show up on the FDD read heads caused by the monitor flyback. What to do to get rid of it?

I take some aluminum foil and cover the rear edge of the FDD cover. There is not much response in reducing the unwanted pulse. I think a bit – aluminum is known to react with air to develop a film of aluminum oxide – the same stuff sapphire is made of and an electrical insulator – on its surface. Maybe if I pressed hard I could break this oxide film, which is only a few atoms thick.

I press on the foil – and see the noise pulse decrease. I've got it – we'll need to change the covers from simple, open-ended U-shapes to shapes with a flap bent down at the rear. This flap will have to be part of the aluminum forming the rest of the cover – made from one piece of metal. I make a sketch and take it to Tom to be passed to the metal fabrication shop.

However, Tom is a very good negotiator, and when the shop points out the cost, he negotiates his way around it. Since he was a metalworker in his youth, Tom apparently feels no need to involve me in the discussions, even though I had told him that the continuity of metal was essential. Besides, I would only reduce his room to maneuver. I am presented with a large number of covers made by adding a separate U-shaped strap across the rear of the original U-shaped covers. Worst of all, these straps are secured by a mere rivet on each side! They have an inviting gap along the rear corner which should have been a continuous metal bend according to my design. I protest but some of these seem to find their way into production units before we got the design right.

Yes, Tom is a great negotiator – aggressive, shrewd, and somehow able to get supplier companies to give low prices without receiving anything in writing – he boasts that he doesn't use purchase orders. He calls it “beatin' up suppliers” and it earns him Adam's great admiration. However, it won't help him in one case. The idea Adam had that he could buy FDDs and simply connect our electronics to them without any adjustment turns out to be very, very wrong. They will need to have the full course of adjustments made to them – adjustments that reconcile the particular circuit board to the particular mechanism.

Workbenches must be set up for the drive-adjustment technicians, workbenches that claim floor space originally intended for white-collar personnel (Tom had laid out a very small space for manufacturing). The planning spread sheets will have to show additional costs – you can't negotiate that away.

Felsenstein's Monster Comes Alive

Taking Form

4 Nov., 2009

It's late summer 1980 and I'm working at my office, part of a huge room with sandblasted wood columns in Berkeley that I share with The Community Memory Project. It's in an old woolen mill building built in 1907, when lots of people had suddenly moved out of San Francisco and some moved to Berkeley. The columns have four-way diagonal braces near the 2-story-high ceiling, for earthquake bracing, and they give the impression of being in a forest. To enhance this impression we have painted the ceiling black to create a night sky impression.

My drafting board is set up next to a window, looking out on Parker St. The windows have cyclone-fence type gratings, and there is a railroad track in the street outside, which is occasionally used to move a rail freight car to a nearby factory. My workbench is next to the drafting board, the blueprint machine, and opposite a sofa made of foam rubber with a cloth covering. Three blocks down Parker Street, next to the railroad tracks, the Palmolive soap factory belches a continuous plume of water vapor.

I'm working on the design of the Osborne-1 portable computer. First comes a block diagram showing the major elements – CPU, RAM memory, ROM, timing generator, parallel interface, serial interface and baud rate divider, video address generator and multiplexer, floppy disc controller, power regulators and modem. I had thrown the Pennywhistle 103 modem design into the mix in my discussions with Adam.

Then, using one sheet per section, I draw rectangles representing the chips I knew would be needed in each section. I am filled with anxiety and doubt. My contract with Adam – Brandywine Holdings, technically - gives me $3500 per month plus 25 percent of the company, with a penalty of 1 percent for each two weeks the design is late. Can I do it? I don't know.

To begin with, I don't know which of two processors – the Intel 8085 or the Zilog Z80 – we'll use. It would all be determined by the price, which we won't know till later, so I drew two alternate CPU pages, one for each. For most of the other large-scale chips there were several choices, so my schematics were rather vague on details – each page became its own block diagram with missing pieces to be filled in later.

I didn't have the circuit, but I needed to get a circuit board into design as quickly as possible. I knew from analyzing the disastrous wire-wrapped dynamic RAM board design in the back room at Osborne Associates that I would need to use printed-circuit construction for the RAM memory section. I didn't have time to do the tape layout necessary to have a printed circuit built, but I could teach someone to do it. Gabriel Stern, an electronic musician who was a friend of a friend, was out of work and seemed bright enough. I taught him the basics and set him up with my light box and Mylar film to lay out the RAM and CPU pages of the design – both CPU pages, as this board would be able to use either CPU.

For the rest of the chips I would use the noisier wire-wrap technique, which required only enough holes in the board to accommodate enough chip sockets of assorted sizes. Aside from copper traces set up for power and some holes to mount bypass capacitors, that was all I'd need. Gabriel had a lot of tiny black, sticky doughnuts and yards of thin, black sticky tape to position exactly on the intersections of precision grids, but he turned to work with a will, in a spot on the 2nd-story loft in the room.

I flew with Adam to Wescon (Western Electronic Show and CONvention) in Anaheim that fall to meet and talk with salesmen from the chip and component companies. With Adam grinning behind me I told them that we would be ordering 10,000 parts a month, and that we wanted to pay a very low price for each chip. When a salesman agreed that two dollars was a reasonable price, I proposed one dollar, and knew I had hit home when he lost his composure, shouting “Lee!” We all laughed, and I had a better idea of what the “price point” would be.

None of those numbers constituted a binding quotation, but I could work with them. Adam took the CPU decision out of my hands, informing me that he had worked a deal with Zilog for the Z80. With many erasures, the schematic diagram began to flesh out. One principle didn't change – the entire circuit would derive its timing from a single crystal. This would prevent crawling noise patterns from appearing in the video, and would save the cost of more crystals. As I would say, “the number of crystals in a computer is equal to the number of designers”, a principle that I would not be able to maintain for long.

Gabriel finished the layout of the prototype board and I soldered in the parts and wire-wrapped the non-RAM circuitry (the modem was left for later). I had given him a trade laying out circuit boards, which he did for a living thereafter, leaving time to build electronic instruments and raise a family. I went on to get the proto board working.

Richard Frank, President of Sorcim Corp., started coming in to work with me on getting the necessary rudimentary software working so that I could get the hardware working. I moved the prototype into a tiny room under the loft with a single, lockable door – we were going to keep the design a secret until we unveiled it.

One of the unknowns I now had to resolve was the number of columns of text to be visible on the CRT display screen. CRTs “sweep” a spot of light back and forth horizontally at 15.75 kilohertz and vertically at close to 60 hertz, creating a network of horizontal lines called a “raster” (rhymes with “faster”). It takes a certain amount of time for the spot to snap back and start the next line (the “retrace interval”), and if you don't turn the spot intensity to “black” (blanking) it will show a messy secondary network over the intended raster image.

Manufacturers are usually quite vague about the duration of the retrace interval, so I had to discover it myself. The period of the horizontal signal was 64 microseconds, and by trial and error I was able to find out that the visible portion of the horizontal sweep time was about 52 microseconds. My 16 MHz clock was divided down to 1 MHz, or 1 microsecond per displayed character, so that meant I could display 52 characters per line, and 24 lines per screen.

Adam had specified only 40 characters per line, like the Apple II, and upper case characters only, also like the Apple II. I could show 52 characters in an upper/lower case font I had created myself – the characters actually had 16 dots but the character ROM had its dots doubled in all but a few places - like the central dot of the “M” and the “W”, which displayed as blurs.

When I got the display working it was late - after midnight. Adam had told me to notify him as soon as it worked. I called him and woke him up.

“I have the good news and the bad news, Adam,” I said. “The bad news is that you can't have 40 characters.” He began to say “can you..”, but I cut him off. “The good news is you can have 52.” There was silence for about a second, then “Oh....that's very good!” His voice was squeaky as it was whenever he was grinning.

Of course, 52 characters is less than 80, which has been the line length for computers since the 80-column Hollerith punch card used by IBM, which defined the printer line which in turn defined the terminal line. We had to provide for that, so I had designed in a counter which would allow for the display line to start anywhere within a span of 128 characters. The CPU could set the starting point for this counter, so the display had a horizontal scrolling feature across a field of 128 characters.

128 is defined by seven binary bits, and a byte is 8 bits, so there was a bit left over on the counter, and this I defined as a half-character bit. The idea was to allow smooth scrolling when desired, such as when “coasting” to a stop. A lot of other things had to be taken care of first, and eventually Richard Frank got around to it. He called me and complained that the horizontal scrolling became jumpy when you used this bit.

I thought I knew all about it – clearly the low-order bit had somehow been exchanged with a higher-order bit – this would cause the display to jump around by several characters when the low bit was changed, and we hadn't changed it until now. But probing around in the circuit and looking at the code revealed that everything was working exactly as designed. And yet it was jumpy in scrolling!

It turned out that it was an effect of visual perception. The eye likes it when things don't change too much, when a character that moves lands right on top of where there had been a character before. It can deal with that. But a character landing on a spot halfway between where two characters had been upsets our perception, and we see it as a major disruption.

Oh well, it was only one bit. We just kept it set to zero.

Osborne 0.1

Osborne 0.1

28 Oct. 2009

It's 1980 and I'm walking the aisles at the 5^th West Coast Computer Faire in Brooks Hall, San Francisco. I am part of the Pacific Software booth crew, and we're showing off a piece of vaporware software called “Junior G-Man”, a variation of the relational database that the Community Memory Project has been developing. For this reason only I am wearing a felt hat that is at least two sizes too small. Others at the booth are dressed in garb inspired by the “Untouchables” TV show, and one of us has a shoulder holster with a real .38 snub-nose revolver (a policeman happens to see it and advises him to put the gun out of sight).

Walking past the booth of Osborne Associates, a publishing company that was early into the new market for computer books, I am hailed by Adam Osborne, the founder. “Lee!” he cries in surprise, “what are you doing wearing a fedora hat?” I knew Adam because I had done some work for him, mostly editing manuscripts for books on machine language programming and reviewing a secret project Osborne had under way to develop a dynamic memory board for S-100 computers. I had pronounced that project hopeless because the engineers were prototyping using wire-wrap technique, which is incapable of maintaining a level of what is now called “signal integrity” - i.e., it was generating signals with far more noise than the DRAM chips could tolerate.

When I stopped to chat, Adam told me that he wanted to meet with me to discuss forming a “hardware company” that would “really do things right”. Adam was somewhat of a caricature Englishman – tall and dark, in his '40's with a compact military brush mustache, and he held himself ramrod-straight. He spoke with an all-purpose British accent, emphasizing words with a cadence that made him sound like a character in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, though had lived in the States for twenty years. As I later found out, his accent only disappeared when he was angry. It seemed clear to me that he took advantage of the tendency common among Americans to regard the British as being of superior intelligence.

Adam held a PhD in chemical engineering and had come to the US in his twenties to work for DuPont and Shell, doing computer simulations toward the end of that career. When Shell closed its research facility in California, Adam struck out as a software consultant and a technical writer, doing business as Adam Osborne and Associates. When the Altair personal computer was announced in 1975 he scraped together the technical manuals on all of the available microprocessor chips and reprinted the information in a single, fat paperback book. Titled “An Introduction to Microprocessors”, it became the bible for machine-language programmers – the only kind of programmers that then existed for personal computers. Adam worked a deal with the Imsai Corporation that had one of these books shipped with each of the imitation-but-improved Altair clones they made.

By 1979 interest was growing in personal computers, and the publishing giant McGraw-Hill purchased Osborne Associates. It was during this time that I did my first work for Adam. While it would have made no sense for a publishing company to pay for a memory board development project, it made eminent sense if the owner had lots of money burning a hole in his pocket and was looking for the next big thing.

At first Adam said he had no idea what he wanted to manufacture and invited me to make suggestions. I dusted off a few plan I had previously set aside – one was a multiplexed game controller that would allow a small audience to drive a game with individual joysticks (software for multi-user games did not exist then and would have to be developed to give this product a market). After a few such presentations he sat me own and took out a pad of quad-ruled graph paper and a mechanical pencil.

I've decided what we're going to make,” he stated, and began to draw on the gridlines with a small ruler. “There's a truck-sized hole in the market for personal computers and we're going to fill it!” As he drew a crude image he went on to describe it: a CP/M machine using either a Z80 or 8085 processor, dynamic RAM memory in 16K increments up to 64K, a video display showing 24 lines of 40 upper-case characters, two 5 1/4” floppy disc drives, a 5-inch CRT display monitor, and all packaged in a case having the keyboard built into the lid that would sit inclined on a table top with the keyboard/lid propping up the front. Oh, a serial port and a parallel port as well, which itself could be configured through software to speak the IEEE-488 standard – the standard for connecting lab instrumentation, such as might be encountered in a chemical lab.

He also wanted to include pockets to hold several diskettes (the word of the time for the floppy discs themselves) so the software would stay with the machine, and he wanted it to be sized to fit under an airline seat. I had no problem going along with the specifications, as I was broke and eager to earn any money I could. But I did not see him engage in any process of deliberation resulting in this spec, and he never talked about how the concept came to him.

It turns out there was a likely source - a fellow named Blair Newman. I met Blair later through the WELL (the “Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link” - an early conferencing system set up in 1985 by the Whole Earth Catalog). Blair was brilliant and bipolar, moving from peaks of raging creativity to crashing depressions. He had apparently worked for the Howard Hughes organization in the past and claimed to have created the specification for the 5 1/4” hard disk drive (5 MB for the first ones).

Blair got in touch with me in 1985 and we had lunch. He was trying to find a place where he could be based – a gonzo R&D lab where he could be the chief creative thinker and others would fill in around him. I couldn't help him – by that time my R&D consulting company was beginning a long, slow decline. But at that lunch he told me an interesting story.

In 1978, Blair said, and he and Trip Hawkins (the future founder of 3DO – one of the big computer game software companies) were working as marketing consultants at Apple. Blair came up with the idea for a CP/M portable computer using two floppy disc drives, a CRT monitor and a case that would seal up when closed – the Osborne design, in short. The two of them proposed it to Steve Jobs, the head man at Apple, and Jobs rejected it scornfully, as was his habit with ideas that did not mesh with his. Metaphorically, Jobs threw the design out the window and threatened to throw its promoters out the window as well if they did not buckle down and do as they were told.

Not long after this conversation Blair took his own life. In past depressive episodes he had said “it's worth it to have a mind like mine”, but this time the black hole was too much. On the WELL he erased all of his previous postings – in effect committing virtual suicide before the physical act. I've experienced clinical depression, and it's a lot worse than simply feeling down. As I trudged around campus getting my body to classes all of which I was failing the worst part was the feeling that I didn't care – although I had always cared and underneath still did. It was like a living death, and I had only a mild case, resolved through therapy several years later. Blair found his own way out, and I wrote him a eulogy that was read at his memorial service.

But what happened to the design specification? In recent years I related the story to Steve Hamm, who was writing a book “The Search For Perfect” about the origin of the laptop computer. Steve interviewed Trip Hawkins in depth and developed more details – none of which contradicted Newman. Earlier, I had followed another line of inquiry, and asked Chuck Peddle about it. Chuck was the designer of the 6502 microprocessor chip that made the Apple and the Commodore computers possible. He ran a company named MOS Technology which was later bought by Commodore, for whom went to work. He was known to be garrulous – not at all shy in talking about anything. I knew that Adam had been a member of a regular poker game involving Chuck as well as Bill Godbout (a seller of electronic parts who ventured briefly into the computer add-on market) and Bill Morrow, a computer designer who started his own company, Morrow Designs. Adam had indicated that they talked about the personal computer market and about the “truck-sized hole” that he perceived.

Poker games among friends are more for the conversation than the card playing, and I wondered whether Peddle, who was connected closely to Apple, had been the conduit for the Osborne design. He did not answer directly, but simply said “that design was around the industry in those days”. Neither Hamm nor I can definitively name the route the design took, but it seems far too much of a coincidence for the idea to have simply popped into Adam's head fully formed.

Adam wasn't about to credit anybody else. In 1979 he was writing a column in the new personal computer press commenting on products of the moment. He titled the column “From the Fountainhead” and seemed amused when people understood him to be referring to himself. When asked he would claim that the word referred to the industry or Silicon Valley, but this held no weight with those who knew him. We knew how popular around the industry were the “objectivist” novels of Ayn Rand, whose early work “The Fountainhead” told of the struggles of an egotistical architect against the forces of mediocrity who conspired to crush his creativity (eventually the architect blows up the housing project he has been commissioned to design because other, less talented people got in his way and modified the design – a fine story for an opera, but having nothing to do with real life).

I began work roughing out the design of what was to become the Osborne-1, always supremely conscious of cost. It would be my first design using dynamic RAM, and I was afraid I wasn't up to it. I searched and found not one, but three CRT video display monitors that would meet the requirements. Interestingly, they were all built for the same mounting holes and the same interface connector – electrically and mechanically interchangeable. I eventually concluded that they had been tooled for the IBM 5100 “Portable Computer”, introduced in 1975 and taken off the market in 1979.

The 5100 was a super desktop calculator, in effect, which could be programmed in either the BASIC or APL languages. It weighed 30 pounds, its CRT display handled only about eight lines of display, it used a cartridge tape drive for storage and with an optional set of 8 inch floppy disc drives it was priced in the stratospheric area of $15,000. The 5100 could not compete with personal computers as they began to emerge and improve. So the Osborne-1 was possible because of investment that manufacturers had made in trying to sell components to IBM – we could not have paid the “NRE” (non-recurring engineering) expenses to tool such monitors, and would have had to live at the mercy of a single supplier who charged whatever it wished.

In the process of setting up the hardware company Adam used a dormant company he had lying around named Brandywine Holdings. The main DuPont plants were built on the banks of the Brandywine Creek in Delaware, so Adam must have had it left over from some venture or investment scheme from his early days. He had an artist develop a logo for business cards. I was there in the meeting when the artist came to present his design. He unveiled it and we all saw the text: “Brandy Wine Holders”. We all looked at each other – apparently Adam had given his instructions verbally and there had been no correspondence to confirm the order. It was an auspicious beginning for what was to follow.