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Digital Dilemmas Introduction
Stanford University FSP
CS99R, Fall 2001
Armando Fox, Emre Kiciman,
and a cast of many
© 2000-2001 Armando Fox
Enrollment and Logistics
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Waitlist posted tonight: www.stanford.edu/class/cs99r
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If you don’t intend to enroll please let us know so we can remove
you from the enrollment/wait list!
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If you do intend to enroll and your name is below, you must
email Emre ([email protected]) before Friday AM 9/28
Chris Anderson
Melissa Burns
Julianne Cuellar
Peter Deng
Jacqueline Dozier
Matthew Henick
Wendra Liang
Nicholas Lukens
Karan Mahajan
Chelsea Nicholls
Marisa Nicopoulos
James Rodgers
JP Schnapper-Casteras
Yuka Teraguchi
Weisong Toh
Anthea Tjuanakis
Noah Veltman
Melissa Wong
Organizational stuff
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What to expect today
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Logistics: readings, email, Web, etc.
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No-count, group-interactive intro quiz and Fun Facts™
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Five millennia of computing history highlights, in a nutshell
What to expect rest of quarter
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Technology and society discussions
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Great guest speakers
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Interdisciplinary crowd
What not to expect
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A lot of technical details…I will pass over these in favor of the big
picture
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Discussion in which the focus is the technology itself
Logistics
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Communication between you and us:
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Subscribe to the mailing list! (instructions on course web site)
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Course web site: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs99r
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Slides will be online
Readings
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Books: Cyganski (at Bookstore); Lessig (we have some copies)
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Course reader: available at Bookstore
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Everything else on Web
Grading
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Participation and discussion, 50%
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Projects, 50%
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No exams
Intro quiz and Fun Facts
“Every city will want to have one”
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What am I?
More fun facts
Original purpose: recording/capturing
important live events and performances
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What am I?
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Of note… what was not its original purpose?
More fun facts: No-Count Intro Quiz
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Fill in the blanks:
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The Web as we know it has existed since ____
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The Internet has existed since about ____
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The basic ideas of reliable, point-to-point communication
over a large distance have been well known since _____
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Most technological advances in communication and
computing have come from/been funded by ______
Don’t believe me?
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Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, late 1700’s, the
Analytical Engine
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Claude Chappe, 1799-1850, optical telegraph system
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J. Presper Eckert and Charles Mauchly, ENIAC (one of the
earliest digital electronic computers), mid-1940’s
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COLOSSUS, British-built early supercomputer, early
1940’s
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Paul Baran and Donald Davies, early 1960’s, packet
switching
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Seymour Cray & others, mid-1970’s, early
supercomputers
Some “Everyday” Technologies
What was the originally envisioned purpose? How are they
used now?
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Telephone
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Copier
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Internet/Web
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“Phonograph” [sic]
What have we learned, if anything?
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A milestone in the lifetime of an invention: people start
using it in ways the creators didn’t (couldn’t?) envision.
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The network externality effect: [Metcalfe’s Law]
If nobody has one, it’s useless.
If everyone has one, it’s indispensable.
More fun facts: Legal/Social Trivia
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What section(s) of what legal document(s)
guarantee Americans the right to privacy?
Yet more fun facts…
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What is the primary purpose of U.S. patent and
copyright law?
Now what have we learned?
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(Your turn to answer.)
Preview of What’s Coming Up
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Rest of today, part of next time
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Tour of computing history and the forces that have driven it
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Whirlwind technical introduction to how the Internet works
Next 2-3 weeks
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Technical and Legal vocabulary for intellectual property
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Three case studies in progress: DeCSS, Napster, Sklyarov
An assignment
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Start reading (inhaling?) Cyganski
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Email me with 1 thing you’d like to see covered in the “technical
intro” , or generally in the course
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Optional: email me a cool travel photo
Condensed History of Computing
“Five Millennia In Fifty Minutes Or Less”
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Prehistory
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Electro-mechanical computers (1800’s-1930’s)
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Electronic vacuum-tube computers (1940’s-1960’s)
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Integrated circuit (silicon chip) computers (1970’spresent)
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Communications history
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If all goes as planned, you’ll see some of these machines
during our Field Trip near end of quarter
Prehistory: Numbers
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The Need to Count
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The Abacus
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Roman Numerals
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An Innovation: Numeration Systems
Turning hard tasks into easy ones: Napier’s Bones
Babbage and Lovelace
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Babbage’s Analytical Engine
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First Government-sponsored computer research project
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British military wanted it for ballistics calculations
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Genesis of the stored program concept
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Never finished!
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Ada Lovelace, the Mother of Programming
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Saw the Analytical Engine’s potential for processing
arbitrary symbols encoded as numbers
Electro-Mechanical Computers
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Hollerith and the CTR Company
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Early American entrepreneur & Govt.
contractor
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Punch card tabulating machines for US
Census
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First high-tech startup to make its founder a
millionaire
CTR evolved into IBM under Thomas J.
Watson, Sr.
ENIAC
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John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Moore School of
Engineering, Univ. of Pennsylvania
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“Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator”
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WW II Contract for US Air Force
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Direct ancestor to modern computers
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Weighs in at 30 tons
Commercialization:
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First UNIVAC delivered to Census
Bureau in 1951; in service till
1963
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Instant celebrity predicting outcome
of Presidential election in 1952
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But Eckert & Mauchly weren’t
businessmen…
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“I have had very bad experiences
with [patent attorneys] over the
years.”
Transistors and Integrated Circuits
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Bardeen, Brattain & Shockley at Bell Labs
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Shockley Semiconductor: the first in Silicon Valley
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Replaced vacuum tube technology
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Cheaper, cooler, more reliable, faster
Integrated circuit chips
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Transistors and other elements in a “silicon
sandwich” on a wafer
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Bob Noyce & Gordon Moore found Intel in
1969
Microprocessors & Moore’s Law
Moore’s Law: Transistors = K* 2(N-1968)
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Ted Hoff: the first microprocessor
(Intel 4004, 1971)
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A “computer on a chip” -- just add
memory!
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Volume production
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Intel 4004, 8008, 8080, 8086, 80286,
80386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro,
Pentium II…
Innovation: high integration
For comparison...
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CPU actual sizes
(Diagram © 2000 Intel
Corp., used without
permission)
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Disk sizes:
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Check out the display
case in Gates lobby
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Hint: state of the art
microdisk is about
this size
“Order of Magnitude effect”
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Microprocessors were a catalyst!
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1968: 30,000 computers worldwide
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Today: > 40 million sold per year
Allowed discontinuous leap in what
could be created affordably
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1979: Steve Jobs sees demo of Xerox Alto
prototype at Xerox PARC
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Q: What else was invented at PARC or by
PARC alumni?
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1984: Macintosh
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1987-present: MS Windows
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1995-present: portables
History of Distnace Communications
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Optical Communication
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Electrical Telegraphy and Telephony
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Wireless Telegraphy and Radio
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The Internet
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The order-of-magnitude effect, again
Fire Beacons and Alphabetic Codes
150 BC: Polybius, a Greek historian, documents first known
system for transmitting arbitrary messages
1
2
3
4
5
1 2 3
A B C
F G H
L M N
Q R S
V W X
4
D
IJ
O
T
Y
5
E
K
P
U
Z
• Major innovations: “instantaneous” transmission and
fully alphabetic codes
Napoleon’s Secret Weapon
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Claude Chappe, 1763-1805: The Optical
Telegraph
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Emergence of a Network
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1799: Napoleon seizes power: “Paris is
quiet, and the good citizens are content.”
1814: Extends from Paris to Belgium, Italy
1853: 3000 miles, 556 stations
Early Defense
Contractor
Scientific Advances, 18th-19th c.
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Relationship between electricity and magnetism
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Oersted (Copenhagen): demonstrated electricity’s ability to deflect a
needle
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1831, Faraday (Royal Institution, London): demonstrated
electromagnetic induction, the basis of electric motors
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1880’s: James Clerk Maxwell develops electromagnetic “field
equations”, Heinrich Hertz demonstrates EM wave propagation
experimentally
Innovations enabled…
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Telegraph (Wheatstone & Cook, 1830’s; Morse Code, 1837)
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Transatlantic telegraph cable (1858)
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Telephone (Alexander Graham Bell, 1876)
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Radio (Guglielmo Marconi, 1895)
Packet Switching
Paul Baran & Donald Davies
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Early 1960s: New approaches for
survivable comms systems
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packet switching, decentralized
architecture
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1967: ARPAnet Interface Message Processors (IMP’s)
connect computers at UCLA, SRI, UCB, UofU via
leased telephone lines
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1973-75: Internetworking via common protocols
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1980: Ethernet invented by Metcalfe at Xerox PARC
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1981: Berkeley UNIX, free TCP/IP
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1990s: NSF privatizes NSFnet
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1993-4: World Wide Web developed (by whom? why?)
What are the important innovations?
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Alphabetic code vs. word-based code
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Any message can be represented
Digital vs. analog
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The ability to make perfect copies
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Non-degradation of messages via error correction codes: the
ability to repair defective copies
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A way of thinking about point-to-point communication
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Packet switching is cheaper and more robust than circuit
switching
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Any message can be encoded
“Order-of-magnitude” effect again
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An order of magnitude (10x or more) change in a
technology can cause a qualitative change in the impact
of that technology.
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Example: computer speed
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1971: 108,000 cycles per second
2,300 transistors
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2000: 1,000,000,000 cycles per second
28,000,000 transistors (a factor of 10K in both)
Why is this relevant?
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Hint: CD-quality audio is 88,000 audio samples/sec
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Hint: decompressing and converting audio is hard work
Info source: CPU InfoCenter, Chipgeek.com, Intel Museum
Another example: Storage
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Hard disk evolution (largely by IBM)
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Hard disk invented in 1956; modern “Winchester” design ~1965
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1956: 50 platters, 24” each, 5 MB total, $10K/MB
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2001: 2-5 platters?, 2.5”, 30,000-80,000 MB total, < 1 cent/MB
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A factor of 100,000 in cost per storage, 5,000 in size, 10,000 in
gross capacity
Why is this relevant?
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Hint: audio takes up a lot of space
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“Raw” audio: about 88,000 bytes per second of music; about 15
million bytes (Megabytes) for a 3-minute song
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Compressed audio using MP3: about 1.5 to 2 millilon bytes for a
3-minute song (a factor of 10 smaller)
Last example: Network
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Speed of transmitting data from machine to machine
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1960’s-70’s: Leased lines, 56,000 bits per second (today’s
dialups!)
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Today: 1,000,000,000 bits per second locally
up to 10,000,000 bits per second metropolitan-area
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Why is this relevant? …I think you get the idea
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The moral: Encoding audio, compressing it, transmitting
it over the network, storing it, and playing it back were
barely conceivable just a couple of decades ago.
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Networks were too slow to make transmission practical
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Computers were too slow to encode/decode and playback
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Disks were too small to make storage realistic
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Everything was way too expensive
Today’s Travel Photo: Where Am I?