![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Where's your science fiction lifestyle?
May. 19th, 2011 11:57 amWhoops! I'm behind on meaningful posts. This week, I have a good excuse. I am once again employed. It's part time for the summer and the gig pays pretty well. Even better, I telecommute. My trip into work involves breakfast and a fifteen foot walk to the patio of my apartment. From there, I do QA and editing work for a research institution 3000 miles away. Back when I was a kid reading escapist sci-fi, I wondered when all that cool stuff would get here. Strange thing, an awful lot of it has arrived. We don't have the VR cyberspace that William Gibson envisioned works like Neuromancer. Instead, we have the Connected Internet which is now just known as the Internet or the Web. Through the web I'm able to perform quality control on datasets used to develop Universal Translator technology for a research institute in Philadelphia. And I do it from my patio in West LA. As for that Virtual Reality space? Don't we have World of Warcraft and Second Life. Hey, that's Cyberspace 1.0 Alpha. I hear the beta version is going to rock. Can't wait to see the consumer market version of all this. Working remotely actually feels familiar to me. I haven't been to space in person, yet. However, I spent two years working in space remotely helping to run an experiment on a satellite. Remember all those comics and futuristic novels that had people speaking into their wristwatches? Yeah, turns out the wristwatch phone has a bad form factor. We have cell phones with Bluetooth ear pieces. And these phones have more computational power than most of the computers I've owned. Faster than light travel? Hold on to your shorts, pilgrim and sing like the duke. The Large Hadron Collider is closing in on an understanding of mass. That could give us the new physics we need to get to the stars.
When did all this happen? When did it get here? Well, my first job, not even ten years after I started reading science fiction in earnest was the satellite gig. Couple of years after that I was helping close down the DARPANet as the NSFNet came into its own. Another couple of years, I was helping the NSFNet transition to the Routing Arbiter and Internet as we now know it. Not long after that, I found that tech skills developed working for groundbreaking projects were obsolete and I became a simple programmer on the World Wide Web that I actually helped build. This autobiographical account of my career demonstrates something. Discrete breakthroughs are a matter of perception. The world changes only when see it differently. Technological and scientific progress happen slowly and proceeds behind the scenes. My first job was a product of the great robotic revolution in space exploration. Voyager succeeded so well that NASA made exploration of space and surveying Earth by machine a higher priority over manned spaceflight. As a result, a student looking for an internship and part time job could step into a position as a ground control engineer. That's how old hat space exploration had become following the revolution that Voyager inspired. Voyager clearly showed us what was possible and the community seized on the opportunity. The Internet meanwhile, even at the dawn of the 1990s, was becoming firmly established. I taught myself the underlying technology by buying college text books on the subject. By 1992, the first virtual social communities were already thriving and banks were talking to banks. Technically, the banks weren't using the Internet. They were using a nasty little protocol distinct from TCP/IP that I no longer remember(thank the gods). Anyway, there was all this communication going on over the same physical networks. Voice, proprietary data protocols, Internet Traffic, none of it mattered to the people running the telecom networks. They switched packets, period. In fact, an awful lot of what we take for granted was happening as early as 1992 long before I took the job at the INOC. Still, it was a closed club whose membership rarely included anyone besides engineers and scientists. What happened to change it all? First, some visionary politicians funded projects to build physical infrastructure, develop technologies and create testbeds like the NSFNet. Second, a geek working at CERN developed the protocols and language tools to visualize everything that was going on. I remember the first alpha release of Mosaic. That was the moment, back in 1992, when I knew the world was different. That's when I knew the average person could access to the world I was seeing through Gopher Servers. The Internet exploded from 1994 to 1996 and it grew so fast that by 1997 we thought of it as having always been there. And, yet, as I worked to keep it all running from a bunker on the University of Michigan's campus, progress seemed glacial. That's because the stuff I was working with had become mature. The change was happening several levels above me as programmers figured out how to provide easy to use services on the infrastructure that I helped build and maintain. In 1996 when I was provisioning network connections, growth exploded as the public noticed that the world had changed. The moral of the story is that the future sneaks up on you even when you're one of the people building it. Development doesn't make anything different. Adoption does; things only change when people use the technology. If you're an engineer, you should stop once in a while and pay attention. Look around and always keep track of what the young people messing with your creations are doing. Those people are going to cause the sudden, jarring and discontinuous changes we call a revolution. They're the future, you're just the midwife helping them to be born.
Whoa, whaddya know? A meaningful post after all.
When did all this happen? When did it get here? Well, my first job, not even ten years after I started reading science fiction in earnest was the satellite gig. Couple of years after that I was helping close down the DARPANet as the NSFNet came into its own. Another couple of years, I was helping the NSFNet transition to the Routing Arbiter and Internet as we now know it. Not long after that, I found that tech skills developed working for groundbreaking projects were obsolete and I became a simple programmer on the World Wide Web that I actually helped build. This autobiographical account of my career demonstrates something. Discrete breakthroughs are a matter of perception. The world changes only when see it differently. Technological and scientific progress happen slowly and proceeds behind the scenes. My first job was a product of the great robotic revolution in space exploration. Voyager succeeded so well that NASA made exploration of space and surveying Earth by machine a higher priority over manned spaceflight. As a result, a student looking for an internship and part time job could step into a position as a ground control engineer. That's how old hat space exploration had become following the revolution that Voyager inspired. Voyager clearly showed us what was possible and the community seized on the opportunity. The Internet meanwhile, even at the dawn of the 1990s, was becoming firmly established. I taught myself the underlying technology by buying college text books on the subject. By 1992, the first virtual social communities were already thriving and banks were talking to banks. Technically, the banks weren't using the Internet. They were using a nasty little protocol distinct from TCP/IP that I no longer remember(thank the gods). Anyway, there was all this communication going on over the same physical networks. Voice, proprietary data protocols, Internet Traffic, none of it mattered to the people running the telecom networks. They switched packets, period. In fact, an awful lot of what we take for granted was happening as early as 1992 long before I took the job at the INOC. Still, it was a closed club whose membership rarely included anyone besides engineers and scientists. What happened to change it all? First, some visionary politicians funded projects to build physical infrastructure, develop technologies and create testbeds like the NSFNet. Second, a geek working at CERN developed the protocols and language tools to visualize everything that was going on. I remember the first alpha release of Mosaic. That was the moment, back in 1992, when I knew the world was different. That's when I knew the average person could access to the world I was seeing through Gopher Servers. The Internet exploded from 1994 to 1996 and it grew so fast that by 1997 we thought of it as having always been there. And, yet, as I worked to keep it all running from a bunker on the University of Michigan's campus, progress seemed glacial. That's because the stuff I was working with had become mature. The change was happening several levels above me as programmers figured out how to provide easy to use services on the infrastructure that I helped build and maintain. In 1996 when I was provisioning network connections, growth exploded as the public noticed that the world had changed. The moral of the story is that the future sneaks up on you even when you're one of the people building it. Development doesn't make anything different. Adoption does; things only change when people use the technology. If you're an engineer, you should stop once in a while and pay attention. Look around and always keep track of what the young people messing with your creations are doing. Those people are going to cause the sudden, jarring and discontinuous changes we call a revolution. They're the future, you're just the midwife helping them to be born.
Whoa, whaddya know? A meaningful post after all.
