Multix OS -- Pioneer of time sharing

Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is a mainframe timesharing operating system which was designed around 1965 and used until 2000. It was often called Multix. which is formally incorrect but a shorter, better name.  Although Multics was much derided at the time by its critics, history has shown that it was a real pioneer which introduced concepts now taken for granted.

Many ideas implemented in Multics were 30-40 years ahead of their time. Ideas “discarded” in Unix were eventually added back (e.g., dynamic linking,  doors were reintroduced in Solaris a few years back.)

Key ideas (see multix ) were extremely difficult to implement on primitive hardware that existed at mid 60th, so the fact that they materialized is nothing but amazing.   Multics began as a research project and was an important influence on operating system development. It also pioneered the use of high-level languages for writing operating systems.  It also was one of the first OS which paied serious attention o the security. As Professor Wilkes noted   (iee90):

There has been some discussion of ways in which the operating system might be structured so as to facilitate, and make more systematic, the task of the inspector. One suggestion has been to restrict to an absolute minimum the amount of information that the running process can access at any given moment. This is expressed by saying that the domain of protection in which the process runs is small. Unfortunately, if everything is done in software, the frequent change of domain which this approach makes necessary leads to unacceptable loss of performance. Attention was accordingly directed to providing hardware support for domain switching.

An early suggestion, implemented in MULTICS, was to have rings of protection. The amount of information available to a process decreased as it moved from the inner to the outer rings. Unfortunately, the hierarchical model of protection which this implied is fundamentally flawed, and it was found that rings of protection were little improvement if any on the simple system of a privileged and an unprivileged mode.

PL/1 was used as system programming language, paradoxically it was also at least 20 years ahead of its time and only simplified dialect was preserved in C -- many key ideas such as exceptions handing, built-in strings, etc were "reinvented" on C++ and Java many years after they were introduced in PL/1. 

Multics also was a pioneer in computer security, being essentially an opposite of Unix.  Many of security innovations in  Multics find its way in Unix only 30 years later.  Here is how Wikipedia  described the situation that existed in early 60th.

In the early 60s, IBM was struggling to define its technical direction. The company had identified a problem with its past computer offerings: incompatibility between the many IBM products and product lines. Each new product family, and each new generation of technology, forced customers to wrestle with an entirely new set of technical specifications. IBM products incorporated a wide variety of processor designs, memory architectures, instruction sets, input/output strategies, etc. (This was not, of course, unique to IBM. All computer vendors seemed to begin each new system with a "clean sheet" design.) IBM saw this as both a problem and an opportunity. The cost of software migration was an increasing barrier to hardware sales. Customers could not afford to upgrade their computers, and IBM wanted to change this.

IBM embarked on a very risky undertaking: the System/360. This product line was intended to replace IBM's diverse earlier offerings, including the IBM 7000 series, the (canceled) IBM 8000 series, the IBM 1130 series, and various other specialized machines used for scientific and other applications. The System/360 would span an unprecedented range of processing power, memory size, device support, and cost; and more important, it was based on a pledge of backward compatibility, such that any customer could move software to a new system without modification. In today's world of standard interfaces and portable systems, this may not seem such a radical goal; but at the time, it was revolutionary. Before the System/360, each computer model often had its own specific devices that could not be used with other systems. Buying a bigger CPU also meant buying new printers, card readers, tape drives, etc. With the S/360, IBM wanted to offer a huge range of computer systems, all sharing a single processor architecture, instruction set, I/O interface, and operating system. Customers would be able to "mix and match" to meet current needs; and they could confidently upgrade their systems in the future, without the need to rewrite all their software applications. IBM's focus remained on its traditional customer base: large organizations doing administrative and business data processing.

At the start of System/360 project, IBM did not fully appreciate the amount of risk involved. The System/360 ultimately gave IBM total dominance over the computer industry; but first, it nearly put IBM out of business. IBM took on one of the largest and most ambitious engineering projects in history, and in the process discovered diseconomies of scale and the mythical man-month. Extensive literature on the period, such as that by Fred Brooks, illustrate the pitfalls.

It was during the period of System/360 panic that Project MAC asked IBM to provide computers with extensive time-sharing capabilities. This was not the direction the System/360 project was going. Time-sharing wasn't seen as important to IBM's main customer base; batch processing was key. Moreover, time-sharing was new ground. Many of the concepts involved, such as virtual memory, remained unproven. (For example: At the time, nobody could explain why the troubled Manchester/Ferranti Atlas virtual memory "didn't work"^[2]. This was later explained as due to thrashing, based on CP/CMS and M44/44X research.) As a result, IBM's System/360 announcement in April 1964 did not include key elements sought by the time-sharing advocates, particularly virtual memory capabilities. Project MAC researchers were crushed and angered by this decision. The System/360 design team met with Project MAC researchers, and listened to their objections; but IBM chose another path.

In February 1964, at the height of these events, IBM had launched its Cambridge Scientific Center (CSC), headed by Norm Rassmussen. CSC was to serve as the link between MIT researchers and the IBM labs, and was located in the same building with Project MAC. IBM fully expected to win the Project MAC competition, and to retain its perceived lead in scientific computing and time-sharing.

One of CSC's first projects was to submit IBM's Project MAC proposal. IBM had received intelligence that MIT was leaning toward the GE proposal, which was for a modified 600-series computer with virtual memory hardware and other enhancements; this would eventually become the GE 645. IBM proposed a modified S/360 that would include a virtual memory device called the "Blaauw Box" – a component that had been designed for, but not included in, the S/360. The MIT team rejected IBM's proposal. The S/360-67 was seen as too different from the rest of the S/360 line; MIT did not want to use a customized or special-purpose computer for Multics, but sought hardware that would be widely available. GE was prepared to make a large commitment to time-sharing, while IBM was seen as obstructive. Bell Laboratories, another important IBM customer, soon made the same decision, and rejected the S/360 for time-sharing.

Ken Thompson was one of about 25 members of the Bell Labs Technical Staff who worked on Multics in 1965-1969.  He got many key ideas from the system as well as the spirit of free development environment with free sharing of ideas that was created by Fernando Corbato and that  later became an important factor in Unix success.  As Corbato noted in his Turing lecture:

The UNIX system [12] was a reaction to Multics. Even the name was a joke. Ken Thompson was part of the Bell Laboratories' Multics effort, and, frustrated with the attempts to bring a large system development under control, decided to start over. His strategy was clear. Start small and build up the ideas one by one as he saw how to implement them well. As we all know, UNIX has evolved and become immensely successful as the system of choice for workstations. Still there are aspects of Multics that have never been replicated in UNIX.

The system became a commercial product sold by Honeywell to education, government, and industry.  Bull canceled Multics development after 21 years. Multics continued to be used by customers for an additional 14 years. As high level language was used as system programming language and source was made available to all customers Miltix was probably the first industrial strength OS that was both developed and shipped in spirit of open source model:

When Multics object code is shipped to a Multics site, it is always accompanied by the corresponding source code. Source is made available for the purposes of site-modifications and site-understanding of the system. It is copyright, but this protection is directed at preventing someone from using the source (or derived source) on another vendor's hardware. Technically, the source is made available to, and is to be used by, only those organizations that have purchased a Multics system. In practice, this is a guideline that has never been policed or enforced. Considering the status of the Multics product today, what little objection might have been raised in the past to your request, is today, essentially non-existent.

It did not have huge commercial success but it did enjoyed some success (approximately 100 site with Multics were deployed) due to the fact that hardware requirements dictated very high price of hardware.

Multics seems to be an under appreciated predecessor of Unix -- Bell Labs folks were trained in Multics were they became addicted to timesharing environment and borrowed a lot from this system including the key idea of the hierarchical filesystem and key ideas for C language as a simplified PL/1 with BCPL address arithmetic (see also links in Multics Home page). For example Thompson in recent interview stated:

Thompson. The one thing I stole was the hierarchical file system because it was a really good idea—the difference being that Multics was a virtual memory system and these "files" weren't files but naming conventions for segments. After you walk one of these hierarchical name spaces, which were tacked onto the side and weren't really part of the system, you touch it and it would be part of your address space and then you use machine instructions to store the data in that segment. I just plain lifted this.

By the same token, Multics was a virtual memory system with page faults, and it didn't differentiate between data and programs. You'd jump to a segment as it was faulted in, whether it was faulted in as data or instructions. There were no files to read or write—nothing you could remote—which I thought was a bad idea. This huge virtual memory space was the unifying concept behind Multics—and it had to be tried in an era when everyone was looking for the grand unification theory of programming—but I thought it was a big mistake.

Unlike Unix Multics has well thought security system from the beginning:

There was never any discussion of military-style classification when the fundamental Multics security mechanism was being designed. Descriptor-based security supported by ACLs is very different from the military system. Rings of protection are hierarchical, but work differently from the military classification hierarchy.

NEWS CONTENTS

• [Mar 24, 2011] multix by Mike Dahlin ( October 27, 2009 )
• [Nov 10, 2007] MIT releases the sources of MULTICS, the father of UNIX! - ( November 10, 2007 | Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog )
• RFC 89 (rfc89) - Some historic moments in networking by B. Metcalff ( January 19, 1971 )
• RC22534 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation."
• Video Terminals--System Terminal Setup Operating Systems of Historical Interest
• [DOC] LOVE

Old News ;-)

[Mar 24, 2011] multix by Mike Dahlin

October 27, 2009

Corrections/clarifications

TBD: Fold the following corrections/clarifications into main notes

From: [email protected]

Subject: Multics

Date: October 26, 2009 10:10:28 AM CDT

To: [email protected]

Hello Prof. Dahlin,

I am the edtitor of multicians.org, a site that contains information you use in class CS380L. I backtracked a link form your course website and looked at your notes on "Multix" in the file

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/Classes/GradOS/lectures/multix.html

and noticed a few errors.

Here are some corrections, respectfully submitted.

Feel free to ignore my comments. I submit them in the hope that students won’t spend time learning things they later have to unlearn.

regards, tom

(I worked on both CTSS and Multics from 1965 to 1981 as a programming staff member at MIT and Honeywell, and I have collected a lot of information, so I think these are accurate.)

1. The name of the system is Multics. not MULTICS, not Multix.

http://www.multicians.org/multics-humor.html

2. To say it "never worked" is peculiar. Would you say that of Windows? It never took over the OS field the way we hoped. But there were a lot of systems sold and used.

(would you like me to add a section to http://www.multicians.org/myths.html pointing at your class notes, and explaining how I disagree?)

3. Regarding CTSS. "4 consoles, 2 tape drives per console" describes the CTSS tape incarnation, demonstrated in 1961 on the 7090. But the system that went into service for MIT users by about 1963 had harware memory protection, swapped to drum and disk, and supported about 30 dialup users.

http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html

4. Just as you conflated the initial demo CTSS with the system that became a service at MIT for 10 years, you have combined the initial second-system Multics of 1965-70, implemented on the GE 645, with the "third system" Multics, implemented on the Honeywell 6180, which became a commercial product and service at about 80 sites. You probably know that the last few Multics systems were shut down in 2000 at the Pentagon and Canadian National Defence.

6. Dynamic linking. You do a nice job of developing the need for the linkage section, and how it is used. There are more details in http://www.multicians.org/exec-env.html There are a few fine points though. The segmentation system does indeed keep str_seg, which keeps a list of descriptor segments that have a segment mapped, so that an access control change can reset these SDWs and cause processes to recalculate access, if e.g. the access control list of a segment changes. This does not cause all processes to regenerate their linkage section.

7. Typo: s/Salzer/Saltzer/

8. Your discussion of "protected subsystem" does not correspond to the actual Multics implementation. Multics descriptors contain ring brackets. Mike Schroeder describes the actual Multics mechanism: http://www.multicians.org/protection.html

the details in exec-env.html are based on the actual code (on-line at MIT).

You ask, "how do you make this fast?" and the answer is

a) caching ("associative memory") in the CPU plus hard circuitry for doing the comparison of ring to ring brackets.

We understood that the linear ring structure was not completely expressive. Proposals for more complex support for mutually suspicious subsystems were never worked out: they imposed higher overhead, did not match the semantics of existing languages, and had bothersome corner cases.

3 Multics overview

Hugely influential operating system

• Very ambitious

• Not widely deployed

• But core ideas live on in Unix, NT, MacOS

Originally a small subset (early 70’s unix). This subset is growing

Purpose of using paper in this class

• Historical context: many basic concepts we take for granted today come from Multics

• Technical depth: something very like the dynamic linking mechanism still used today

3.1 Background

3.1.1 “Second system effect”

• 1st system

• - terrified of failure

• - simplified to bare bones

• - successful beyond its intended life-span

• 2nd system:

• - hugely ambitious

• - usually conceived by academics

• - many good ideas

• - a little ahead of its time

• - doomed to fail

• 3rd system:

• - pick and choose essence

• - usually made by good hackers

• - emphasize elegance and utility over performance and generality

• - become widely adopted

• 4th systems:

• - maturation

3.1.2 Multics lineage

• 1st system: CTSS

• 2nd system: Multics

• 3rd system: Unix

• 4th system: BSD

3.1.3 CTSS

• Compatible Time Sharing System

• - transition from batch processing to time sharing

• - work on line and store info on line

• Features

- Hardware: 4 consoles, 2 tape drives per console

• - interactive debugging (!)

• - editors

• - shells

• - no protection among users

• By early 60’s, CTSS is showing its limitations

• - more memory, disks

• - Want sharing and protection!

3.1.4 Multics

• MIT, Bell labs, GE

• Redesign everything (second system!)

• - custom hardware

• - New programming languages

• - New OS

• Success or failure?

• - Never really worked

• - Probably the single most influential OS

• - Explored virtually every single aspect of OS design (except networking)

3.1.5 “Extreme Research”

• Hallmark of much influential work:

• - Take a simple good idea and push it to its logical extreme

• - Learn a lot

• - Then, take a step back and make it practical

• What is extreme idea in this paper?

• - Extreme sharing

• - Share anything (code, data)

• - Fine grained sharing

• - Dynamic sharing

• - Flexible protection

3.2 Principles

4 key ideas

1. Naming and addressing

• Combine virtual memory and file system

• File name + offset in file == segment # + offset in segment

2. Fine grained sharing

• Share procedures instead of entire programs

3. Dynamic linking

• Recompile anything without relinking anything

4. Autonomy

• independent address spaces (Making virtual addresses independent in presence of fine-grained sharing is hard!)

• Consequence: “The values of identifiers that denote addresses within a segment which may change with recompilation must not appear in the content of any other segment.”

3.3 Security principles

• Enunciated by Salzer in this paper (and still very influential)

• (refined and extended in a later paper – I’ll use that terminology)

1. Failsafe defaults

• Base protection mechanisms on permission rather than exclusion

• ! Conservative design – if you make a mistake, system is still safe

2. Complete mediation

• Check every access to every object for current authority

• e.g., make sure cached mappings are consistent with truth

In this paper, concern about how changing a user’s name could affect system ! don’t allow re-use of name

3. Open design

• Mechanism should not depend on ignorance of potential attackers, but on possession of specific keys

• Allow design review

• Obvious (but still violated today. Russian security expert got arrested for violating DMCA in 2001 for revealing that a particular commercial copy-protection scheme was just using ROT13!)

4. Least privilege

• Every program and every privileged user of the system should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job

• Obvious (?) – how well do we do today? (Sendmail? Web helper apps?)

5. Psychological acceptability

• Design human interface for naturalness, ease of use, and simplicity so that users will routinely

• and automatically apply the protection mechanisms

• Not obvious (until stated). Really hard.

• Fundamental problem (in 1973 and 2002): fine grained sharing + least privlege v. psychological acceptability

6. Economy of mechanism

• Not stated explicitly in this paper (but explicit later)

• Have one access control mechanism and use it everywhere

This paper: “the storage system...handles almost all of the protection responsibility in Multics.”

Moderately controversial (“elegance” v. “defense in depth”)

RFC 89 (rfc89) - Some historic moments in networking by B. Metcalff

January 19, 1971

The Multics Connection

Our quest for historic moments began with the need to demonstrate that the complex hardware-software system separating MITDG and Multics was operative and understood. A task force (Messrs. Bingham, Brodie, Knight, Metcalfe, Meyer, Padlipsky and Skinner) was commissioned to establish a 'polite conversation' between a Multics terminal and an MITDG terminal.

It was agreed that messages would be what we call 'network ASCII
messages': 7-bit ASCII characters right-adjusted in 8-bit fields
having the most significant bit set, marking, and padding. In that
Multics is presently predisposed toward line-oriented half-duplex
terminals, it was decided that all transmissions would end with the
Multics EOL character (ASCII <LINE FEED>). To avoid duplicating much
of the INCP in our experiment, the PDP-10 side of the connection was
freed by convention from arbitrary bit-stream concatenation
requirements and was permitted to associate logical message
boundaries with network message boundaries (sic). The 'polite
conversation' was thus established and successful.

Multics, then, connected the conversation to its command processor
and the PDP-10 terminal suddenly became a Multics terminal. But, not
quite:

First, in the resulting MITDG-Multics connection there was no
provision for a remote QUIT, which in Multics is not an ASCII
character. This is a problem for Multics. It would seem that an
ASCII character or the network's own interrupt control message could
be given QUIT significance.

Second, our initial driver program did not provide for RUBOUT.
Because the Multics network input stream bypassed the typewriter
device interface module (TTYDIM), line canonicalization was not
performed. In a more elegant implementation, line canonicalization
could be done at Multics, providing the type-in editing conventions
familiar to Multics users. We fixed this problem hastily by having
our driver program do local RUBOUT editing during line assembly, thus
providing type-in editing conventions familiar to MITDG users. It is
clearly possible to do both local type-in editing and distant-host
type-in editing.

Third, we found that because of the manner in which our type-in
entered the Multics system under the current network interface (i.e.
not through TTYDIM), our remotely controlled processes were
classified 'non-interactive' and thus fell to the bottom of Multics
queues giving us slow response. This problem can be easily fixed.

RC22534 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation."

Video Terminals--System Terminal Setup Operating Systems of Historical Interest

• MULTICS (Stratus, Green)
  It is probably safe to say that every operating system now in use has been influenced by MULTICS.
• The Multics EMACS Editor broke new ground for LISP and Telnet.
• Honeywell GCOS is best known now for a field in "/etc/passwd".

[DOC] LOVE

Uh.. final comment, way back in 1965 when- when we did Multics set, MIT, Bell labs and Honeywell. Uh.. we solved a lot of problems that uh.. still haven’t been solved by some of the vendors today. We actually solved the year two thousand problem in 1965 on Multics, uh.. we recognized it and we used a- a clock algorithm that didn’t expire in uh.. the year two thousand. But the point is that in the research community there is an enormous amount of good stuff that uh.. is there and it can be used. There’s a tremendous amount of knowledge in the community, let’s- let’s use it. And uh.. Cliff has arrived so I will stop. You’re here. How are you buddy?

I, Cringely NerdTV #10: Dan Bricklin (Transcript) | PBS

... ... ...

Bob: How did the Multics people feel about Unix?

Dan: Well people always called it, you can look at the different spellings. It's one of what Multics was many of. And it was Multics that was missing some features, important things, but it was the fact that the people who went off and did it were major people in the development of ideas in Multics.

Whenever I use Unix I just remember how we did it in Multics and try it and sure enough it will often work. You know it had pipes. You know ls was the way you got lists. It had drivers and stuff and I used a higher-level language to program it. So, nowadays we feel wonderful that that was the 386 architecture that came out of the Multics architecture. So an awful lot of things.

Bob: I didn't know that.

Dan: Oh yeah, yeah. Now they decided to use it in the - most people use it in the flat address space, not in the segmented address space format that the Multics used. We missed that because in Multics all you did is say, I want a file, open a file and you got an address pointer to it. And you can just do memory operations on it and it made input/output really easy. And you could have any amount of memory because everything started at zero because it was a new segment. But initially that was too expensive in the hardware so a lot of people didn't do that and they went with the flat memory system where they have to simulate as if they had segments. But the rings of protection in the way and the whole idea, the kernel in the media and that type of stuff, writing your operating system in a higher level language and all those things, using a shell do to stuff, a lot of them were pioneered in many ways through Multics.

Security being extremely important, Multics was partially funded by NSA and others in the government. So we were very security conscious and we were always told stories about that would teach us why you needed to be more secure. They would tell us about how - what does it mean to be secure? Well, you know it's not just not telling but not letting them know. So, for example we were told that on the day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so the story goes, the head of NSA was seen rushing from his car. That was considered a security breach. Okay? These are the war stories you are told.

Dan: I see. Spies have to saunter.

Bob: Yeah, well no. If they run, they have to always run.

Dan: Oh, okay.

Bob: It's poker, your poker face. If you are always nervous, that's fine but if only you can distinguish. People looked at what type of attacks could you do to figure out what was going on. Trust - Bob Frankston, my partner during VisiCalc, he did his master's thesis on how do you in a computer market place, like Multics was or the Internet, I guess the Arpanet or whatever it was becoming at the time, and you have all these parties that don't necessarily trust each other. How do you have micro payments? How do you have payments? And his thesis was how you need a third party you can trust and how you can automatically do stuff. It was very interesting. This was back in the early 70s I think or the 70s he did it. The mid 70s he did that.

So we were thinking about those types of things. And we had people you know who's job it was to try and crack systems. The government was paying them to try and figure out how to crack Multics. And I sort of taught from one of them a year or two ago. It was fascinating about what they did and the exploits that they used, which of course all work today.

But the Multix, you didn't worry about stacked overflow. Because of its architecture, it could handle that a lot better but its stacks went down or up or whatever, they were very security conscious. And even when they started doing the ArpaNet, they wanted to do things in cryptic but they were told by the government that it was a no supposedly.

Bob: Really?

Dan: NSA was, you'll have to talk to some people about that.

Bob: Yeah, I will.

Dan: I can give you some names. So, there were real war stories.

Bob: Literal war stories.

Dan: But I went from there to working in newspapers, computerized type newspapers, which was the real world. Right after that I worked with microprocessors at a company that made electronic cash registers for fast food places and word processing before that in between. So, I got a range of regular people using my products and what's it like. Like they didn't have modems. They didn't have extra telephone lines for the fast food, so you'd have to call up the, if you wanted to download what happened that day, you'd call up a store, which was the pay phone and they would throw a switch, which would connect it so they could dial up to the modem so they could download it. Sometimes the person said I can't talk to you now, we're being robbed. It was interesting working for companies like that. But actually that was a small company, a very small company and I found out that it was able to do all the things that big companies could do. You know it made, wave soldering made its equipment there. Was using the latest shift sets and doing all this neat development and it was a little company. And we were in decked as a billion dollar company in those days, which was a lot of money.

Bob: Huge.

Dan: Huge in those days and I was there when it through the billion I think. And this little company could do all that same stuff. It just inspired me in becoming a little company person.

Bob: You realized the potential of a little company could be a big company or to just be a successful little company?

Dan: That little companies aren't a bad thing to work for. They can do just as good work as the big company. You don't have to be a big company to do interesting work, as a techie or as anybody. And since my dad, my grandfather was a small businessperson, it just fit with me. But I did go off to Harvard Business School to learn what business is about because I figured I didn't know much about business. And what better way to learn than to go to school. And I treated myself to two years of school there. Well, I had been making money and saving it as a programmer and all that and you know to suddenly become a student again, that is sort of treating yourself. Spending your money to go back to school.

Bob: So, how did you fit in at Harvard Business School?

Dan: The first evening, we showed up at a reception and spouses would come up to me and look at me, with the beard and a ponytail down almost to my waist, and said, "Oh my God, you're here!" You know because they say I was afraid they would turn into these capitalistic accomatants here but with somebody like you - I had the third longest hair in my section of 90 people. Three of the women had longer hair than me. And I did cut it the summer between my two years when I was going cross-country, camping cross-country. I had seen Easy Rider and decided it. And I talked to people that actually had people with tire irons coming for them, decided I would go. If I'm ever going to cut my hair, I should cut it now. I cut it down. But I fit in well. The professors were you know, they are not the big business whatever type. I mean they are much more into ethics and stuff than a lot of the students necessarily were. And I took some courses in entrepreneurship and stuff and they brought in all these wonderful entrepreneurs of all different sorts. Sprig who did Advent came in and the head of Analog Devices and we met all these different people. For me it was great because I got to see all sorts of business and how it was done, the case method. You learn about all sorts of things. And it helped inspire the spreadsheet. So, and I had one of my classmates, who inspired me in certain ways was a real inventor. He had gone to RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design and he worked with this guy by the name of Ron. And Ron has a company called Ronco.

Bob: Oh sure.

Dan: And my friend has gone on to do the rotisserie. His name is on the package, among other things, spray on hair. He helped get that out the door. One of my classmates is governor of New Hampshire right now.

Bob: Ron Popeil.

Dan: Yeah, his partner or whatever, I mean Ron's the head, was one of our classmates in our section. We had two Olympic athletes. I mean it's a really interesting, you know people from England and one of my classmates was a member of OPEC. He was from a Central American company that did oil and he actually sat behind Sheikh Yamani, who was at OPEC, like a big guy at OPEC. He had been, himself was kidnapped by Carlos. I mean it was very interesting learning about what the world was filled with.

Bob: I was there the day that happened.

Dan: But you weren't kidnapped.

Bob: No I was sitting in OPEC headquarters in Vienna. I was in the lobby when Carlos and the people came in.

Dan: Oh my God.

Bob: And they said, this is - I didn't know this was Carlos. And there was this fat Viennese off duty policeman who was the security guard and he said who are you? And Carlos said, we're the Palestinian Delegation. And he waved them through.

Dan: Oh my gosh. You get interesting stories about all sorts of stuff and you learn about all different ways, about certain people so it was a really great experience to go to school like that. I graduated Chairman of the Board with no salary but I had this product that I had announced a few days before graduation. The NCC in New York, which is also when I first met Bill Gates and Ben Rosen and a lot of people.

Bob: And that was the spreadsheet?

Dan: That was the spreadsheet. The idea for VisiCalc came to me sitting there in Harvard Business School. And taking my word processing background from Digital, my interpreter and other background from days before MIT and at MIT and stuff and putting it all together and coming up with the idea of word processing for numbers. The idea that it was, like words like desktop publishing became but in those days it was for newspapers. Layout - you could put things anywhere you want because we used the paper as a two-dimensional grid where you put things anywhere you felt like it. Not that it's column and rows that are named and whatever but it's a general way you put things.

And the original idea was supposed to be a head up display because I'm daydreaming in class. There are 90 people in a class, you know and you're listening to professors. So, I imagine my calculator had a mouse, ball at the bottom. I had actually seen a mouse before so and you moved it and you had a head up display so you could look at people. And you could pound out numbers and stuff like that and I came up with the whole idea you could put things where you want, just like a blackboard because I was thinking blackboard and spreadsheet paper. I even found some of my notes about it were on the back of a publication called The Spreadsheet that we had, which was one of the rags we had business school.

Bob: Sure, sure.

Dan: But decided to run, to found a company to publish, to make this thing. It was published by another business school graduate that I met through the business school. I had professors advising me. One professor hooked me up with my publisher, with Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings and their company and two MBAs, one from Harvard and one elsewhere. And when we wanted advice on things, I went to Glauber at one point, who ended up as a head of Nasdaq, the company that owned Nasdaq, was Assistant Treasury Director later on, Michael Porter of Competitive Analysis in Oil gave us advice. We went to _____ Miller. I mean this was really cool what's available from the business school.

Bob: So had you gone to Cleveland State Business School, it wouldn't have been the same?

Dan: It would have been different. I would have ended up with the same product because I had the same background. The first professor who said it might be a good idea was an Operations Manager/Production Manager but the first computer person that I told about it was my professor, Professor Cash, Jim Cash, who actually had a Masters in Computer Science. And he told me user interface. I mean he couldn't visualize what I was talking about because without actually seeing the product, it's hard to visualize it. But he said you are talking about the input/output, the user interface. That is the important thing, Dan. You should do this. And Jim went on to head the MBA program. He's now retired. He's a director of Microsoft and Migrator and General Electric and stuff like that. He's head of the Compliance Committee on the Microsoft Board. Jim's a really good guy.

Bob: There's a job.

Dan: I feel really bad for Jim to have it but if anybody's going to have it, he's a good guy to have it. Jim's a really good, he decided to become a business school professor when he could have gone on to industry. But he had the chance to be the first tenured black professor at Harvard Business School in Wharton. And that helped a lot of people of color to get into business school. So there was good stuff. And he also was the one who helped spear head getting email and a lot of those other things into the curriculum and stuff and teaching managers who came in for the advanced programs to learn to use computers more and stuff.

So I had professors like that but he taught me cost accounting.

Bob: Exactly. Were you further ahead in the use of computers in business school then industry was in a comparable level?

Dan: Well let's see. They used a timesharing, a depth timesharing system and they used it for simulation and that was about it. We used our calculators. Some people like my friend, Allen who went to be with Ron with Ronco, Allen had a programmable calculator. He had more money than I did. He had one of the HP programmable and he would always program the things in the calculator and there I would run down and use the basic terminal and he would always beat me _____. I learned that quick and dirty can win when we were study partners.

And so we didn't use computers that much at the time. Though I did do some prototyping for VisiCalc on their machines. The actual time when I came up with that I'll use the A,B,C/1,2,3 type grid and that you would only see the results and then you would have a little window where you would be able to see the formula and stuff, that was actually that idea came to me while prototyping on one of their terminals in Basic.

So, but no, they weren't really into using it. Like you didn't do email. We didn't do any of that stuff. That, Jim and the others started bringing it in, I think first to the - well when VisiCalc came in, after me, there were professors, Eric Rosenfeld, who was a professor there, who was one of the partners in Personal Software, early Lotus or pre-Lotus with Visiplot, Visitrend and stuff like that. He bought an Apple and would bring it in and use it. And I think used it to help mark tests and stuff. The professors actually started using it and of course they noticed that certain students and then of course they brought in using a laptop, which was an IBM portable I think at the time. And they started adding it. But actually in the development, while I was prototyping, I had the early versions of it; I brought professors in under nondisclosure to see it. And one of them was Barbara Jackson who had been my professor where I had learned about financial forecasting systems at the school. We actually got to play with some of the systems.

And she was on the calculator committee because remember they had gone from slide rules. First they had slide rules in the old days, then they had to go to calculators and redo all the - they had to make calculations that were easy to do on slide rules and then had to redo all the cases to be able to have numbers and stuff for calculators. And so she actually was very helpful. She explained to me she had done a lot of work with computers with senior executives and was telling me how my competition was not any of these other tools. It was the back of an envelope. It was paper/pencil to calculator. That if it wasn't easier the first time, they won't do it. And it has to be, she said, easier, easier, easier.

She pushed me to that stuff. My classmate, John Reese, the other MIT grad in my section, said well Dan, you know, you have it this way. Can't you remove that because it's obvious that one plus and then pushing an arrow is unambiguous? That you want to point, put the thing. You don't have to put a key. You know I said, oh well, John that's a great idea. We're having a reunion tonight and he will be there. I get to see him about that. I got people who gave me ideas along those lines. So they started and eventually they switched over and then now they use the spreadsheet, which is kinda cool to affect teaching at your old institution.

That was one of the big things at every institution.

Bob: At every institution.

Dan: But especially at, you know how you like to have your parents be happy with what you do and your family happy with what you do. You know having your teachers who you look up to and who taught you things to say you did good stuff is a nice thing to have. And to bring back something to help you to add something to it is even better. Especially in my case, to make it easier for people who are going through what I went through to go through that stuff.

Bob: How did Bob Frankston come into the picture?

Dan: I met Bob at MIT. After the first semester, I figured MIT is going to be so hard. I'm not going to do any computer stuff because I'll flunk out if I do that. So my first semester I took a computer course, which I did really well in, I just going into the final I was number one in the class I think. It was pass/fail I think.

Bob: First among equals.

Dan: Do what?

Bob: First among equals.

Dan: Yeah, among equals. Well, no not everybody was a freshman. Only freshman were pass/fail.

Bob: Oh, okay.

Dan: And then worse yet, the second half of the year was Kent State happened and the student strike and they made everybody pass/fail for the last of the semester. But it didn't help for us freshman because we were pass/fail anyway to cut pressure down. So we wouldn't have as many suicides. And I decided to look for a job for programming. So I started walking around the labs and I poked my head into different offices and I poked my head in Professor Corbido's office, who was the head of the Multix project. And he said oh, you want a job. I'll give you a job. We'll give you a job on the Multix project. We usually do it for credit but we'll pay you some money. And I joined that project in late December, January of must be January of 70.

And my first thing to do was to take Bob Frankston's bachelor thesis project, which was a limited service system to give access to computers in a controlled environment to students and add some features to it in order to make fit into Multix better. So I met Bob through that and those of us who worked in that lab together got to know each other real well. Bob had a car because he had been working as a programmer since sometime in the early sixties. And he worked for WhiteWell, which later became Interactive Data Corporation. And so he was paid really well. He didn't get into MIT his first try. Went to Stoneybrook for a year. And then applied again. So he had to live off campus. So he had a car but he had a computer terminal in his room you know because he was paid. It was great.

So he would take us out to dinner, those of us who worked in Multix or out to breakfast, you know because we worked through the night. So we had a real social thing going on among us computer nerds. So Bob and I got close. We figured one of these days we'll make a business together. Both of us have parents that were small business people. His in electronics and mine in printing. And we stayed friends since.

Bob: Bob is a great guy.

Dan: Oh he really is. He lives just a few blocks from here. So, he's off at a conference or something right now. I talked to him last night for a second to tell him that I got to get permission from him to use my new product so, you know, before I do certain things, I want to make sure it's okay with him.

Bob: Because of the name?

Dan: Well because of the name. Before I would use the name, Visicalc, I would at least ask Bob. I asked a couple others but Bob particularly before I hit the buy button on the domain name and send the application in. And also just to tell him what I was doing. You know because I want to do something like that I know that he would peripherally be mentioned periodically. So, he should at least get an okay. Though he's not interested, he's never really been interested in spreadsheets. He's interested in communications much more.

Bob: Really?

Dan: Oh yeah. Ubiquitous communications is his life. He just did VisiCalc as some fun on the side.

Bob: Well he probably made a couple bucks too.

Dan: Not as much as he did doing other things. He went to Lotus, after Software Arts and stayed there and that did pretty well for him. And got them into some things, which they should have followed up on like Lotus Express, which was this email thing, where they had a tax on every email sent over MCI mail. That was a product he got started. But Lotus didn't follow up on that email or that product. Gates just asked me, why did they give up on that? Don't they breathe? Don't they breathe air, you know? They gave up. Microsoft doesn't give up. Lotus gave up and then they had to buy CC Mail later.

Bob did join me at Slate to do at hand a spreadsheet for propend computing. He did something that was a kin to VBA, I think before VBA a Basic like language. Like when I first met him, he had written Basic for Multix. He had a Basic like language for spreadsheet that had cells built into the Basic language. After Slate, he went on and went to Microsoft and had a very good five years, four and half years, whatever. And he commuted from here.

Bob: I remember.

Dan: He spent half the time but when he was there, he got them into home networking. He said it really had to just work. That we should be able to just plug a computer in and to a home network and it should just work. DHCP and whatever and stuff like that and you can use things like you know, the wired LANS that work through the phone wires was pushing on that. He was pushing them to the Internet. I remember him showing me. I have a video of him somewhere of him showing me Mosaic running the browser or running on hardware from Microsoft through Microsoft in connection to the Internet the month that Netscape was incorporated. I think he was at that meeting. "The Meeting" where Microsoft decided to go into the Internet. But basically he views his main thing is he really pushed them for home network and his home was the original model for doing that stuff and the prototype.

So he did his good for the world there and he did well by it. So, but that's all about connectivity. Now he's doing a whole lot of other things that has to do with connectivity. Trying to push to people to make freedom of speech on the Web. And freedom of speech being the program can do what they want to communicate to other programs and not to have people patrol ways in the way.

Bob: Interesting.

Dan: That everything can connect to everything so that there'd be ubiquitous connectivity of every light bulb. He said, "why should a light switch have anything to do with the light bulb other than to tell it to turn on and off?" You should have a little thing in it sort of almost like you can slap it on the wall anywhere you want. Why do you have to have the wires come through the light that goes to the you know? Why does it have to even be in the same room? Why can't I, if I want to, be able to check the status of the switch from elsewhere in the world securely?

Bob: Exactly.

Dan: He writes about a lot of that stuff in his weblog.

Bob: Well we'll have to get to Bob.

Dan: You really should get to Bob.

Bob: We definitely will.

Dan: But you can't today.

Bob: No, he's at a conference. So, how did it come that Bob hired on for VisiCalc?

Dan: For VisiCalc? I was in business school and let's see. So, I had sort of come up with what it should be. I had a prototype of it written in Basic that run on this computer I used over at Dan Fylstra's house, which was the offices of Personal Software, one of the largest publishing of software in those days. Run out of almost a living room or something. And he needed a programmer to convert the bridge program from I think TRS80 to the Apple.

So, I said why not Bob. Bob's a consultant who does computer programming. He knows the 6502 and that stuff. So, Bob went to do some work for him and he went over there. He got a listing of the basic program. The way he did it was he brought in a X70 Camera and took pictures of the screen as he went through it because they didn't have a printer on that machine. It was very basic then.

So when I came up with the idea and then made a deal with Personal Software to publish it, Bob said he'll program it. He had access to some tools on the Multix system that were 6502 assembler stuff. He had written 6502 stuff for a previous company that he was a consultant to - ECD Corporation, competitor to Apple. And I had done a little bit of consulting for ECD too, so Bob said it will only take a few weeks to write. So why don't he'll write it so I said sure. You can write. We'll be partners. We've always wanted to be in business together and we'll use this to fund our computer business or whatever we do, my software business. So, Bob ended up doing most of the programming. I did the user interface design, mainly in the Basic prototype. I played with that. Wrote the spec and early manual, the reference card.

So we had been trying to go into business, thinking of different areas before and hadn't been able to come up with any idea that was worthwhile. So this is sort of a way to start a business. And he came up with a name, Software Art, which was a good name for the company and he helped fund it because he had some more money than I did. I borrowed money from my family and he borrowed some money from his family and money he had. We borrowed money from a bank and bought a computer from Prime, which was a follow on to Multix. It was very much like it. And he wrote tools and I wrote an editor. And he wrote an assembler and a linker and we did VisiCalc. It took about six months until it was basically in final data. It took about six to nine months. It shipped at ten months or so, ten a half.

Bob: And what was their early reaction?

Dan: Some people went gaga over it. I mean Ben Rosen when he wrote that famous, "The Tail that Wags", the software The Tale that Wags, personal computer, hardware dog about it. Hewlett Packard, one of my classmates, ______ Howe worked in the personal computing division. The one that did the HP 75, I think it was. They licensed it from us based on that. So there were people who were interested in it. Apple was not as interested. Well, maybe they thought they could it themselves. I remember there was politics there but I didn't get to see a lot of that.

But among non-computer people, see if you're not the actual audience for a product, you don't understand it. Most people say computers can do anything. What's special about a spreadsheet? Programmers look at it and say you wrote a basic program. But only the people who really needed it, looked at it and only of those, those that understood the idea of a general purpose tool, the people that know what a general purpose tool can do and they can visualize it. That's a very small segment of the population. They can say I can use it to do this for my area. Other people needed somebody else to have done it like what they do and look it and you can use it for that?

That's exactly what I do. Like I showed a person, this guy Joe Suldnick, who was The Computer Store, he was their financial person and he started shaking. And he said, that's what I do all week. You can do it in 15 minutes what I take days every week to do, showing me all the spreadsheets he did by hand. Those people got real excited. But I only sold about a thousand units a month for the first year. Then we came out with the Radio Shack version, Basic version, Commodore Version 2. Radio Shack started advertising. HP started advertising their version, which was a recoded basic the program or something rather in their system. They took our source code and recoded from it.

And so then it started taking off. And you know it did more and more and I sold more and more personal software. Later Visicorp, they told me, there VP of Marketing - Ed Esber at the time, told me that the more they raise price the more they sold. No matter what they did they wanted more. That's what happened.

Bob: I'm not sure that cause and effect was actually there.

Dan: It wasn't cause and effect. It didn't matter because they had to go out and buy a computer for it and then you have to buy a good daisy wheel printer for it. It's like five thousand dollars anyway. It was replacing maybe timesharing or something that's five thousand dollars a month. So who cared you know? It was like the two orders of magnitude improvement, two-week payback. Like desktop publishing, it pays for itself in two weeks. So what the hell? You know it's heads I win, tails I don't lose much. One of my classmates is a business school professor now who wrote a book - he's at Columbia, Anwar Betty and he wrote a book about new small businesses where he interviewed all these Inc. 100 companies and he said the thing about the small business person isn't that they take risks other won't take. They don't take dumb risks. They just are willing to take risks but only good risks. But they can't investigate things to death like big people do so they'll say things like heads I win, tails I don't lose much. That's good enough.

Bob: Exactly.

Dan: Now, so it became from a thousand units a month at some point it exploded into this huge, eventually sold a few hundred thousand, maybe 700,000 copies, tying Lotus and shutting it down, which in those days was a lot. Basically we knew how many Apples were sold every month because we tracked it pretty well. And IBM came to us and basically when they shipped the ads showed what was supposed to VisiCalc, it was a Basic mock up. They didn't trust us or whatever. We could tell. It was just a character missing. But we shipped within a week of when the IBM PC came out and sold an awful lot of copies on there.

So, it did really well.

Bob: Well things went sour. What happened?

Dan: Well we were in an author/publisher relationship. In those days that was the model some of the businesses had. It was the model Dan Filestro at Personal Software came out of the publishing business, who's a co-founder, editor something like that of Byte Magazine. Carl Helmers was a good friend of his. And so that model of publishing and even the lawyers I think were involved in publishing ______ used. So, they started with a publishing business and it turned out that the software business has hits. In the hit business like that with the structure, that's not a good model and they also went for venture capital.

And which needed different returns and it just messed things up and the relationship between them and a lot of the authors soured. But we were the biggest author. Kapor, who was one of their authors at the time and also an employee, just left and they bought him out. He got a couple million, two million dollars out of that. We were selling ten times that much. We would have taken ten million bucks but we couldn't come to an agreement with them.

So things soured with that and we ended up in a lawsuit with them. They sued us. It was bad stuff. It was really bad. We were about to sell our company. We were days from selling our company for cash and we got sued. It was bad. They bet everything on VisiOn, which was something kind of like the Lisa and then the Macintosh except it was character based but it was bitmapped. It had all the disadvantages of bitmap with all the disadvantages of character base. It was an early and it goaded Bill Gates into doing Windows. But Bill Gates had a real cash cow. In our case, they sued our cash cow. So we had a real problem. And they expected I guess to ship a lot and make money but they didn't ship enough and they went under.

We sold out to Lotus. They saved us from going under. Mitch was a real hero there for us and bought our assets.

Bob: How was Mitch a hero?

Dan: For me? He kept my company from going bankrupt.

Bob: Okay.

Dan: And he paid me more than what somebody else was about to pay me. And he did it real quick and easy. And gave me no handcuffs. It was great. I mean I ran into him one morning on the way to Sofcon, a software conference, at the airport and he asked me how things were going and I said lousy. And he invited me out to sit next to him on the plane, first class. I was sitting next to another suitor who was trying to buy our company. I had been flying around. I went to visit Esborough, Ashton Tate. And Mitch said oh you have an engineering, scientific product called TK Software. We have an engineering, scientific product division. Maybe we can do something. That was Monday. Friday we had a check. And Friday night was the first Passover Seder. Liberation, you know, of the slates.

And that afternoon we signed the deal.

Bob: So he property value was TK Software.

Dan: That's the way they saw it, of course it turned out that the VisiCalc copyrights were more valuable to them in the long run with the look at field cases that came in. But didn't know that. And TK Software, they resold for what they paid. It didn't make much difference. PR value was good. They brought Dave, they brought Bob in which they got Lotus Express out of it and Lotus Metro out of it. David Reed joined them who had been with us. He was one of the authors of the End-to-End argument paper or the basis's of the Internet, as we know it. David led some of the projects for them and went off later to _________ and other places and he's now working at the Media Lab and I think it's Hewlett Packard.

And so they got a whole lot of other good people out of it. It was good for them. And PR wise it was good. For Ed it was the right thing to do. Oh and for me it was good because I was part of the deal. What we worked out was that I had this product that I was working on which was a demonstration program, when I was at Software Arts and written in our internal language and Mitch tried using it. We used it to prototype some of our stuff and of course it had bugs and kept crashing. So, I said I want to write a real version of this and see as a program. And they said fine. We'll make a deal. You can write the program and then just give us a license, a company wide license, to copy the source or something for our own use. And I said sure. And Dan Berkman's Demo Program came out of it.

And I made more money off the demo than I did off of VisiCalc.

Bob: Really?

Dan: Yeah. Well VisiCalc basically, I made my salary, which was a good salary but I frequently took no salary. At the end I got something from Lotus's money. I got a little bit of back salary. And we had a building that unfortunately we had put effort into making it a nice building and when we sold the building, I made a little bit of money. Paid for my house and stuff, for a small house. But Demo paid for a bigger house. And I sold that off to Peter Norton for a little bit and that was better than -

Bob: Now Dan Berkman's Demo Program was the way of making a demo version of your program before you would write the real version.

Dan: It would look like, you could paint the screen to look the way you wanted and then the next screen and then the next screen. So you could make it look the way wanted and it would respond to keystrokes. You could program it. And it was such that a marketing person could use it. People would use it for training. It was used for sales, for showing off things. And it was used for prototyping.

And in fact, a whole lot of the programs you see when you see a character based program, there's a good chance that Demo was used in the creation of the look with all the boxes around things for those programs. Thousands and thousands of copies were sold, 75 bucks apiece list. And it was used for head up display design on fighter planes, I'm told, cash registers, what was it, at Prodigy they used it for designing screens. I think it was used by UPS. I mean it was used. All sorts of people used it to demo. Lotus How was sold to Lotus by a demo that was done in Demo apparently.

Bob: Really?

Dan: I think that's what Bill Grosse had told me. All sorts of things were done in Demo. I learned there about different licenses. The product had a free runtime but it had a warning notice on it and some people didn't like the warning notice. So, you can get a runtime that didn't have a warning notice. But you had to identify me and pay me a thousand bucks. And companies asked for it. IBM needed to do a demo and they didn't want to have that on the demo they were showing off and they paid me. I had to get a fax machine because it was always being used immediately.

So, I found out that with special licensing deals, you can make a lot more money. In fact it's the difference between having a really good vacation and a lot of other things one year and that was the difference because I had these dual licenses that you could get by with that. It was kind of, learned about that. The day of learning about Shareware and things like that. Learned about that because I was on the committee that decided who got the Andrew Flugelman award when it first came out and we gave one of the first ones to, I forget. It was this bulletin board system and it was freeware. And we also gave it another one to the development of Freeware. No Flugelman did the freeware so it was one of these bulletin boards.

So I learned about that. And of course I was using freeware stuff, editors and that, the shareware type of stuff. So I was learning about that type of world, which was in the legal world. I had between the lawsuits I was involved with and running a business and all the contracts involved in financing and all that and courses I took, I had gotten a whole education. I could have gone to law school many times over with the money that was spent doing those things by somebody but it's not really a law school education. It's knowing a lawyer. But it's been helpful in understanding a lot of the other things, which is helping me in my understanding of open source.

Bob: And that's where you are now, right?

Dan: Yeah.

Bob: In the open source world?

Dan: I'm in the open source; well I'm in the business models world among other things. Of which, open source is an important part of it. So, when I was at Trellix, we were doing web authoring stuff and we were doing hosting stuff and I found that a lot of what we were building in-house was based on Linux because it was cheaper and better for stuff and Corel and we used open source this and that and we needed to have a certain type of product and we were able to get an open source version of that product to build our thing on but we had to separate it appropriately so we could because of the GPL and I started learning about all of these things.

I knew Richard Stallman from folk dancing and stuff from years ago and from you know, MIT. I didn't know him well but I knew. To me he was that really good folk dancer at the time. He could do the Balkan dances and I couldn't. But you know I've been learning about that and when I decided to go off on my own and program because I wanted to program again, I'd been releasing my things on a different type of open source-like, eventually GPL licenses. So I had been experimenting with business models, learning about it. And I did consulting. And companies want to know what you should do. What you should open source, what shouldn't you open source. I'm on an advisory board to the state here, which is now this whole thing about open document format and open source, open standards, what the difference between the two and what should we do.

So I had sort of gotten thrust into all of that. I released a product in open source last year, List Guard and it did pretty well in its area. It was a very narrow area, about hand RSS feed, when you don't have a blogging tool creating it for you. And that did really well and the dynamics of the open source part really they made a difference. I mean people treated it differently. The marketing costs were so much lower. Like they were zero basically. People don't expect the same support. And they are willing to pay for it. People give you donations if you ask for it. And plus people now think you are an expert. I mean there are all these things. And that was one month of programming.

So when I decided to do something follow on and did _______, I decided to go the same way because I see that the market likes a product that people seem to say - and it's GPL, it's open source, it means to them it's kind of like it's organic or it's kosher. Some people think that something kosher means it's better. No it isn't. It means it follows certain laws, certain rules. But it turns out that because it's been carefully watched at some end, because it costs so much to do it anyway, a lot of things are of higher quality. And of course, Hebrew National tries to make it look that way so there is this image that because it's that, it must be better. Well there is some image about open source products of certain ilk that is positive and people are more likely to recommend it because it's that. They are not going to - they feel that, I guess it's theirs. I don't know why. Maybe it's part of the culture, it's the right thing.

So you get certain viral stuff that doesn't pass on of your product. People telling people about it that you wouldn't get otherwise. That to me, open source pays - some of the business model is your costs go down.

Bob: But where's the revenue?

Dan: Well it depends on what you need as revenue. Well where was the revenue for some of my other products where the company lost money. I raised tens of millions of dollars of venture capital and the company in the end, didn't turn a profit. So, that doesn't - what is my goal? If my goal is to run a consulting business or to establish a reputation in the area where I do have a product, it's a help. If I just want to do good for the world and I need it myself, so I'm gonna spend the money anyway, why not do the little extra to make it a product. I know with open source, if you have the volume, there is money. That's the way it is. If you keep your cost structure. You have to build your business differently. That's a real problem with venture capital. Because venture capital is set up for big businesses. They have to be at least spending millions of dollars to fit their model. When you can start some businesses in the open source world, you don't have to spend on the marketing and sales people the same way initially. You don't have to spend on some of the development. You don't have to spend on those things. So your costs are much lower but they can't invest in those chunks. So you are in that netherworld where you either do it as a labor of love or you have some money to spend of your own or you are just a fast coder and you do something simple enough for whatever or you luck out.

And we see a variety of those from things in a dorm room and we have our Face Book and things like that that people are able to build businesses out of open source and all in today's world pretty cheaply. So I'm learning about that and this is to be able to speak about it, just like anything else, I like to actually have gotten my hands dirty in the area. And this is a way to get my hands dirty in the area. Hopefully people will like the product or what it becomes. I mean it's only an alpha right now. But I assume more people will try it then try List Guard. So, instead of a few thousand users -

Bob: There is a broader appeal.

Dan: There's a broader appeal. I'm using it to create websites right now. I mean it creates its own website about it because it can use it to create Wiki like design. It can create blog-type looks. You don't have to know html, just like you do with the Wiki. It handles the multiple editing a little differently where I can be on my PC and it sucks down the source but then leaves a little bread crumb up there so somebody else knows not to suck down the source. It takes care of that automatically. And then when I post it, then it goes away so somebody else can. When I do the server version of it, which is the same code with a little different front end, it'll do similar type stuff and you won't need a client site. It's always through a browser. So, it looks like it might bring in, you know that together with consulting -

Bob: What does the future hold?

Dan: For?

Bob: You, us, technology, the world?

Dan: Well, we know accept technology as being part of the world. I mean the fact that the cell phone is now the thing that everybody has and people don't even - they carry that instead of their wallet. And the first new thing since the watch and wallet, that everybody carries with them. Technology, the Ipod, the success of the Ipod - we're seeing that it's become part of culture. I do a lot of reading of stuff about sociology and stuff. Things like the Death and Life of Great American Cities, you know that great book and stuff like that about what real people do and how communities interact and how the Web came about and we're now seeing technology is so much more part of life. We have to develop things along those ways.

I wrote an essay called Software in the Last 200 Years. As I learned about it's part of our infrastructure of society. And we can't keep redoing everything. We have to build things that sort of run till who knows when somebody is going to replace it. And things have to interact and be able to morph and move and be resilient and non-brittle. They have to be non-brittle when things happen. Society, you got to look at terrorists and other things. We have to be able to deal with accidents and you know, at natural situations, like Katrina and stuff. We look at what worked at Katrina, what worked in 9/11, what didn't. The president on 9/11 ended up having to use a cell phone because the secure system didn't at all work. The vice president found out about it from his assistant who said come watch it on CNN. You know and that's where they were finding out. The planes were gotten down by adhoc people figuring out on their own. You know, Blackberries work. Nextel worked. Some of those things, the internet continued to work. With other things bogged down, point to point stuff - they weren't able to rewire New York that easily. But Voice over IP, look what happened with Katrina. The only way you could get telephone calls to city hall in Katrina was over Vonage, Voice over IP, by somebody who by hook or crook was able to keep their ISP up, we can listen to podcasts on today. And we were listening in almost real time how they were keeping that ISP up, little realizing that the telephone call.

So we are learning about this is now a part of it. We have to build things that are in different way than we used to build them. Microsoft's change that they are going through with Ray, who worked for me at one point way back when - great guy, it's going to be interesting. They are making some changes. I think they have to change more than they are saying about what the world is and what the world wants but I think that this technology that I've always loved and many of us geeky types, nerdy types from back then, people you know didn't know what it was we were doing. They would laugh about computers have now become just part of the fabric of society and we always knew it was there and it's now happening.

I remember for me the big "aha" moment was when I picked up the Wall Street Journal, I think and it had an editorial that mentioned VisiCalc, as if you knew what it was. And that just got it for me. And in comics you had to know what a spreadsheet was. And then when you look at kids' textbooks today, you know and they teach spreadsheets. People said did they have spreadsheets when you were in school and I say no. Remember when I - oh yeah. So, that's kind of cool. And all of these people that I knew when I was younger, have helped build a lot of this stuff. We were all building and now the youngsters today, the people who are the age that I was when I did VisiCalc, are coming up with things that are changing the world today. It's unbelievable.

So, we don't know where it's going to go. I mean we had no idea what computing was going to be like back - we did. We did. Bob doing in the seventies about micro cameras on the ArpaNet and about how to trust third party and the next thing we know, we have a Pay Pal or something like that.

Bob: Next thing you know, 25 years later.

Dan: Twenty-five years later but you know, I remember first seeing the mouse some many years ago and then in 84, finally, many years later, it got advertisements about it on the Super bowl and then you know maybe ten years later, it was a normal thing and people could laugh if somebody talked into a mouse on a movie. We're moving a little faster than that now but ten years, 20 years is not a long time in society because you know some of those people, I mean Andy Hertzfeld and stuff, and all of these people you have, ____ Olsen and Winers and all these people have invented the things that make our society, improving on our lives, all of our lives and our social lives even. And we need to be able to continue doing that.

Bob: Thank you.

Dan: Yeah you are running out of bandwidth here. Bandwidth will hopefully get cheap.

Bob: I hope so. Thank you, Dan.

Recommended Links

Softpanorama Recommended

Multics

• Multics--The first seven years

  In 1964, following implementation of the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) [1, 2] serious planning began^{{note 1}} on the development of a new computer system specifically organized as a prototype of a computer utility. The plans and aspirations for this system, called Multics (for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), were described in a set of six papers presented at the 1965 Fall Joint Computer Conference [3-8]. The development of the system was undertaken as a cooperative effort involving the Bell Telephone Laboratories (from 1965 to 1969), the computer department of the General Electric Company, ^{{note 2}} and Project MAC of M.I.T. Implicit in the 1965 papers was the expectation that there should be a later examination of the development effort. From the present vantage point, however, it is clear that a definitive examination cannot be presented in a single paper. As a result, the present paper discusses only some of the many possible topics. First we review the goals, history and current status of the Multics project. This review is followed by a brief description of the appearance of the Multics system to its various classes of users. Finally several topics arc given which represent some of the research insights which have come out of the development activities. This organization has been chosen in order to emphasize those aspects of software systems having the goals of a computer utility which we feel to be of special interest. We do not attempt detailed discussion of the organization of Multics; that is the purpose of specialized technical books and papers.^{{note 3}}

UNIX and Multics

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/Classes/GradOS/lectures/multix.html

The who command

Video Terminals--System Terminal Setup Operating Systems of Historical Interest

• MULTICS (Stratus, Green)
  It is probably safe to say that every operating system now in use has been influenced by MULTICS.
• The Multics EMACS Editor broke new ground for LISP and Telnet.
• Honeywell GCOS is best known now for a field in "/etc/passwd".

Multics Papers Online

• A Managerial View of the Multics Development. -- very important paper
• The Multics MACLISP Compiler The Basic Hackery -- a Tutorial
• The Multics system programming process
• Multics Emacs The History Design and Implementation

• The IBM 7094 and CTSS -- Multics predecessor

Netizens On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben

In 1961, MIT was to celebrate its centennial anniversary. Martin Greenberger, who had joined the MIT faculty in 1958, describes how a call went out for appropriate ways to celebrate:  

I proposed a series of lectures on the computer and the future. We threw open the hatches and got together the best people we could assemble - whatever their fields. We asked these thinkers to project ahead and help us understand what was in store [1].

Charles Percy Snow, a British writer, was invited to be the keynote speaker, His talk, "Scientists and Decision Making," discussed the need for democratic and broad-based participation in the decisions of society "We happen to be living at a time of a major scientific revolution," he observed, "probably more important in its consequences, than the first Industrial Revolution, a revolution which we shall see in full force in the very near future" [2].

He and the other speakers expressed their concern that the challenges represented by the computer be understood and treated seriously. They felt that there would need to be government decisions regarding the development and application of the computer. They cautioned that these decisions be entrusted to people who understood the problems the computer posed for society. Also, they were concerned that the smaller the number of people involved in important social decisions, the more likely serious errors of judgment would be made. They urged that it was necessary to open up the decision-making process to as broad a set of people as possible.

Present at this gathering were several of the pioneers who had helped to set the foundation for the developing cybernetic revolution. What was the revolution they were describing? John Pierce, a pioneer in electronics research at Bell Labs, was one of the speakers at the MIT Centennial Conference. In an article published several years later in Scientific American, Pierce described the foundation of the cybernetic revolution that was then unfolding [3]. Pierce noted the intellectual ferment that accompanied two publications in 1948. One was "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon, published in July and October 1948 in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. The other was the publication of Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

Multics Repository at Stratus Computer

• The Green Multics Collection contains programs and papers written by Paul Green

• The Wolman Multics Collection contains programs written by Barry Wolman.

• The Multics Collection, of Tom Van Vleck ([email protected]) and Bernie Greenberg ([email protected]) contain photographs, papers, lists of participants, an "encyclopaedia" of Multics terms and concepts, and many other interesting records.

[PDF] Virtual Memory, Processes, and Sharing in MULTICS

[PDF] Microsoft PowerPoint - Lecture5.ppt

[PDF] eBook - Informations about Operating Systems

Fernando Corbató

Fernando J. Corbató - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing Award Lecture

Professor Corbató sent a letter to all Multicians on the occasion of the last system's shutdown on 10/31/2000.

Fernando J. Corbató - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Corby

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: June 04, 2016