Incremental

It is generally observed that advances (in tech) happen incrementally. By and large the increments are small and go unnoticed. The past half century or so I’ve been like a particle in a Brownian motion experiment constantly nudged in new directions by the latest incremental impact. Out of interest, I’ve tried to recall some of the nudges I’ve felt over the years, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

Analogue to Digital

The 1970s would be when I started my tech journey, and at that time most of the stuff I was tinkering with was made of thermionic valves, resistors as thick as a pencil and chunky capacitors that I was often (rightly) wary of touching. I delved eagerly into the workings of a simple superheterodyne vacuum tube receiver and had learned enough at a young age to be able to repair a small CRT oscilloscope, which served me well for another decade. The first technical increment that made a big impression on me was my first solid-state transistors. These came to me by way of my father who had acquired a piece of Russian equipment from a pilot. The exact provenance I cannot remember, but I certainly recall these small metal-encased three-legged wonders that were far more interesting than the hot glowing triodes I had been used to. These new wonders used voltages that wouldn’t kill me, had switching speeds that were incredible (and visible, now that I had a working oscilloscope) and didn’t break if I dropped them. I lost a good few valves that way. For me, those little Cyrillic-encrusted cylinders were my proper introduction to real electronics.

Discrete to Integrated

Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) had been invented just before I was born, and TI’s 74xx series of relatively inexpensive TTL integrated gate packages appeared on the market around the time I started school, but it wasn’t until my teens that I encountered my first 7400 (the 74LS00 to be precise), the quad NAND that is the workhorse of many early digital circuits. I had already gone through a phase of discrete components including valves and transistors but I was still dabbling in analogue electronics and then the 7400 introduced me to digital. That changed everything.

Circuitry to Code

A neighbour ran an electronics shop and from him I got most of my components to feed my hobby, and in my early teens he introduced me to the next step above the discrete logic circuits I had been working on. I had briefly been given a 4004-based processor – really just a calculator but by my reckoning it was pure magic. From this I learned the essence of low-level programming, but it wouldn’t be until around 1979 when I finally got access to a real computer, a Z80-based Cromemco multi-user system. I already had enough electronics knowledge to be dangerous, and now finally I was coding. I had been nudged from seeing logic as circuitry to seeing it as mathematics (i.e. algorithms).

Mainframe to Personal Computing

By the time I started in college (thinking that I wanted to be a physicist) I was already coding in several high-level languages, and as I was already spending much of my spare time running a club in which I could share that knowledge, I was invited to continue that teaching activity as part of the university’s student computer society. Through the society I got access to a mainframe, and much more. In fact, although I had access to an Apple before I started in college, it was via the computer society that I first encountered a “personal computer”. This green-screened PC was revolutionary and the impact would be felt worldwide.

Supercomputing to Portable

The next nudge for me happened shortly before graduation, when the focus had turned to parallel computing and I was tasked with creating an operating system for a bus-based multiprocessor. That piqued my interest in other such systems, leading me into hypercubes (for which I designed and built some prototype nodes), the Transputer and eventually a funded research project in which I had sole use of a massively parallel DAP supercomputer, which I coded in a variant of Fortran. OK, maybe not that super, as it only had 1024 simple processors but it was quite a radical machine nevertheless. Parallel processing, algorithm design and digital electronics were building blocks of my PhD, and would remain my primary research interest until the close of my academic career when I moved from thinking about large-scale computing to thinking of the smallest: mobile.

At this point I must also mention that there was one other nudge that happened before I moved into industry, that would later have a massive impact on me: the World Wide Web. Networking was a topic in which I had become proficient, to the point of lecturing in the subject and providing national system administration, and I was engaged in the research networks of the early 1990s when the Web was launched and many of us tried out NCSA Mosaic as an alternative to using tools like Gopher to find the research material we wanted. I saw the Web as a useful tool, but had no idea how much of an impact it was going to have on the World, and on me personally.

Desktop to Mobile

The move from academia to industry was a bit of a jolt. Whereas in academia new ideas would stir ideas about how to share, popularise, teach, publish…, in industry any new idea was captured, contained, documented for the patent/IP people, probed by Sales/Marketing, and promptly shelved in secret because “the market isn’t ready” or something like that. I had gone from thinking in terms of supercomputers and global networks to thinking about small portable computing devices. I had a mobile phone during my time as a national sys-admin, but the only thing “digital” about it was the occasional SMS (often about some networking emergency in the dead of night). People in my new social circle were beginning to see possibilities for digital communications, and I would eventually lend my weight to their effort to create a new business in this emerging space. While with them the next nudge became obvious: the Web was going mobile.

On behalf of my company and colleagues I was part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and had several senior roles within that organisation over a period of about a decade. In that time the teams around me created powerful adaptive solutions that involved clever on-premises deployments to deliver content to a wide variety of clients, including Web and Web-adjacent (e.g. WAP) devices. These deployments gradually increased in complexity and demanded more technical know-how of our customers than they were willing (or able) to manage, until eventually it became clear that we should host the service on behalf of the customers. We moved from local on-premises into the Cloud.

Local to Cloud

Once again I was back in computational parallelism, this time involving clusters of virtual machines located in various cloud service providers. Clouds offered all kinds of benefits, notably the ease of scaling, fault tolerance, security and deployment efficiency. As my time with the various teams and customers was coming to an end, the backend server stack was still the most complex part of the overall multi-channel solutions. By the time I had launched my tech consultancy, the Web browser ecosystem had become significantly more competent, more efficient and more effective. Thanks to various standardisation efforts, intelligent client-side solutions started to take over the burden previously the preserve of the servers. We were being nudged away from server-side towards client-side.

Backend to Frontend

Client-side frameworks for Web-based solutions really kicked off shortly after HTML5 hit the headlines. Up to that point I was still immersed in things like Servlets, Spring, Wicket, Struts and JSF. The browser still wasn’t seen as a place for anything more complex than form data validation, but the introduction of jQuery and Ajax had shown that cross-browser scripting of the displayed content was viable. So by 2010 the stability of browser standards encouraged the emergence of frontend technologies like AngularJS, Bootstrap, Vue, Typescript, React and more. Even the backend got some frontend attention with the creation of Node. I moved from the big company scene to independent consultancy around the time that React Native, Angular and Progressive Web Applications were taking off.

Corporate to Independent

This nudge was not so much one of technology itself, but of my relationship with it. Over several decades I have been immersed in technology as a hobbyist, as a student, as a researcher, as an educator, as an inventor, as a CTO, as a standards leader and finally as a consultant. I am fortunate to have amassed experience in a wide range of technologies over the years, and now I continue to put that knowledge to good use for my clients. Initially my clients were as varied as the journey that got me to this point, but gradually I have specialised in the technical needs of companion animal organisations and the veterinary space in general. This is a surprisingly complex space with very specific needs. My first foray into the space was back when hosted services were gathering pace, shortly before the Cloud came on our radars, just to provide some assistance keeping a basic online pet reunification service up-and-running. What started as something I’d do now and then in my spare time, has become my main focus and I’m happy to be able to bring my experience to the table.

What will the next nudge be? Perhaps it is already happening and it’s too early for me to notice. I’m sure it’ll be fun, whatever it is.

Categorised as: LUE

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