Selectron 2400 - wasn't a big success - guess why.

After much brou-haha, fan fare and some controversy over whether he was the Messiah – or just a naughty boy, the passing of Steve Jobs and the release of Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography, FM and I were discussing how, after working the IT industry for over thirty years it seems that our industry has always had its giants.

Whether you regard jobs as some kind of eccentric megalomaniac with a gift for design, head and shoulders above his peers, or whether you see him as some uber-geek with dodgy personal habits and a penchant for bullying in the  workplace, the story as told by Isaacson is an interesting journey.

The IT industry, so dominated by the Americans, has a hall of fame that ought to eclipse the music, movie and publishing industries, but which tends to hide its light under a scanner. For example, has anyone heard of Bob Metcalf ?  No, I thought not.  Bob invented the Ethernet – the first widespread network technology connecting PCs and other computers.  Do we know who were the fathers of Arcnet – the precursor to the Internet ?  No, me neither.

And with the exception of a few huge names like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison (owner of Oracle – major database technology for the less well informed) the lions of IT are invisible to people outside the technology and communications industries.  Do we know the names of any of the geniuses who design and build the information storage technology on which practically everything that uses electricity depends ?  The processors at the core of every computer, large and small, every mobile phone and these days, goddamnit every set of traffic lights and even if not most many kitchen appliances.

Bardeen, Brittain and Shockley ring a bell ?  Inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 (nobel Prize for that in 1956),  Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce (silicon chip in 1961 at Texas Instruments), Federico Faggin and Ted Hoff microprocessor  at Intel between 1969 and 1971),  mass storage (there is a really good summary of this fascinating area in http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/08/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/ ) and so many of the storage revolutions have come from our old friend IBM’s laboratories.  The chaps at IBM astounded the world this January by revealing tunnelling electron microscope pictures of their latest experimental memory – storing a byte of data in 8 x 12 ATOM increments.  http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/ibm-scientists/

For me, the light went on about the revelation in technology when Apple brought out their first iPod – then soon after one that could store 40GB of data or songs.  I had recently run all my vinyl LPS onto MP3 songs by hooking up my Yamaha amp to the input on an old Windows 98 laptop running a piece of freeware – that captured the sound and wrote digital files.  Over 200 LPs took up about 13GB – less than half the iPod’s capacity and I could use some more of that huge pocket-sized storage to backup the last ten years’ work files – and still I had space left over.

The early iPods had tiny rotating disk storage.  Rotating disks consume far more power than memory chips, are slower and have moving parts – that are prone to wear after a rather long time, admittedly.

After that came memory chips up to 32GB each for less than $150 a piece – on USBs, then Micro storage of the same capacity – killing off CDs and DVDs as the storage media of choice for movies and audio files.  And at the same time opening up wonderful opportunities for portable audio / video capture and playback – and supporting the contemporary mobile phone industry.

More data drives both the software industry and processor chips to be able to handle huge volumes in acceptable time frames.

The iPad was the device I should have seen coming but didn’t.  Laptops got smaller and smaller and not much less powerful but the cornerstone of the next computer / communications breakthrough was combining computing power and storage capacity with mobile telephony technology AND touch screen technology that for the first time had become fast and reliable (up to a certain level of consumer abuse).

Make no mistake, the early touch screen phones were no great shakes.  Two years ago, Telstra gave me a Samsung Wave phone.  Touch screen.  No keyboard.  Worked when it felt like it.  Two repairs under warranty.  Apple’s iPhone 4 had antennae problems – not good for a phone costing $900.  Two years later I have a new iPhone 4s – and cannot believe how good this thing is.  Lost in Melbourne ?  No problem.  Open up Maps, tell it where you want to go.  It knows where you are from the mobile grid – and shows you how to get to your destination.  Not in Melbourne ?  Doesn’t care.  Works wherever it can see some GPS satellites.

So, as much as Steve Jobs has been lionised for his breakthrough technologies, this in my opinion is because the technologies themselves open up the boundaries for so many other geniuses to develop useful things to do.

Not the least of which is e-books.  Now I know that many of us (including me) are rather partial to the feel of paper and I don’t deny the right of generations of Mr Gutenburg’s progeny their place in the sun.  However I can also appreciate that reading the Steve Job’s story on my iPhone (at less than half the cost of the paper book) has a certain appeal when the extra half kilo matters – on planes and in one’s bag on the train, bus or walking across town.

Moreover, the cost of not chopping down a tree, not typesetting and printing the book, shipping it across the world, putting it up in expensive retail stores and (yikes !) paying the wages of serfs to sell it to you – has advantages for a planet groaning under the weight of moving stuff and consuming ever-increasingly expensive energy.

And the phone – or iPad – or other e-book readers can store far more books than can be read in a month of Sundays.

So how come Australia doesn’t have any Steve Jobs – like lions ?

In our IT global IT and communications industry, there is one common thing underpinning the pivotal discoveries, marvellous software and hardware engineering.  Huge deep pockets for research and development.  And HUGE markets to sell the sometimes underdone products into – producing the cash to finish the job properly.

There is a piece of jigsaw that Australia seems to lack entirely.  The bit that can bring wonderful ideas and prototypes into full-scale production.  And make serious money for the people who invented them and their larger tribes.

What happened after Australian Nobel Florey and Brit Fleming rediscovered penicillin and more importantly collaborated with others to produce it in large quantities ?  The pharmaceutical world-changing equivalent of the microhip ?  Florey’s royalties should be keeping South Australia in research dollars till eternity.

Answer:  Working at Oxford at a time when Britain considered that patenting medical discoveries was unethical, Florey and his team had to fly to America to find an organisation with the resources and cash to scale up production.  You can join the dots, now.

There’s more on Florey at http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/florey/story.htm but the truth seems to be that there is little information because Florey was a humble man shy of publicity.

Perhaps that in itself adds the last missing piece – that a great and inventive mind needs resources and an ego big enough to make investors line up.  A tall poppy, isn’t it; the kind that the uber-egalitarian Australian society hates to see making it truly big.

Ironic is it not that we seem to be OK about the megawealth accrued by worthless obese mining magnates who, by accident of birth and sheer greed personally own enormous fortunes, but lack the foresight to know what to do with it beyond accumulating more.  Those individuals also lack the decency to give something to people who do have the foresight to create the next big things.

Mega wealthy, maybe but certainly no Steve Jobs or more particularly Bill Gates.