Date: Sun, 27 Aug 1995 14:52:02 -0400
From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
To: apple-internet-users@abs.apple.com
Subject: The Geodesic Network, OpenDoc, and CyberDog
Message-ID: 

Everyone remembers the old saw , "When all you have is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail." These days, I think see nails everywhere.
Here's why.

Almost a decade ago, now, in one of my more entrepreneurial moments, I read
Peter Huber's 1986 "The Geodesic Network", the US Government Printing
Office version of his report to Judge Green, the judge who broke up the
Bell System, on the status of the breakup and what Huber thought the next
steps should be.  Peter Huber's a smart guy. Doctorate from MIT, JD from
Harvard. Wrote a great book about junk science and tort law. The upshot of
Huber's report was a polite version of "Deregulate 'em all and let God sort
'em out".  It took 10 years, but Regional Bell Operating Companies are now
(not too successfully) competing in the information services business, and
it looks like it's a matter of time before the last bastion of the
telephonic monopoly, the local central office, will be utterly deregulated
and competing for its customers like every other business.

The reason Huber gave for his conclusion was something called Moore's Law,
more of an observation, really, named for Gordon Moore, who was one of the
founders of Intel.  Moore figured out something that is painfully obvious
to anyone who's bought a computer: the cost of some given semiconductor
"horsepower" falls by half over a very short period time: every 18 months
when Moore first looked at it. You would think that Moore's Law would
bottom out eventually, but it's hard to see that any time soon. Moore
himself figured that it would happen around 1980 or so, and if anything,
this "half-life" of semiconductors has decreased since. It's now half every
12 months.  That means that your brand-new whizzy PowerPC-604-based Mac
could be worth half what you paid for it in as little as a year. Moore's
Law is why Guy Kawasaki wrote in one of his columns a few years ago that
smart people start saving for the next computer the day after they buy the
one they have.

This implosion of the price of microprocessors really got Huber's
attention. Telephone switches are microprocessors.  Because the cost of
switches (operators) was so expensive, and because lines were much cheaper
in comparison, the telephone system was originally set up as a hierarchy.
Operators switched long distance calls up the network's hierarchy and then
back down to complete a call.  The further a call had to go, the higher up
the "root" structure of the net the call had to go. The faster "switches",
or rooms with more operators, were at the top. Remember that picture from
the 1920's with an operator supervisor on roller-skates supervising
hundreds of operator switchboards?  So, this couldn't go on forever, people
cost too much just to switch phone calls, and switching evolved from
electromechanical (pulses, or "clicks") to transistors (tones) to
semiconductors.  Shockley, the guy who invented the transistor, worked for
Bell Labs, remember?

With the advent of semiconductors, you could build really small switches.
You could even build one called a Private Branch Exchange, or PBX for
short, which really just put a small central office on your premises, if
your company was big enough.  Once companies could switch their own calls,
however, all bets were off.  The was no reason you couldn't just string a
bunch of private lines between your headquarters and your branches and
build your own minature version of the long-distance network.  You then
wondered how you could lower the costs of your private lines, and you
couldn't, because you were buying them from a telephone monopoly. There
wasn't any competition for long distance direct lines between a company's
various PBXs, much less switched traffic, which is how most normal long
distance calls are handled.

We all know where this went: MCI sued AT&T, and Judge Green broke up the
network. He hired Peter Huber three years later, who looked at all these
switches, *and* their collapsing prices, and decided that instead of lines
being cheaper than nodes (switches), which necessitated a hierarchical
network, things were the reverse, and accellerating with a vengence.  In
other words, the network had changed from a "root"-like hierarchy to
another familiar network, the network of lines and nodes one finds in Bucky
Fuller's geodesic domes, or, as Huber called it, a "Geodesic Network",
which is what he titled his report to Judge Green.  In a geodesic network,
there is no up or down. A packet of information could be going through a
switch in any direction, in and out of any line. The information content of
the network is so huge that if it were concentrated at any one node, or
switch, the switch couldn't be built big enough to hold it all. It would
choke.

You can see the rise of the geodesic network model in all sorts of things
(remember what I said about everything looking like a nail?), the
ubiquitous computing stuff they're doing at Xerox PARC is the most famous
example, and my favorite really outrageous one is the capital markets and
the financial system, particularly when you look at the long term
consequences of digital bearer certificates like digital cash, or digital
stocks and bonds.

Anyway, my favorite analogy (and you can see I use way too many as it is
;-)) for the effect of microprocessors on information is that of a
surfactant: plain old soap.  Like the Dawn commercial, where a drop of dish
soap breaks those big grease globs into smaller and smaller pieces until
they seem to disappear, Moore's Law does the same thing to information, and
by extension, information hierarchies.  Now it seems that information
hierarchies are the central fact of modern life, and everything from
governments to corporations to *practically* any organization imaginable
evolves into one when it gets big enough. However, let's dance around the
sociology a bit here and apply this strictly to software on the internet,
which is the mother of all geodesic networks, specifically the internet as
a glaring exception to the rule of organization as information hierarchy.

There is of course, sizable argument about whether the internet is in fact
organized, but it *is* organized, and it is because it is *out* of control
that it works. In fact, Keven Kelly's excellent book, called, ironically
;-), "Out of Control", speaks precisely to that point.  Kelly talks about
organization "emerging" from chaotic circumstances, about biological
analogs to this, like a beehive, and about why the net works. It's a great
read, and I reccommend it highly.

When I went to the recent Boston MacWorld, to get into the exhibits free
(and to get a free lunch in the process), one of my friends, who's a VAR,
signed me up to an Apple product road show as an "associate". I mean, I
*am* an associate of his, and I *do* send my systems integration hardware
buys through him, so I was probably even legit, in a backhanded sort of
way.

Now,  I'm a Certified MacBigot�, but I haven't been paying much attention
to microcomputer markets much in the last year or so because I've focused
so much of my time on the net, in particular, on internet commerce. I have
gotten to the point that where the net is the only thing that gets me
really fired up creatively.  To paraphrase Gibson a little, sometimes I
think that hardware as just "meat"; the Real Stuff is on the net. It's
certainly true the thrill is gone. Used to be, when you went to MacWorld,
you saw at least one thing which really surprised you, because you couldn't
have imagined that it could even exist. Now, when you go to MacWorld, you
see something which has been announced for months, or years, in advance,
and is usually just a new wrinkle on an old thing.  Not so on the internet.
You have everything from news and mail groups to the web, discussing
everything from why the Brits have the new Babylon-5 episodes and we don't,
to digital cash and cryptoanarchy.

For someone with the attention span of a gnat, like me, the net is heaven.
You can pretty quickly find the bleeding edge of some new field, get spun
up in a few weeks and actually ask intellegent questions, and even make a
conceptual contribution or two, if you bring something new to the table.
Things are changing so fast that everyone's knowlege gets retreaded almost
yearly. *Thank* you, Mr. Moore.

I used to think, "if only you could get paid to do this stuff", and now,
it's beginning to look like you can. With the advent of internet commerce,
someday pretty soon you'll be able to live anywhere you want, and sell what
you do, or what you think, even, to anyone, anywhere. For cash.  The
ganglia twitch. I love this place.

So. I'm in MacWorld, marvelling at how the outrigger on some of the new PCI
PowerMacs allows you to tilt the whole guts of the machine away from the
motherboard so you can plug memory into it, (to loud applause ;-), and the
next thing they talk about is OpenDoc.  I've heard about OpenDoc, but
remember I've been a net.head for the past year and a half, I've given up
arguing with idiots about why the Mac is Better then Windows, and my
MacWeeks get a cursory glance, if at all, anymore: Hardware is Meat, and
all that.  So the guy demos a clock part, and then a database part, and
then a chart part, and light dawns on Marblehead: and epiphany worthy of
O.Henry.

What I'm looking at in OpenDoc is geodesic software. The code only gets
used when it's needed, just like that surfacted information on a geodesic
network. It can point to a process or information anywhere, on your
machine, down the hall, in New South Wales, anywhere.

That's nothing new, of course.  McNeally(sp) of Sun has said the "network
is the computer" for a decade or more, and we're still wrestling with stuff
like CORBA to get it all organized and under control, and no one has
figured out how to *really* implement the object model on an
enterprize-wide basis and all of that gark, and meanwhile I'm looking it
all in the face, right here at MacWorld, between bites of a ham and cheese
sandwich.

The beauty of OpenDoc is that it *doesn't* have to be organized, or more
precisely, *controlled*.  The user picks his parts and puts them together,
the user figures out what he wants to see, the developer has no idea what
his OpenDoc part is going to actually be used *for*, doesn't care too much
about what it interacts *with* besides what it needs to run, and only cares
about what his part *does*. Organization from chaos.

I immediately had all kinds of ideas for this OpenDoc stuff. My pet one is
navigation. You know, like, boats? It's easy to see how under OpenDoc, a
chart is a compound document. There can be parts for meridians (the lines
for latitude, longitude, even loran time differences), transponders (depth,
wind, location like GPS), courses, contours (depth and elevation lines,
isobars), and marks (bouys, landmarks, other boats), and pictures (clouds,
rain, water temperature stuff from NOAA). Superimpose them on one compound
document, and bingo, a living, breathing picture of where you are right
now, with live information from wherever it comes from: NOAA, the
instruments on your boat, other boats, the bouys in the water, wherever.

All lit up like this, I then went to see a friend who works at Apple.  When
I was a graduate student at Chicago in the middle 80's, I used to work
midnight to eight in the morning at the computation center. I spent a lot
of time in my office smoking baseball-bat cigars, eating pizza with
everything, reading usenet news, and chatting with a high school crony in
Dublin. It was a lot of fun then, but I got a real job in Boston, and I
hadn't really messed with the net since.  My friend was the one who got me
back on to the net a year or so ago, by making me buy Adam Engst's book,
the "Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh".

So, when I see my friend, holed up in an Apple computer lab at the Parker
House Hotel, I told him about my little epiphany with OpenDoc, and all he
said was "CyberDog". At that point, I went into grinnin' fool mode.

Now, I remember people talking, and even skimming over articles, about
CyberDog, Apple's OpenDoc environment for the internet, and I thought at
the time that Apple was trying to write a Yet Another Netscape Killer. I'd
even read the various articles on Apple-Internet-Users about it. Now, with
geodesic "hammer" in hand, all I could see was nails: I could see that
CyberDog isn't a Netscape killer at all, any more than OpenDoc is a Word 6
killer.

It's Moore's law come to internet applications. It's a code surfactant,
breaking software up into smaller and smaller pieces, enabling it to exist
in more and more remote places, making it more and more ubiquitous, more
uncontrolled, more inefficient, and more powerful, and, paradoxically, more
organized, in the emergent fashion of Kelly's "Out of Control".

The internet, a creature of Moore's Law, has always had applications like
this. When I got my copy of Adam's book, they were all there. Fetch,
NewsWatcher, TurboGopher, Eudora. InterSLIP. ("Dating" myself, though it's
only been 14 months)

Mosaic was too big, so you had to download it yourself. Netscape hadn't
been released, but eventually it would dwarf even Mosaic. Why? Because
Netscape and Mosaic were web-browsers, and because although HTML is itself
a kind of compound document architecture, albeit a very primative one, it
was never actually designed to *be* one, it just grew into the role.

The problem Netscape is, as we've said here already, even though it tries
to use helper apps in a quasi-parts fashion, is *just* a web-browser. It's
like the meridian part (the latitude and longitude lines) in my example
about a compound navigation document. You need it under everything, so that
you can tell where you are, and the other parts can array themselves in
relation to it, but it doesn't need to do all the stuff that all the other
apps do. Netscape, like the any node in a geodesic software network, will
choke on all the code if it tries to control it all at once.  As we all
know, a geodesic network, like the internet itself, will automatically
route around bottlenecks.

Now, there are other architectures out there, not the least of which is
OLE, ostensibly a compound document architecture, but is in reality
Microsoft's bus for linking all its "Office" applications, and thus trying
to create with it a super-app which is supposed to be the software
equivalent of kudzu, choking all its competition out of the water. OLE may
do more to increase the market for Pentium chips than any marketer at Intel
ever dreamed, but I don't think that it's going to do what Microsoft hopes.
I think that Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree for two reasons: One,
if it plays its historic "dog in the manger" role of controlling code to
its own advantage, it will eventually collapse under the load of trying to
write it all.  Word 6 is a good case in point, and it's just a word
processor. Two, if Microsoft actually opens up OLE to the rest of the
world, by improving it so it works better, and by improving its developer
evangelism, including *not* saving the juicy bits for its own developers
first, then Microsoft gets its application code base broken up just like a
big glob of grease in dishwater breaks up when the soap hits it. Microsoft
goes back to being an operating system company, sans the efforts of Mses
Clinton, Reno, Bingaman, et. al.

Which is why I think the idea of OpenDoc on the internet, and by extension
the CyberDog project, is very interesting.  I expect that there will be a
Netscape OpenDoc part, just like there will be parts for every Mac normal
internet app, like Newswatcher, for instance. The people on the mcip list
(the Macintosh Cryptography Interface Project) are talking about a PGP part
as soon as PGP 3.0, which is modularized, comes out. I can see how internet
commerce parts, like parts for First Virtual, or Cybercash, or more
important, how MacEcash, Digicash's digital cash app, could be converted
into an OpenDoc part for CyberDog. Just drag your coins out the Ecash
part's window and drop them on the cash register icon in the Netscape
SSL-protected form (or IPSEC-protected, security's just a part, remember).

It gets worse, however. Remember how Moore's law drove the terminal-host
model to client-server? Are you ready for peer-to-peer on steroids, for
server-server?  In a twisted parody of Huey "Kingfish" Long's campaign
slogan of "Every man a king", we're looking at everybody a server.  In a
geodesic model for software, concentrations of code are surfacted away by
the ubiquity of the processors on hand for the job. We already know about
farming out ray-tracing on a network of graphic Macs, one machine acting as
a massively parallel parasite of unused computer cycles on other machines.
Even this is too hierarchical, too top-down.  The cypherpunks, a
"electronic mail list of cryptographers, hackers, and mathemeticians"
according to the Wall Street Journal, are at this moment cracking yet
another rediculuously small keyspace that Netscape is forced to use to
encrypt foriegn credit card transactions, to prove that the State
department regulations calling cryptography a munition, the ITARs, are
hopelessly out of date, and that anybody can read international web-traffic
with ease. A participant's machine links to the server running the search,
requests a block of keyspace to search, searches it, and sends back whether
it's found the key.  The key server just keeps track of the processing. The
processing is actually done by the hundreds of machines requesting keyspace
to search. Nobody's in charge here.  The machine with the keyspace to be
searched isn't telling the machines searching the keyspace how to do it.
Any machine can be a keyspace server or a keyspace processor, depending
upon the circumstances.

One more thing. The machine which finds the key actually gets a reward of
about 450 of Digicash's beta digital cash certificates, called Cyberbucks,
or c$ for short, which are currently trading at US$5/c$100, or 5 cents per,
and this is a horse of a different color entirely.  Digicash did not
anticipate a secondary market for it's nonreplicable certificates, which
evidently are being given a cash value on their electronic uniqueness and
secure transmissability alone.  People are actually buying physical stuff.
A major example was a "This T-shirt is a Munition" shirt, printed with the
RSA algorithm in 4 lines of PERL and in machine-readable barcode, bought
from a server in Great Britian by someone in the US, who will be importing
something he can't then export, or even show to a foriegn national without
breaking the law.  All with these "beta" certificates Digicash had no idea
would be traded.

Welcome to the future, Apple.  It is easy to see how people who create
things can get paid in a geodesic market like this. It's easy to see how
people can be paid for their knowlege of something in particular.  It's
easy to see how, with teleoperation, even machine operators (like
surgeons!) can get paid. It's easy to see that, like the factory jobs did
to the farms and to the domestic staffs of the world, people would rather
work here than where they worked before, which is all too often an office
full of grey cubicles.

I hope that Apple, which has done it's own imitation of the dog in the
manger on occasion, and who fortunately can't hold a candle to Microsoft in
that department, will figure out two things: First, 30% of the
microcomputers hooked into the net are Macs, and the Macintosh way of doing
things is the reason for that. Second, the people who write either client
or server code for those net.macs are about to get paid, directly, by their
customers, and eventually get paid in cash, for their their efforts.

A lot of money's going to be out there for the company selling those
developers the tools and the standards to do their jobs, as long as Apple
realizes that they're not marketing transactions here, that they're
marketing relationships, and that they have to avoid hogging all the code
for themselves.  That dog won't hunt. It's too busy keeping the cows out of
the manger.

A geodesic network routes around all obstructions.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga







-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131
USA (617) 323-7923
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
>>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf@clark.net  http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<



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