Tech Career Nostalgia

from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 3.0 license

I admit I am a pack rat at heart. Perhaps it’s because I was exposed to prairie grandparents who lived through the Great Depression when I was at an impressionable age. Or maybe it’s just a character flaw. Nevertheless, at the end of my 25-year technology career late in 2002, when “my services were no longer required”, I walked away with copies of a variety of software and data I had produced. On at least two occasions over the first few years after that, I got e-mail or a phone call from some of my former bosses who asked, “Is there any chance you have a copy of that wonderfully useful test software you wrote, because we desperately need it and the acquiring company discarded their copies.” I treat that as “thank god you stole it”, so I have no concerns about these particular intellectual property rights. (The editors may disagree.)

Within the last few months, after reading our own fillyjonk’s complaints about doing online classes, as well as seeing similar complaints elsewhere and suffering through Grandparents Day visiting my granddaughter’s classroom by Zoom, I went hunting through my old backup media. I was looking for the stuff I had done in the period from 1993-1995 that provided multimedia capabilities I thought then would be useful for seminars or small conferences conducted over the emerging commercial internet. Working off and on for the last couple of weeks I got players for my three principle media working¹. I am largely disappointed in how little progress seems to have been made in 25+ years. That should be like a century and a half in internet time.

Consider the state of the world near the end of 1993. The abomination called Video for Windows was available but regularly crashed any machine it was running on. The first generation Intel Pentium chips were available but you were much more likely to have a ’486 box running at 50-66 Mhz. With Linux running on that sort of vanilla hardware I had roughly AM radio quality audio and the world’s ugliest video ². It was literally black and white video – black dots and white dots and nothing in between. But it moved! (Like the Sundance Kid, it’s more impressive when it moves.) Fifteen frames per second, so you could read body language and tell the audio and video were synchronized. And I could shove it around the corporate data network, from my office in Boulder to offices in Phoenix or Seattle or Minneapolis³.

by the author, released into the public domain

Early in 1994 I added my version of an overhead transparency projector medium to the kit – vugraphs, as I called them. Again, the basic image was just black and white dots. But with the ability to scribble in red on top of that, and a movable shared pointer (the red square), lots of things were possible. For still images it was obvious I could do better than just black and white, but I was more interested in the “sharing” aspects at that point. At one point at least six people could share the vugraph medium, putting up base images, scribbling with red lines (and boxes and circles and limited text), and fighting over the pointer. I know it worked with six people because a colleague came and got me one day so I could look over his shoulder while six people – three in Boulder and three in Minneapolis – used two instances, one for source code and one for results, while they argued about who had screwed up.

by the author, released into the public domain

By sometime later in 1994 the powers that be insisted I add grayscale video (again, it looks better when it moves). I admit it’s “prettier” in some sense than the black and white dots, but it’s unclear if it was more useful. A couple of years later than this another research group in the company conducted some trials with some universities in Oregon using very expensive workstations and very expensive fiber optic links. The little video windows in those trials, based on someone else’s opinion of what was important, were full color and 24 frames per second. One of the bottom lines in the final report from these trials was, “Given good still images and good audio, video is quickly relegated to body language signaling.” Body language is important⁴.

by the author, released into the public domain

A few years later when color frame grabbers had become more-or-less affordable and processors were faster, some of my prototype applications were still in use for demonstrations and the powers demanded color video. I did a quick and dirty extension to the grayscale but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d lost the war. IP multicast was/is a key element to doing shared media well and the company wasn’t going to implement it. (Nor do the commercial IP providers seem likely to support it in my lifetime.) Services were going to be dominated by software but the company wasn’t interested in being a software company. We could have given away quite reasonable multimedia meeting software as part of the basic service arrangement pre-2000.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment of Fantasia, Walt Disney Corp, fair use claimed

So. Anyone else want to share career nostalgia?

1. Reconstructing this may be one of the dumber things I’ve ever done. It certainly has the potential to be a major time sink if I put together the ability to record things.
2. There wasn’t a chance in hell of doing video other than the very limited VfW media on a Windows box. The necessary preemptive multitasking was still a couple of years away in Windows 95. They did unspeakable things to the rest of the operating system to get their very specific model of video to work at all in 1993
3. Black and white dots met several requirements. At that time, the only display mode you could assume would be available on all the corporation’s desktop computers was black-and-something dots. The computational effort of the decoding algorithm I developed was very low so a ‘486 box could show three or four independently moving little video windows. And some expert had told me I couldn’t implement error diffusion dithering that only encoded partial frames – nothing I liked better at the time than proving some expert wrong. Black and white dots are limiting, but there are a lot of cases where color or even grayscale are not absolutely necessary. She’s still pretty rendered in black and white dots
4. As almost everyone notices, the standard arrangement with a camera in the laptop or phone bezel or clipped to the top of a monitor, that provides a nose-centric view of the person, almost completely precludes body language signaling. I claim this is a really serious flaw and nothing is going to fix it except cameras that catch the person from at least the rib cage up (plus relatively free arm waving).  Michael Siegel’s Video Throughputs series gets it (mostly).{/efn_note] but the one-bit 15 frames per second video transmitted body language quite well