As an IT professional I have the fortune to procure, utilize and tinker with some fantastic technology. I'm lucky enough to work at an institution where bandwidth is not an issue, processing speeds and memory -- at least for my purposes -- are always readily available. This week I was buying a new storage device that has a capacity of 4TB (~4,000 GB or 4,000,000 MB) and thought back to my start in IT.
In the mid 1980's Dad brought home a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer just like my neighbor Tracey and her dad Ed had. Running at 3.0Mhz the system ran an early version of BASIC and offered me Tombstone City and Parsec. More importantly, it offered a glimpse into programming. I still remember my first code:
10 PRINT "JASON IS COOL" 20 GOTO 10 RUN
Jealous aren't you? :) Somewhere between 1988 and 1990 the TI was sold and replaced with an IBM XT. The XT ran MS-DOS at 4.77Mhz, had a 10MB hard drive, a 360KB 5.25" floppy drive, and the upgrade 640KB of memory and sported a 12" green monochrome monitor. It was this XT machine that propelled my knowledge of computers and what they could be capable of doing (so little did I know). Dad claims to have taught me everything I know about computers -- a point on which we'll have to agree to disagree -- though I do certainly concede that he undoubtedly aided in providing the hardware that sparked my career path. This XT allowed me to run QBASIC which refined some rudimentary programming skills of the day into more advanced programs that drew circles on the screen and filled in boxes that made a face. It also allowed for Print Shop to run and put the 9-pin dot matrix Okidata printer through its paces.
Moving on the XT left the house, replaced by an AT computer -- a 286 computer running at 12Mhz and sporting an unheard of 1MB of RAM. It was with this computer that I entered the age of digital communications with the necessary peripheral of the day, a modem. Running at 300 baud (300 bits/sec, or 37.5 Bytes/sec) this modem linked me to the first BBS I ever dialed, where the SysOp was my cousin Daryl. The BBS was called Abacus. You could dial in, share files and send messages to be read later by other users that dialed in. Too cool. This was the first in a long line of BBSes that I frequented; others being Trading Post and Troll's Cave. I also participated in FidoNet -- an early form of store-and-forward email exchange between BBSes. Yes, you could actually "message" or "email" a user on a BBS that you never called directly -- even across the U.S.! The emails were, in effect, routed from hub to hub until reached at the destination. Today, SMTP is the common mode of transport for emails (and in much less time).
The 286 was sold to Chip Boles' parents (can't believe I remember that) and replaced by a 386 running at 16Mhz. We also ditched that 300 baud modem for a blazing 2400 baud version. Then came a 486 DX @ 25Mhz and 2MB of RAM (and a 14.4K modem! woot!), followed by the fantasic Pentium powered machine screaming at 120Mhz with 16MB of RAM and -- yes -- a hard drive that topped 1GB (1.2 to be exact) of fathomless storage possibility. The 28.8K baud modem provided an excellent means to speedily chat online for hours and it was around this time that multi-line BBSes were all the rage and I became a frequenter of Sounds of Silence BBS which had 8-12 lines initially and I believe later scaled to 32+ lines. I met a few good friends on SoS -- a couple which I now see on Facebook from time to time. It was also around this time that I learned the awesomeness of Winsock 1.1 and Netscape to get on this thing called the Internet and it's fancy web pages.
Many years and many systems and modems (56K wha?) later I entered the broadband age near 1999 when I went to WKU for undergrad. At the time WKU students, faculty and staff shared a 10Mb/s connection to the Internet which was already showing signs of overburdened use. Today I have an 8Mb (with 20Mb burst) connection to my house. At work the connection tops 1Gb/s and can be easily put through it's paces by the students, faculty and staff.
Today, an 8GB USB key can be purchased for under $20 and a 1TB external hard drive for under $100. A box of 10 3.5" DS/HD floppies used to run over $12 alone (that's why you bought the cheaper 720K version and drilled a second hole to make them 1.44MB disks.) I write this blog post on a Macbook Pro running a dual core 3.06Ghz processor with 4GB of memory and a 256GB solid state hard drive (SSD). It's completely wireless to my broadband connection where, in less than a second, this post will be on Blogger, Facebook and Twitter -- accessible to hundreds of millions of users. All this to say that I wonder what Ethan will grow up using. He's 17 weeks old today and has his own website and blog to document his early life for out of town family and friends. Whatever it is, I will have taught him everything he knows. :)
Earlier this month I enjoyed another great trip to Seattle (pics) for Microsoft Sharepoint Conference 2008. The conference was really beneficial to our progress at work in leveraging Sharepoint for our intranet, collaboration, and data management to the extent possible. After the conference we were privileged to visit Redmond, Washington, at Microsoft's headquarters. There, in Building 33 -- better known as the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center -- Chris and I were invited to visit the Microsoft Home of the Future and the Center for Information Work.
Microsoft Home of the Future I enjoyed this tour more than the CIW, personally. It starts in an Asian-style entry way where when the doorbell rings the homeowner's cell phone chirps with an image of the visitor. The owner can then choose options to ask the visitor to leave a message or even unlock the door remotely. Once inside, the house -- "Grace" -- tells where the members of the family are, the weather and a few reminders. "Grace" presents herself visually using OLED technology, hidden behind the painted wall. We saw pervasive use of RFID tags in place of today's more common UPC labels. The RFID technology allows for items -- decorations, greeting cards, anything -- to be tagged with meta-data. The house 'knows' what items are on the kitchen counter, what ingredients are missing from the recipe that's being projected onto the counter. The dining room can be redecorated on the fly for the child's party -- changing wall projections, and even projecting interactive placemats on the table that the kids can play with. There's way too much to mention here, but wildly entertaining.
Microsoft Center for Information Work Still impressive was the CIW. In this room there were a multitude of workstations. Some had what appeared to be three 20" projection screens, some were tablets, many flat panels, and even haptic-based input panels (aka multi-touch). We saw voicemails converted to text on the fly and placed into your Inbox with emails, meetings, and more -- with the system able to filter out what you don't want or what is lower priority. Advanced videoconferencing was shown with Microsoft's Roundtable device, along with Office Communication Server to demonstrate the ability to be "seated" across from a panel of speakers even in a standard office environment setting.
Friends, as a part of my job I research and explore new technologies and seek ways to put them to good use. Some fall into my "why in the world" category, some into my "that's cool" genre, and a select few I choose as "must have". Today, I share a few of the best finds with you and you may have heard of these before, but never reviewed with my intense wit and charm (see what I mean?).
Google Labs' GOOG411 and Reader Call me biased but there's one company that doesn't often make a mistake with their product. If it needs "fixing" they do it and quickly. I wasn't impressed by the first version of Google Reader but in it's latest iteration I have found it incredible. I can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as I want and Google Reader will feed them to me however I want -- chronologically, random, alphabetical -- and know what I've read and what I haven't. I can see, at a glance, all the feed topics and after viewing those that catch my eye I can click "Mark All Read" and move on. Why use this over Outlook or IE's built in reader -- simple. I can use Google Reader on my laptop at home, desktop at work, my Motorola Q and the content is the same and always up-to-date.
Labs recently debuted GOOG-411, a voice-response system that is free to use to find business listings. You simply dial 1-800-GOOG-411 from any phone, tell it the city and state, and what you are looking for. GOOG411 presents you with the top listings and you can simply pick by number or ask for "more". Want GOOG411 to connet you, just stay on the line of say "Connect". You can also ask for "directions" or have it sent to you phone with "text message". An incredible alternative to cell providers charging you $1.49 per call to their own 411 service.
GrandCentral.com Originally a start-up GrandCentral is now owned by Google. GrandCentral provides you with a single phone number that you provide to everyone instead of giving them your home, cell, and office numbers. They call one number and all of your phones ring, or only certain phones -- it's all up to you. Every call is logged and can be screened, sent to voicemail, recorded (which notifies the caller of the recording) and you can see it all online, mobile, anytime. You classify your frequent callers into Family, Friends, Work or Other and can choose which of those groups call which phones. And possibly my favorite part is that you only have one voicemail to check. GrandCentral is currently by invitation only and if you ask nicely I may help you out (cash bribes accepted).
OhDontForget.com Simple service but very handy. You "add" your number to the service and then you can schedule text messages to your or your spouses phone at any time using a very simple interface. Very handy for quick reminders.
Mozy.com Love this one. Most people have data they want to backup, but to where and how? You could have an external hard drive with one of those free softwares that copies data to that drive on a schedule. Great. Now you have it in two places hooked to the same computer that can be struck by the same lightning. We need to one-up this. Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology is essentially a hard drive on a stick. You hook the drive to your home network and your computer can backup data to this drive and you may not lose them both at the same time -- or will you? What if you were one of those affected by the April 7th tornado or Katrina and lost your house and along with it all of your precious digital data? Tax records, family photos, important documents all good in an instant.
For a while there have been services available such as Carbonite and XDrive that will backup your data over the Internet to a private storage facility. Enter Mozy. Carbonite has issues -- you need a client program to access/restore your data, you must transfer the entire file when changes are made, and multiple versions are not kept. XDrive, from AOL, also has the lack of delta transfer technology, but also cannot backup open/locked files. Mozy is incredibly easy to setup and 2GB of space is yours free. Have a lot of photos and other data? Need 50GB? No problem. XDrive will give you that for $120 a year. Mozy will do it for half that. Need 100, 200, or 500GB? XDrive will laugh at you. Mozy will answer the call and for not a penny more.
I recently shared the following video with a colleague and we both agree it ROCKS. The video, from TED in March 2007, demonstrates Seadragon technology. Seadragon centers around a concept that you only need to render on screen at the screen's resolution. In doing so you can view photos at hundreds of megapixels and continuously zoom in to an almost infinite level. Imagine this -- being able to open your newspaper and the period at the end of a sentence contains the complete text of a book you want to read and the first letter on the first page of that book can be zoomed to reveal hidden secrets about the story. Yeah. You'll then see Photosynth which contains Seadragon technology. Photosynth lets you view a 3D environment from almost any angle, made from 2D images -- such as all public images from Flickr tagged with "Times Square". Very, very cool. Enjoy...
A term has been tossed around for a while now -- "Web 2.0" -- and many people do not fully grasp what this means. I've been asked several times to explain Web 2.0 and recently came across this video that does an excellent job at demonstrating the mash-up process that has brought us to the living internet.
What an amazing world we live in these days. Imagine, if you will, that persons living in 1850 would have laughed at the idea of "automobiles". If you lived in 1900 you were amazed by Edison and Bell bringing their wonderous distributed electricity and telephone into the world. A person living in 1950 would have smacked you if you said you had a "computer" in your house (or your pocket!). In 1990 I was using dialup and only dreamed of faster speeds. Look at us now, and tomorrow.
Cisco has an incredible commercial on the air right now that I will paraphrase for you. The essential message is that of the "human network" -- any content, any device, any network. The commercial shows this to us: books re-write themselves (Wikipedia), drag-and-drop people anywhere they want to go (IM, SMS, mobile web, VoIP), maps are rewritten (Google Earth), and anyone can be famous (YouTube/Google Video). The commercial's underlying message is no doubt intended to say, "we're Cisco and we power the network" but the voice-over is quite powerful --"we're more powerful together than we could ever be apart".
