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02.08

Feeling Obsolete? Stay Tuned.

By Donald Christiansen

The other day I was reorganizing my office for more efficient operation — a process my wife would always refer to as “cleaning up the mess.” In due course, I stumbled across an ancient board game I had not seen in years. Perhaps you remember it. Called “King Chip,” it came out in 1985.

The game was targeted to engineers and techies in general. It was based on questions and answers, some 4,000 in all, printed on 675 2 ¾ x 5 inch cards. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could answer several of the 23-years-old questions. They involved mostly computers, communications, and solid-state technology and were grouped into five levels of difficulty. I went right for level 5 — most difficult. Here are a few of them. You will find the answers at the bottom of this column. No peeking!

1. In the 5-bit Baudot code, one binary value was assigned two different natural language values. How did a machine know which value to use?

2. MOS is metal oxide silicon. What is SOS?

3. When referring to dynamic RAM, what do the letters RAS and CAS mean?

4. What is the generic name for the copyrighted term Xerography?

5. Why is ECL more expensive than TTL?

6. What was the designation of the IEEE committee that worked on standardization of the CMSA/CD network protocols?

Though at one time I may have been able to answer nearly all of the two dozen or so questions that I had randomly picked, now I missed several. Was it because of the natural lapse of human memory, or did it have something to do with the oft-repeated “law” that technology changes so rapidly that what we learned x number of years ago (in this case, 23) becomes obsolete and thus not worth remembering.

This question led me to undertake a bit of research on what else was happening in 1985 that might lend credence to that law of engineering obsolescence. Here’s some of what I found.

• The cold war was at its height. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was two years old. Its goals included increased research in weapons exploiting directed energy and kinetic energy, plus systems for surveillance, tracking, kill assessment, and command, control and communications.

• Martin Marietta was just months into its $684 million contract with the FAA as system integrator for the air-traffic modernization program. $10 billion had been earmarked for the 10-year project, named the National Airspace System Plan.

• The go-ahead was given by the FDA to four manufacturers of nuclear magnetic resonance machines, a technology begun in 1983 with the placement of just 14 machines in U.S. healthcare facilities.

• LISP, the artificial intelligence software, was taking hold. Digital Equipment Corp.’s VAX LISP was among the leaders, with Data General and Gold Hill Computers also active. The DOD was converting to its new standard, Ada.

• Motorola implemented the 32-bit MC68020 in CMOS, with a processing rate of 4 MIPS. UNIX, a favorite for use with 32-bit microprocessors, was being modified to handle real-time and multiprocessing applications.

• The seven divested companies of AT&T created Bell Communications Research to provide some of the technical support previously provided by Bell Laboratories.

• Encore Computer introduced the long-anticipated bus-based Multimax computer, to compete with the Balance, from Sequence.

• “Microsupercomputers” came on the scene, like the Convex 4-MIPS, 50-megaflop computer priced at about half a million dollars.

• AT&T introduced the Unix PC, IBM discontinued its PC Jr., and Apple stopped production of its Macintosh XL (Lisa). Wall Street concerned itself with slowing growth in the PC market, troubled by increased sales of only 23 percent. The Intel 8-MHz 80286 was widely used in most of the new PCs introduced during the year.

• The National Science Foundation reported more than 100 parallel computing research projects underway in the United States and Canadian universities, leading one microprocessor researcher to predict that new architectures would boost processor performance by one or even two orders of magnitude in just a few years.

• In the Canary Islands, tests by AT&T Bell Laboratories of the first international undersea lightwave communication system got underway.

• Not all news was good in the semiconductor business. Oversupply and pricing wars prevailed for most commodity chips. But the future appeared bright for applications-specific ICs (ASICs).

• Power ICs became available from at least a dozen makers, several of them outside the United States (Europe and Japan). They were capable of handling the higher currents and voltages of automotive applications, consumer appliances, motors, etc.

• Gallium-arsenide ICs, commercially available only since 1983, were making inroads as it became possible to fabricate wafers of 2 to 3 inch diameters. Fiber-optic lightguide telecommunications was projected to be a major application because of the speed and high noise immunity of GaAs. Mitsubishi was seen as a potential leader in the field.

• One of Three Mile Island’s nuclear power reactors came back on line—nearly 6 ½ years after the 1979 accident.

• Power equipment, including transformers and circuit breakers formerly manufactured by U.S. manufacturers like Westinghouse and General Electric, were being outsourced to countries like Japan, Germany and France, leading to concern about U.S. competitiveness by the U.S. Department of Commerce. In an expansion of its HVDC line, the Bonneville Power Administration elected to purchase the needed equipment from the Swiss manufacturer Brown Boveri & Cie AG.

• The battle of Beta and VHS tape recorders was not quite over, while CD players were threatening tape players in general. CD audio players originally priced at $800 or so were now available to consumers at reasonable prices. DVDs were somewhere in the future.

• The first secret military mission was flown aboard the shuttle Challenger in January. NASA predicted that by 1990 at least one third of the shuttle missions would be “military related,” and that 24 flights a year would be flown.

Conclusions?

Looking back at these items from the mid-80s, what might we conclude?

First, while particular technologies may fade from use, most of what we learned from those technologies is not wasted. This may help ease our concerns about the impact of the law of engineering obsolescence, and even suggest that it may not apply in certain instances. Second, not every product developed based on well-defined technology will survive the vagaries of timing, marketing, competition, or, sometimes, the onslaught of even more advanced concepts (no surprise here). Fortunately, while competently designed hardware and software may ultimately fade away, the principles of good design do not. Third, even the most respected high-tech gurus may badly miss the mark in their projections of whether and to what extent a developed technology will succeed in the marketplace. And finally, the seeds of many of today’s larger problems (e.g., global competition and offshoring, nuclear defense, the funding of space exploration, and the overburdened and technically obsolete U.S. air traffic control system) can be found in what happened decades earlier.

Answers to King Chip questions:

1. A shift character preceded the transmission, which identified it as one or the other (e.g., alphabetic or numeric).

2. Silicon on Sapphire

3. Row Address Stroke and Column Address Stroke

4. Electrophotographic printing

5. Emitter coupled logic requires extra diffusion steps, compared to transistor-transistor logic.

6. 802.3 (Specifications have been published for the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection.)

Resources

About technology in the mid-‘80s:

• “Technology ’85,” IEEE Spectrum, January 1985.

• “Technology ’86,” IEEE Spectrum, January 1986.

• Improving the Air Traffic Control System: An Assessment of the National Airspace System Plan, U.S. Government document, August 1983.

• Drucker, P. F., “Beyond the Bell Breakup,” The Public Interest, Fall, 1984.

• Christiansen, D., “Beyond Divestiture,” IEEE Spectrum, January 1985.

• “AT&T Postdivestiture Telecommunications,” IEEE Communications magazine,
  December 1985.

• A Competitive Assessment of the U.S. Electric Power Generating Equipment Industry, U.S. Department of Commerce, October 1985.

• Proceedings of the 1985 National Computer Conference, IEEE Computer Society.

• Proceedings of Compcom ’85, IEEE Computer Society.

• “The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),” IEEE Spectrum special issue, September 1985.
  
  

Epilog (post 1980s):

• “Upgrading the National Airspace System While Supporting the Leadership of Related U.S. Industries,” position statement of the IEEE-USA Board of Directors, 20 June 2002.

• FAA National Flight Program Oversight Office Fact Book, August 2000.

• Hall, T., “Poor Little Lisa,” American Heritage, Summer, 1999 (The Lisa was
  considered a commercial failure. This article reported that Apple buried about
  2,700 unsold Lisas at a landfill in Logan, Utah, and received a tax write-off on the
  unsold inventory.

Corporate Vicissitudes:

• Bell Communications (Bellcore) was created in 1984 by the new regional Bell operating companies. It was acquired by Science Applications International Corp. in 1997 and its name changed to Telcordia to signify that it had severed ownership connections to the Bell companies. In 2004, Providence Equity Partners and Warburg Pincus acquired equal stakes in Telcordia.

• Convex Computers was formed in 1982 and acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1995. HP continued to produce the Convex Exemplar parallel computing machines.

• Encore sold off parts of the company (including a major spin-off of its Storage Products Group to Sun Microsystems in 1997), and was acquired by Compro Computer Services in 2002.

• Post divestiture, Bell Laboratories downsized and closed a number of its facilities. It became part of Lucent, and an entity of Alcatel-Lucent, a company headquartered in Paris, France, when Alcatel acquired Lucent Technologies in December 2006.

About King Chip:

• Sadly, it appears to have gone the way of Beta, PC Jr., and Lisa.
  

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.