Clearly since Ms. Livingston was
graduated from college, she has learned a
lot about the economy, business,
start-ups, making money, getting financial
security, careers, and jobs. And likely
and apparently she got a good marriage.
Good.
History
But nearly unbroken history of at least
the past 200 years shows that the
knowledge frontier she reached keeps
moving forward. So, yes, likely Ms.
Livingston knows more about start-ups,
etc. than her mother did, but, even so, it
is not clear that she knows enough about
start-ups people in their teens and 20s
need to know now to do well to get started
on doing well in the rest of their
careers.
Do well? Sure: Have to select the good
start-ups and f'get about the rest. How
to do that? Not easily, e.g., the venture
capital world tries but, from some data
posted by VC Fred Wilson on his blog
AVC.com (1) about 2/3rds of the start-ups
he funded flop (don't do well, or some
such) and (2) on average the return on
investment (ROI) of US information
technology start-ups is poor, less good
than Ms. Livingston helped obtain in her
first job in Boston that counted the
minutes she was on her coffee breaks.
Sure, Ms. Livingston might have majored in
computer science and joined Microsoft in
1990. Alas, we come this way only once,
and we don't get do-overs or re-dos, at
least not until we get a time machine.
So, what to tell young people now?
Since Ms. Livingston is talking about
start-ups mostly in information
technology, we should consider such
things, and there is less to the
significant history there than often
meets the eye:
(1) In the 1930s, Bell saw clearly that
vacuum tubes were too big, expensive,
unreliable, and hot for the future of the
US long distance phone network. So, a
better amplifier was needed. They had a
solid state rectifier, so what about a
solid state amplifier? They started a
project. WW II got in the way, but soon
after the war, presto, bingo, fireworks in
the sky, a giant step for Bell and a much
larger step for mankind -- the transistor.
Exercise: Why so important? At the time
Bell saw the importance for civilization
and, thus, decided not to patent the
transistor. So, write an essay that might
have been written in, say, 1949, on why
the transistor should be so important.
(2) Soon enough the Cold War caused the US
DoD to want a lot of digital electronics
for aerospace, and thus, erupted from
Stanford, due in part to Dean Terman,
Silicon Valley to supply electronics to
the US DoD and later NASA.
(3) Fairly soon Silicon Valley saw how to
put several transistors on one piece of
silicon and make integrated circuits.
Gee, could make little devices! An
electronic calculator to replace all those
mechanical parts? Sure: But, still, need
a lot of transistors, maybe more than for
just a small, simple, general purpose
computer where the rest of the calculator
functions are just from software? Yup.
So, bingo, simple microprocessors.
(4) NSF: MIT had some ideas for
interactive computers with a lot of
security. So NSF funded their Project MAC
which did the operating system Multics
with an hierarchical file system and
security features capabilities and
access control lists. For
authentication, MIT did Kerberos. Then
Kerberos made use of RSA encryption, also
from MIT. Big things still with us; moving
right along here.
(5) Bell Labs again: They wanted word
whacking. DEC had a mini-computer, so
Bell borrowed a little from Multics, etc.,
wrote a simple operating system Unix
written in a simple programming language
C. Later Bjarne Stroustrup, also at Bell
Labs, wrote a pre-processor for C to
support software objects -- the
pre-processor was called C++.
Since Bell was a regulated monopoly, they
couldn't sell Unix so essentially gave it
away. A group at Berkeley, as I recall
funded by the US DoE, did more with UNIX
and made their work available as the
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
Unix became Linux, and C++ and software
objects are still with us.
(6) Lots of people, not just Bell, were
struggling with typing. IBM had their
Selectric and, eventually, a correcting
Selectric with a little white ribbon that
would remove from the page a character
struck in error. But, why no actual word
whacking? Okay, Apple II, IBM PC,
WordStar, etc.
Biggie. Really big biggie.
(7) We got Microsoft that recapitulated
the mainframe history in operating
systems, and Intel came along with
microprocessors that recapitulated the
mainframe history in processors. Now
WinTel put on "every desktop" a computer
for word whacking, Microsoft Word, and
business arithmetic, Excel. Gates on the
way to being the richest person in the
world. Not too doing too badly, Paul
Allen, Charlie Simoni, Nathan Myhrvold,
etc.
(8) Ah, the US DoD again: It wanted
battlefield communications, where even if
shoot holes in some of the equipment the
rest still works and provides
communications. So, we got TCP/IP, e.g.,
in BSD, that is, we got internets. Soon
labs were connected, and we got the
Internet. Soon NSF funded it and IBM ran
it. With HTTP and HTML for a particle
physics newsletter by Tim Berners-Lee at
CERN, we got the Web. Companies put their
company brochures on the Internet.
(9) For the Internet, we needed more in
communications capacity. Enter Bell labs
again: They'd seen that one coming, too,
and had been working on Ga-Al-As (as in
the periodic table from a chemistry book)
solid state heterojunction lasers and
had the solution. Bingo: Send at 40+
billion bits per second (Gbps) on one
wavelength, some dozens of wavelength on
one fiber, some dozens of fibers in one
cable, maybe several cables along a
pipeline, electric power line, railroad
track, highway, river, ocean shoreline,
across an ocean or few, etc. Now, watch
movies!
(10) Presto, IBM and others learned more
about putting magnetic dots on surfaces,
and now we have hard disk drives in the 3
1/2" form factor size with a few
trillion bytes each. And HP is on the way
with a trillion bytes, solid state, on a
postage stamp.
So, now we can build server farms at
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft,
Apple, Amazon, etc., and we can have
start-ups like SnapChat, PInterest, Box,
etc.