Reflections on Technology and Society

Introduction With the arrival of USB C and the final collapse of the last corporate resistance to the standardization of digital interconnection, it is instructive to reflect on the evolution of these connectors and their electrical and signaling standards going back at least to the 1960s. My first experience with remote computing connections came when I was in high school.  Our school established a relationship with a time sharing operator and situated a Teletype Model 33 ASR device in a small windowless room in the high school.  The device connected by telephone and acoustic coupler to the remote computer and we wrote and ran programs in BASIC. The interconnection between the modem and the teletype was a bundle of wires presented through a DB-25 connector. DB25 (male) connector This connector was referred to at the time as a "D Subminiature," a designation that may have made sense to the engineers who developed it but that is now viewed with hilarity. What was fascinating ...

I have been posting on Quora since April of 2014, earning top writer status in 2017 and 2018 and running up, as of this writing, 5.6 million views by Quora readers. While many of my posts are of limited interest, I'm inordinately proud of some of them.  With this post I will begin retrieving some of my particular favorites from Quora and reposting them here on my blog. There is some fun history behind this particular post.  Back when I was a grad student at CMU back in the 1980s I was friendly with Jeff Schrager, a fellow grad student at the time, and he posted a hilarious item in, as I recall, rec.humor.funny, an early netnews group.  The item was titled "How Many AI People Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb" and I admired it so much that I tracked it down and put it up on this blog some years ago (https://nygeek-blog.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-many-ai-people-does-it-take-to.html). Several years ago someone posted the question, "What are common stages that PhD studen...

BGP reroute Blackholes Facebook, Instagram The sound of silence.

In 1972 I bought the first HP 35 calculator sold on the Caltech campus.  It was not by far the first one on the campus – HP had distributed pre-release copies to numerous faculty members.  Max Delbrück, my next-door neighbor, had given me my first experience with the calculator one evening while hosting my landlady, her family, and me for dinner.  I was smitten. When the Caltech Bookstore posted the impending availability of the calculator I was the first on the list.  The arrival date was not known, so I haunted the bookstore. HP-35 (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mister_rf) They finally came in sometime in November of 1972, if I remember correctly, and I happily paid the $395 price (about a quarter of my life savings at the time).  It was everything I had dreamed of and more.  It transformed my Physics lab performance from C (great on execution and writeup, not so hot on accuracy of calculation) to A.  It made me popular as a member...

Increasingly the various businesses that I pay monthly (rent, garage, credit cards, phone bill, newspaper bill, and utility bill) are only notifying me that I have a payment due by email or worse, not notifying me at all.  Combined with a shrinking window between when the bill is issued and when late charges start to accrue, there is increasing pressure on me to track my bills. In the past I would accumulate unpaid bills on a designated spot on my desk at home.  The presence of paper bills there told me that I had bills to pay.  When a paycheck rendered me sufficiently liquid to write checks, I would pay them. As the transition to email notification and non-notification has progressed, many of these bill issuers have offered to help me out with this scheduling problem.  All I had to do was give them the ability to directly take money from my bank account in whatever amount they desired and at whatever time they liked. You’re kidding, right? Not all of these...

A friend of mine told me that she had logged in to the Social Security Administration's website recently and was able to review her account and get a forecast of her Social Security retirement income, should she make it to retirement. Intrigued, I decided to do the same thing. I went to the website ( www.ssa.gov ) and tried to create myself an account.  I entered my Social Security number, my name, my address, my date of birth, all sorts of information. After a while it told me that it could not create an account for my social security number.  It suggested that I call the help desk and gave me a toll-free number. So I called the number and followed the instructions to get to the help desk. The help desk person was very nice.  She asked me all of the same information that the website had asked. She confirmed that the site would not activate access for me.  She asked me if I had bad credit.  I said no, I think I have excellent credit.  She asked me about my mortgage, and I told her ...