Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology,
business, and culture with the finest minds in
computer networking.
Well, hello,
Jeff. How are you today?
Hi, Russ. No. I'm good. I'm good. It's
down here in the Southern Hemisphere. It's You're
upside down. Summer. Yeah. I am I am
upside down, and things are getting, you know,
warm and green,
which, I love.
Here, it was.
The high today was around
10 degrees centigrade or a bit less.
And I don't love that.
And overnight,
it was,
I don't know, down into
the twenties here, which is negative eight to
negative 10 centigrade something along those lines.
Not feeling the love for me on that.
No. No.
That's that's pretty actually, pretty common for Tennessee.
This for Eastern Tennessee and being in the
foothills of the mountains this time of year.
We're on the West side of the mountains,
and so we get all the weather that
doesn't make it over the mountains.
It all stops with us because it's So
You're just lucky, I guess.
Well, we don't get the nor'easters that come
up the East side of the mountains. And,
actually, the nor'easters are horrible.
That's the worst weather in The US, I
think, is the nor'easters
that go up the East Coast, that come
up the Florida Coast, hit North Carolina, South
Carolina,
and then work their way all the way
up the coastline.
Holy mackerel. Those things are those are some
crazy, crazy storms.
But, anyway,
that said,
we were talking
by the way, Jeff, I mean, maybe you
wanna say hi to people before Oh, hi,
everyone. Yeah.
I'm Jeff Houston. As might might be obvious,
I I live in the Southern Hemisphere, in
Australia to be precise,
on the East Coast where right now it's
all turning gloriously summer, which is highly enjoyable.
And,
yes. That's me. I work as the chief
scientist at APNIC, which means I get paid
to think thoughts.
Oh, cool. Awesome.
Do. Think thoughts. So before we started, we
were gonna talk about Moore's law and the
Internet and such.
And you started off talking about telephone networks.
Now if you've listened to me for a
while, some people don't know this, but I
started out in The US Air Force doing
electronic. Actually, I started long before the US
Air Force doing electronics.
I got my immateriality license when I was
12.
So I was actually doing 40 words a
minute Morse code when I was 12 years
old, and I was doing
climbing towers and hanging inverted v's and long
wire
40 meter and 10 meters and hand adjusting
and soldering together YAGI antenna antennas and all
those LPDs, log period dipoles, and all that
other stuff.
When I was in the air force, we
had
a
an FPS 77, which was a storm detection
radar,
which was installed in 1964.
It was serial number one.
It was a weather radar, serial number one
of the mid range. There was one earlier.
There was a model before the 77,
then they came out with the 77,
and now they have Nexrad, which is all
computerized
stuff stuff.
And this was all tube type. We even
had tube type operational amplifiers,
and it was all high voltage.
Everything was high voltage in the whole thing.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. The magnetron was fed by a
flywheel circuit that
pushed,
I,
a 100 watts at, you know, one volt
or 10 volts or something.
But you said it was all same. It
it was all tubes. Yeah? Yes. Magnetron,
receive circuit,
everything was all tubes. There were no
digital electronics in it.
And then on the other side of my
world I mean, I worked on lots of
other things that were like that, very old.
I worked on the telco network from time
to time. And k g 80 fours,
which I don't know if you know much
about 2 threes and k g 80 fours
crypto gear.
But the telco system was based on stroger
switches.
We had a 10,000 line frame
that was based on paper wrapped cable
and stroger switches.
Right. Right. And, you know, that was the
the early, you know, computer sorry, telephone networks
were effectively electromechanical.
The stroger switches actually really created an electronic
circuit.
And the issue was, you know, in some
ways, technology was extensive.
So all you could do at the other
end of the wire out in people's houses
and offices
was to put a speaker and a microphone.
Yep. And the power came from, you know,
the thing in the middle,
And all the switching was in the middle.
And when they first started doing digital switching,
then you only had valves.
You only have really expensive power hungry things
where you had to share that capacity
across thousands of people to make it pay.
And so the telephone network was
incredibly network centric. You know? Yeah. It really
was stashing all the money in the middle
and then sharing that functionality to people at
the edge, so highly network centric.
Yeah. And a lot of the terminology we
have today, by the way, comes from this.
So the stroger frame on Maguire, we called
it the mainframe
because it was
the frame that all of the tele telco
circuits came into.
Now there were IDFs and BDFs and, you
know, subframes and and other things like that,
but the frame there that was the stroger
was the mainframe.
And so it was called the mainframe.
Right? And the Right. It was
terminology. And and, you know, that that was
the early design. But there was a couple
of thoughts that were completely
off the wall crazy.
And because the telephone network was the concentration
or one of the concentration points of technology
because if you think about it, you know,
there are a few giants around at the
time, and one of them was RCA, the
broadcaster.
But there was also, you know, dear old
Marbell, the telephone company. And they were desperately
trying to make the telephone network bigger and
cheaper.
And so their research labs were trying
I suppose, I guess, there was a department
trying to make
valves that were smaller and use less power
because, you know, trying to perfect what you
have is always a good idea. But down
the end of the corridor, god knows where,
but down the end
was this strange sort of group
trying to push current through
this weird stuff of rare earths and and
so called semiconductors.
Where they weren't like copper. They didn't just
always conduct.
But it wasn't like
stuff that doesn't conduct. It was sort of
in between.
It sort of conducted.
The name goes semiconductors.
And it was in 1947
that a group at Bell Labs
came up with an arrangement
of silicon,
which had been permeated with a certain amount.
I think it was gallium at one point.
I've forgotten, but it doesn't really matter.
And instead of having a valve
with power, vacuum,
hideous unreliability,
you had these strange semiconductor elements,
which with a small push of electrons
turned from conducting to not
conducting or the absence of a small push,
which was all a valve was.
A valve was this large current. And if
you put a small amount of voltage on
the grid in the middle, it stopped it
or it started it. So a little thing
controlled a big thing. And in the semiconductor
world, which they just sort of invented as
a transistor,
this little current controlled a big current.
Amazing. Who would have thought? Which which, by
the way, happens with tubes. This is something
like a tube,
essentially,
a vacuum tube is essentially
a cathode
and a plate,
and then you have a grid in the
middle. And the whole thing about a tube
is is you can have multiple grids. So
basically, what you do is you shoot
a stream of electrons
through the vacuum in the vacuum tube
at the plate
and through the plate so that the receiver,
the cap
the to the plate, and the plate picks
it up. And so what you do is
you control the strength of the str of
the stream of electrons, the amount of voltage
that you're getting through the tube, by modifying
the amount of voltage you drive on the
on the on the grid.
So you can have three or four grids
and have them do things. So this is
how you modulate signals, is you actually
can adjust.
You have a you have a straight pure
sine wave going into the cathode side, and
it is if if you don't have any
if you don't have any grid, you just
get the same straight,
you know, out of the the the plate
side. But you put that
grid in the middle and you start messing
with it, and you can actually modulate signals
onto the sine wave. So it's actually exactly
like a transistor,
only
it's not using these
weird silicon things
that you you know. It it it it
was the other way. The the the silicon
transistor
was exactly like a simple valve. It wasn't
multiple grids and multi unit and so on.
It was really basic and really simple. Yeah.
But, you know, when they invented it at
Bell Labs, the answer from the telephone companies
was,
well, fascinating, but so what? Yeah. Because it
wasn't immediately obvious that it had application there.
And interestingly, in the next ten years,
the silicon transistor industry
went gangbusters
in consumer devices.
Transistor radios were a
to actually differentiate between that big hulking thing
with a whole bunch of valves connected to
Maine's power
and this little thing that ultimately, you you
know, within a few years, could run off
a battery.
Yep. All of a sudden, it was a
different world, but it didn't change telephony
until
and it was in 1958
that Bell Labs
came up with something else, which was almost
like the multiple grids in a valve in
a vacuum tube.
But it was basically multiple transistors
on the one substrate of silicon. Yep.
The integrated circuit.
And then all of a sudden, things turned
bananas
because
we were starting to play with computers. We
played with them a lot in the forties
to try and do various feats of of
encoding and decoding,
various feats around calculations of projectiles
and and orbits, etcetera.
We were playing with this stuff, but all
of a sudden, integrated circuits meant
you could actually build a machine with
thousands,
tens of thousands of the equivalent of valves.
And instead of taking up buildings,
you could make computers that only took up
rooms.
Wow.
And at that point, things started to impact
back into
this wonderful world of telephony.
Because we were starting to uncover the fact
that you can actually do this integrated circuits
and integrate them with computers. And you can
actually do switching.
Now
the switching in telephony,
for some reason, the telephone network decided to
switch the most difficult thing to switch.
I'm like, you gotta be nuts.
They switch time.
Yeah. It's kind of, what are you talking
about? That's really hard.
You mean to say, I I sort of
create a signal
and I pass it through your digital switch.
And out the other end becomes the same
signal,
the same voice
without distortion,
without sort of turning into unintelligible.
And, mate, the telephone switch was again a
modern miracle,
and it was only really possible with with
the invention
of of the integrated circuit.
And and, again, what was going on was
this was still expensive stuff.
Computers were big. They were kind of custom
exotic things.
But
there was something else going on.
Because once you'd figured out that what you
did to build these integrated circuits
was to take away for a pretty pure
silicon,
I. E. Sand,
whack a photoresist on it,
and then expose it to light and etch
patterns into that chip. And you could apply
various
impregnated
metals to create transistors
on on this sort of silicon wafer.
How many?
Woah. Depends on how good your camera is,
to be perfectly frank.
Because two is easy.
A thousand is easy.
10,000? Well, if you've got a really good
piece of optics,
a fine lens,
and and good positioning,
yeah. You can put tens of thousands
of individual circuits on one chip.
And if you do it right, you can
do this at a rate of thousands a
second.
So at the end of the other side
of the production line, sand and a few
rare animals get rare minerals go in one
side.
At the other end, basically, come to these
fantastic sort of combinations
of literally thousands of valves
all hardwired together to create
functionality.
The computing industry was born.
And Yeah.
The first ones were big.
They were really big. And what's interesting to
a lot of people think about the computing
side of this, but they don't what they
don't think about so much is that without
the network stuff that was done
early in the days,
computers themselves would have been a very limited
value.
And there would have probably been 20 or
30 of them in the world
at big research institutions
that took on specialized
tasks.
So a number of things were going on.
And and, you know, computers
started to be used in business. And the
whole issue was, I want them cheaper. I
wanna build more of them.
And and and the trick was, can I
put more gates, more features
on the one piece of silicon? And the
answer was brighter lights,
better lenses.
Sure. Because the process could miniaturize
really easily.
And when it miniaturizes,
it uses less power per unit of computing.
So over the fifties and sixties sorry. The
sixties and seventies,
because the integrated circuit sort of appeared in
the world in the late fifties,
the sixties, The mainframe computer industry
was constantly
changing.
They were getting smaller. They were getting cheaper.
And we started to get not just the
mainframe,
which was the big, you know, multi tens
of millions expenditure,
we started to get mini mini mainframes.
Digital equipment were keen on them.
They're called PDPs.
And in the late nineteen sixties AS 400.
AS 400. Well, PDPs are interesting because,
in the same Bell Labs, not the same
office,
but,
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
were mucking around
looking at the entrails of a failed project
called Multics, which was a grand experiment with
MIT and a few others to produce the
massive computer that everyone would have an account
on, the shared multi user, you know, computing
system that would, you know, do everything
for everyone all at once.
And they took this PDP 11,
tiny machine, a single rack.
That's a 19 inch equipment frame for those
who haven't seen one. They're still around. They're
still the same size. They took this this
PDP 11
and built their own little mini operating system.
The control system that made the computer
be able to do things.
You know, it could run programs. It had
a file store. It had a way you
could type in commands. It had a display.
And and they called it as a play
on Multics, UNIX.
So here was this operating system,
small, portable,
worked on this new generation of of machines
that you could afford in a lab, not
just afford in a company.
And immediately, when they sort of did this
and came to the attention of the the
mothership AT and T,
there was a problem.
Under the terms
of an agreement with the US administration and
Department of Justice,
AT and T
was basically a phone company, and they were
a supplier of technology to phone companies.
They built
five ESS switches. They built that technology.
Now they were straying from the reserve
if they were doing a business other than
equipment for common carriers in the telephone world.
That's not your job.
I went, oh,
but we have this really cool operating system.
And they said,
not your
job. What can we do with it?
Give it away.
What? Give it away. And they did.
So for the cost of shipping,
anyone could have
a really quite cool lean mean operating system
that ran on not just PDP elevens, but
because it was written in a high level
source code, you can assemble it for almost
anything.
And and so
by the late sixties, early seventies,
this new operating system, UNIX,
was certainly a thing.
Every vendor had their own operating system, digital
IBM,
you know, Burrows, you name it. But here
was this other one, this upstart
that wasn't really owned by anyone. It was
open
and it was available
as we evolved computers and made them smaller
and faster.
I want an operating system. Oh, I'll just
put on UNIX.
A morning's work and you're done.
Not five months work of devising a new
operating system for this new computer. It's going,
nah. Just put on UNIX. I'm out of
there.
Revolutionary.
What a thought.
What a thought. And totally totally accidental.
Totally accidental. But it made the software
independent of the hardware.
So that's the second of these serendipitous
thoughts that kind of came from nowhere.
Maybe it was a particularly strong coffee that
day. I don't know. But, you know, kaboom.
It just happened.
And there was one more, and it was
1973.
Because one of the outcomes of this work
in radar and so on was actually using
radio for communications.
That's pretty easy.
Now you send a signal,
in radio terms, and then you modulate that.
So, So, you know, dot dot dash dash,
all that kind of stuff is humming, not
humming in radio.
And over in the Hawaiian Islands, they built
this radio based network, relatively primitive, pretty slow,
called AlohaNet.
And it was kind of neat.
It was a simple system where
you waited for a while to see if
that carrier frequency was idle.
And then you sent your your little packet
of data
over to the main hub point.
And then it would send it to wherever
you wanted to address it. It was a
neat system
because it just used radio. Nothing else.
All the machines, the computers at the sort
of connect
to the network formed part of the functionality.
One of the guys who worked on this
was Bob Metcalfe,
and he was then hired by that well
known computing company, Xerox.
Not
the the only company that I think that
made at least two, maybe three fundamental inventions
in computing. And at the end of this,
managed to stay a photocopier company.
Yeah.
So I sit there and think, how did
you miss it? Every time.
Missed.
So this guy, Bob Bittcalf working at Xerox
at the time,
kind of came up with a wired equivalent
of HelloAnet,
a wired equivalent.
And this is the beauty of it The
network was a wire
A wire
No electronics
Nothing
It was the ultimate disappearing trick
Because everything
was actually in the computers attached to the
wire.
And architecturally,
it was it was the opposite of telephony.
Really smart concentration of technology in the middle.
It's so expensive. We can only have one
dumb devices at the edge.
This new thing,
Ethernet,
is the exact opposite.
Computing is now so affordable
that every computer can participate
in driving the network.
And we can actually take it to the
point, and it is a big point to
take it to, where the network itself is
just a piece of wire. It's it's nothing.
It's the computers at the edge that are
cooperatively
talking to each other,
driving this thing we call a network.
Wow.
And and when the industry saw this, it's
kind of, you mean to say all I
need to do is lay wire
and I have a network?
And the answer,
yes. Or where do I order this stuff?
And by the mid seventies,
this 10 megabit system
was being installed almost everywhere.
It wasn't dependent on a single vendor.
You know, Xerox did not make computers. And
oddly
enough, that was a good thing
because
it was openly available.
It wasn't tied up with a particular brand
of mainframe.
And and literally, everyone who was looking on
building their mini computers and then it got
smaller and smaller, Connecting them up was the
job of Ethernet.
So we kind of had these three things
happening all at once.
Yeah. Moore's law was starting to take effect.
Your integrated circuits were smaller, cheaper, and faster.
Wow.
We had software
divorced from hardware.
And oddly enough,
no one knew how to value it. So
we were giving it away. Just giving it
away.
Remarkable.
And then we had networks which
were effectively networks that weren't centralized. They were
the ultimate of pushing it so far out
to the edge, there was nothing left in
the middle.
These were very, very basic inventions, all three.
Yeah. Yeah. And now when networks were first
done, like, when we talk about mock mock
Metcalf days, we actually aren't talking about integrated
circuits. We're talking about discrete electronic circuits,
which is a phase of electronic engine of
engineering that people seem to miss. But I've
worked on,
you know,
systems
with
a hundred, two hundred, 300 gates.
There were literally two
there were literally two capacitors and a resistor
per gate,
all discreetly soldered on to circuit boards.
Because they they I mean, they were transistors,
but they really I mean, they were mostly
diodes
and capacitors.
And Right.
And they were soldered onto physical boards to
make gates.
But the trick was you could do it
on silicon
Yeah. A lot smaller. At money level. And
and it was cheaper to produce. So the
cost per gate is a really good way
of thinking about this.
Whereas it used to be a couple of
cents
to actually build the transistor,
solder it onto a circuit board, you know,
put it with all of its mates, you
know, create circuitry that supported the thing working
in concert, and then doing the connectors at
one end of the the PCB card to
connect to all the rest of these, you
know, little circuits. Yeah. You could shrink all
of that to one integrated circuit
with a bunch of of pins as its
feet.
And and this just kinda took over the
world because
the cost of production were now down at
fractions of a cent per day.
Minions.
And and bizarrely and again, this is something
that I think we failed to truly understand.
Moore's law said,
every two years as it turned out originally
said every every single year, but very regularly,
we were able to put twice the number
of gates
on a single circuit
of the same size.
So wow. This was the incredible shrinking world.
Every two years, let's go two,
I could buy state of the art technology
that was twice as fast.
Twice as cheap.
And demanded twice as less power
than my competitors.
And so the whole reason why bell labs
looked at the transistor and said
Great.
But we're not ready for it.
Come back and tell us again in a
few years' time.
Was that they had a life cycle of
equipment of twenty five years,
you know, which is why the military, by
the way, that that insisted on having that
life cycle for decades longer than they should
have were using twenty five year old equipment
in the seventies because, you know, that was
the mode of thinking. Yeah. I know. We
were still using nineteen sixties equipment in the
nineteen nineties.
Twenty five year lifetime. And in
in one extent, they were right.
You know? Trans
transistors, unlike valves, didn't have a half life
of ours. Yeah. Transistors had a half life
of decades. Yeah. And so the thing that
you bought in the sixties still worked in
the nineties.
But if you're in the competitive world, the
commercial
world, everyone else was buying equipment and machinery
that every two years
was twice as good in almost every parameter,
the one I have.
So
all of a sudden, I've got a problem.
I can't run a twenty five year life
cycle
on my on my capital, on my equipment,
on my asset.
Because unlike the the military and the government,
I'm in a competitive world. I need to
change every year or so. Every year.
And and that really did leave some companies
behind
and made giants out of the most amazing,
almost unintended
folk.
Apple was an accident.
Yeah. It really was.
Because
I think very few folk foresaw
that when you scale and instead of producing
a 100 computers a year,
you produce
a 100 integrated circuits per second,
which turn into what?
Mainframes?
Don't be silly. Yeah. How do I sell
that extraordinary production capacity?
I need to convince more and more people
to buy them.
And so what you do is you get
you you release Lotus one two three, and
everybody puts one in their closet.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. I build a closet computer,
and I convince every single people that are
you know, person who owns an apartment or
a house,
you need one of these in your closet.
And all of a sudden, my market has
expanded from a few 100,000
enterprises and businesses
games, not by business applications, by
the way. Well,
consumers.
Yeah. Consumers. Because once you once you enter
the consumer market, you know, most of us
spend most of our time wanting to be
entertained. And that's that's a fine human pursuit.
I do it myself.
But, you know, what we found then was
that these things become
a scaling consumer technology.
Mhmm. Now, again, you look at sort of
the the tools that we then had,
cheap networks,
really, really minimal networking,
cheap software.
Some of it was free like like, like
a Unix.
Hardware that was ever shrinking.
And we had this kind of desire, if
you will, to sign
build more of them and link them together.
And and out of that grew the Internet.
And the Internet was kind of the same
expression
that it wasn't a network that was dense
in the middle.
Really wasn't.
Because like Ethernet, it was all at the
edge. Yeah. All the software that is the
Internet, all all the protocols and applications and
packages.
I mean, the end to end yeah. The
end to end principle. Right? Like, the the
intelligence should be at the edge and the
network should be dumb. Why? Because the network
does has a longer life cycle.
It's physical wires in the ground,
and so, therefore, you want those physical wires
to last for twenty, thirty years. And, you
you know, you do all your upgrades on
the edge to make the network more useful
over time. And because Right. The network itself
is a big investment.
Well,
boy, have we reversed all of that.
Well, that then leads to the next point.
Because you kinda think, oh, it's just computers,
and the stuff in the network's kind of
well, it's expensive and fixed, isn't it?
Yeah. No.
No.
And and we first saw it with the
use of the telephone network
for dial up modems. Remember them?
Yeah. Remember when you used to make the
call and these things would start screechy?
You've heard for the first ten seconds or
so as it kind of had this screech
down the wire. What was it trying to
do by screeching, you know, down the wire?
Well, we were getting smarter
because the original idea of putting signals on
a wire
was to take a carrier tone and turn
it off and turn it on again.
The absence of a carrier tone was a
zero and its presence was a one.
And in essence, you could put a microphone
at the other end and reassemble the bits.
And that was about as sophisticated as it
was.
But if you try and go as fast
as the carrier tone,
you start to think about, well, how do
I encode
a one zero sequence
into
a frequency signal that's the same frequency as
my bits.
Oh.
So I have to kind of modulate the
bits.
I have to kind of set it so
that
a high voltage is a zero, a low
voltage is a one, and somehow manage to
to encode that.
Interesting.
It's called amplitude encoding. It's kind of on
off. Or you can try to be cleverer.
I have four volumes.
No volume at all. That's a zero.
Full volume. That's one one.
And there's two intermediate states. Well, I can
encode that as zero one and one zero.
Oh.
Out of the same carrier tone, I've got
double the bits.
How clever.
All I need is four amplitude levels.
How about 16?
Well, I can get more. How about 32?
You know, the human ear is pretty good
at this. It can distinguish about 256
or so discrete levels of
volume. Well, computers can do better because
we're using digital signal processes.
And so you start to do really clever
encoding.
But is it just all volume?
No.
I can change the phase of the carrier.
Woah.
Big thought.
All of a sudden, by the
late eighties,
we were getting out of a carrier voice
call, which should have been capable of doing
300 bits per second.
By the screeching and the remarkably clever modulation,
we were getting 56,000
bits per second.
The carrier tone was actually only
eight kilohertz.
8,000
cycles a second. But we were managing by
really clever modulation of that carrier
getting seven times the signal out of it.
56 kilobits.
You go, well that's really clever. You analog
guys are amazing.
And then there was a fascinating
accident.
Over in Motorola land,
they were running out of money. God knows
why. And they were really clever radio folk.
And they were really clever fiber optic folk.
Really clever.
But as a budget saving measure
they put them in the same building.
Now over in the carrier world,
we've long since run away from copper conductors
for our big circuitry.
We were using fiber optic.
It was, I suppose,
cheaper,
far more resilient,
lasted for years longer than copper, didn't rust.
You know, it was great stuff.
And the technique was you have a torch
at one end
and the equivalent of an eye at the
other end, a digital eye, and you go
on or off, On off key
And you can control the torch with some
circuitry
And you can start doing the torch a
few million times a second On off on
off on off And it kind of works
up until a few million
But how do you make it go faster?
Well, switching lasers is difficult.
On off keying really does strike a limit.
And and the best they're able to do
was just below 10 mill ten ten megahertz,
ten minutes per second,
which is Ethernet have been doing that for
a decade. It was hardly rocket science in
fiber.
I'm just sorry. I I tell a lie.
I got confused.
They're up to a 10
gigabits per second in on off keying. That's
sort of where it got to.
Right? Which is okay.
But because they're in the same lab as
the modem people, the modem folks said, well,
you know, photons, electrons,
same thing really, isn't it? Quantum mechanically, you
know, just waves, dude. It's all waves.
Why don't we phase modulate
the light?
Right. Can you?
Yes. Sure.
And amplitude modulate it.
And all of a sudden
with
better digital signal processes,
you can push more and more capacity
through the same piece of fiber.
Nothing's changed on the glass,
but everything's changed electronics at either end.
Everything.
So instead of having a carrier network that
ran at a few, well, 100 megabits per
second, a few gigabits per second,
I'm talking 20 gigs,
a 100 gigs,
200 gigs.
And all I did was change the ends.
Yeah.
So
yeah. I mean, it's a bit more complex
than that because you're actually in in QSQ
or quad quad keying.
QSQ. Yeah. Yeah. You're you're on
sidebands.
You're dealing with multiple sidebands.
You know, like, I used to run a
radio that was a single sideband,
but they were running all eight sidebands.
And there's they were modulating onto eight sidebands
or four side bands with more cymbal depth.
So, I mean, there's a lot more going
on there. But, yeah, basically,
we, you know, got to the point where
we were modulating
the same way on fiber
as we were
on,
on copper. And, you know, there were there
were
light based modulation schemes before. They just weren't
ever put inside of a cable.
Well, that work that it didn't work cost
effectively,
Moore's law. But if you wait long enough,
you know, the the the gates get cheaper.
You can put more on a single chip.
I can do more on a single integrated
circuit, so we did.
Now I'm gonna swing back a bit a
little bit and talk a little bit about
the way the telephone networks actually worked.
Because if everyone lifted up their handset at
the same time and tried to dial, nothing
would happen.
Yep.
There wasn't enough network to go around. It's
they're non blocking,
but they're non blocking because you have access
control.
You can say no. You can say no.
You're not allowed to make a phone call.
And you looked at some of the telephone
control rooms, and I remember visiting one here
in Australia, and they had the TV running
on massive screens at the front of the
room. Why? Because if there was an earthquake
in in Italy, some natural disaster in Japan,
they would block the calls manually.
I'm sorry. No one's ringing up Italy right
now because, you know, everyone's trying. It won't
fit.
But you think again about what they were
trying to do. And what they were trying
to do was ration
inadequacy,
scarcity.
There wasn't enough to go around.
And indeed, the whole margins of why telephony
made us so much money
was because there wasn't enough to go around.
So as well as the cost of I
run a telephone network, there was the opportunity
to charge what the economists call a scarcity
premium.
To actually damp demand,
you charge a whole lot more than it
costs
just to dissuade everyone from picking up the
handset at the same time.
It's it's the economics of scarcity, and the
telephone companies became the
became the rationalist and became very rich.
But Moore's law
was the insidious worm
that was undereating the entire foundation of this.
Because when you applied Moore's law to these
digital signal processes and the carrier's
own networks,
all of a sudden, they didn't have not
enough to go around.
They had so much. It wasn't funny.
It was abundance.
And no matter how they tried,
they couldn't put a damper on that abundant
capacity.
So all of a sudden,
there was this suspicion that the telephone companies
were
eating everyone. They they were monopolistic. They were
gouging. They were they were working against you
and I.
And to hang the the era of deregulation,
which was actually the era of entering a
different phase, the phase of abundance,
the utopia of Moore's law.
So now we're designing networks about abundance.
Where transmission
is so cheap, it's worthless.
Didn't someone sell Sprint's carriage network to someone
else for a dollar? Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah.
It's not cheap. Much.
They paid way too much because
it's not worth anything anymore.
It's abundance.
And you think again about what the job
of the Internet was. It was to take
you and your computer
over to that server a long, long way
away
to get the product or the service you
wanted.
Dear old Microsoft was having this room full
of servers to distribute the Windows operating system
in Seattle. And all of a sudden Seattle
was a networking black hole. It just couldn't
stand it. What about you with abundance?
Well, hang on a second. Computers are cheap
now. Storage is cheap now. Processing is cheap
now.
Why don't I take what you're trying to
distribute
and distribute a copy everywhere
right beside the user?
The content distribution networks. And it's all about
cost.
It's cheaper to do it that way than
to carry the bits. Even though we've made
transmission cheaper, computing got even cheaper. So did
storage.
And so you find companies like Netflix is
a good example,
Google's YouTube,
where they take the entire inventory of what
they have, that digital inventory,
and reproduce
it 10,000 times
close to everybody.
Mhmm.
It's the great vanishing network all over again.
Yeah. Because all of a sudden, the number
of miles that packets travel
from where they were stored in a storage
device
to my computer on, you know, in my
hand or on my desk, they've shrunk to
close to nothing.
Wow.
We've taken distance out of networking.
You see,
networking always had the distance square rule.
You know, it comes from physics that force
over distance, force reduces,
by a factor of distance squared because, you
know, that's the way geometry works.
The circumference of a circle. Sorry. The area
of a circle. Distance squared. So cost is
distance squared. Performance is distance squared.
Everything is distance squared. If you reduce distance,
things become
phenomenally
cheap.
Really so. So we took distance out of
networking.
When we took the networking out of networking.
And all of a sudden, today's networks are
remarkable.
We've gone from a provisioning model of, well,
it's over there if you need it.
To, look, I bought it to your doorstep
along with a thousand, a million other artifacts.
Yeah. If you want it, just open the
door and pick it up. It's just sitting
there waiting for you. It's just in case
delivery.
Just in case you want it, I've already
done it for you. I have pre networked
it for you. It's just waiting there.
And so we've managed to actually achieve the
one thing that this industry
always said. And I learned that when I
was a child sort of starting to think
bigger, faster, cheaper. Pick two. I can make
it bigger.
I can make it faster. But if I
do so, I can't make it cheaper.
I can make it bigger and cheaper, but
it won't be fast. Now there was always
a compromise. But all of a sudden,
bigger, faster, cheaper,
well, I'm good.
I'm good.
Well, it's and it still is to some
degree.
I mean, because you still have to store
the data at a thousand, a million locations.
You still have to like, it still costs
something.
And so you could
If it costs less than a millionth of
what it used to cost Yeah. It actually
costs less.
You can replicate it and still pay less.
I mean, you yeah. You but you could
actually still not store the data and still
pay less. But economically,
the trade off is such that it's better
not to.
It's better said yeah. Moore's Law said buy
more computers.
They're cheaper.
Keep up with your competitive. You know? It's
a race. Come on. Come on. Come on.
Change. Change. Change. Get on with it. And
so now I think we're looking at at
the next revolution.
And it's interesting because we've lived through
Moore's Law,
but things are looking hairy.
And this is, I suppose, the
the portent, which is a useful place to
end this.
The feature size on today's silicon
is down around two nanometers.
It's remarkable
to get there. We have to vaporize
Indian tin using laser pulsing
to get a light signal of nine nanometers
in order to focus it down onto a
chip to etch features that are two nanometers
wide.
Yeah. Wow.
What do we do next? Oh, let's make
it down to one nanometer.
Woo!
How big is a silicon atom?
Well, a fifth of a nanometer
So I get five of them across a
one nanometer track
Just five
Now the whole idea of semiconductors
was that electrons are well behaved.
And if I put a slightly excess amount,
it can change a conductor to a non
conductor.
Right?
But this kind of relies on
the polite behavior of electrons.
But when you get down to five atoms,
they're not very polite.
And in fact, they're not even electrons. They're
a wave function
and they leak.
Can we make
gates at one nanometer?
Well, no.
It just can't.
They don't behave well enough.
So at some point, you've got to be
a lot cleverer
to get the next doubling.
I can't just make it smaller anymore. We've
been making it smaller since 1957.
Wow.
You know? So we've done sixty five years
of making it smaller. And we've now got
to the size of an atom. And it's
kind of, dudes,
you're done. In this this universe,
in this model of physics, you know, physics
version one, that's it.
You you've got to go elsewhere.
And, you know, you've go into the fuzzy
world of quantum computing, and my brain just
exploded a second ago because I don't understand
it.
Or you can try and build three d
silicon lattices
at two nanometer feature size.
And and quite frankly,
you know,
that's a challenge.
In anybody's language, that's a challenge. Yeah. Yeah.
Or you can say,
have we reached the end of this road?
And and it's sort of a plausible question.
And and that's what I'd like to leave
you with, because
if you look at the
feature size and processing capacity of cores lately,
instead of making it, if you will, smaller
and smaller and smaller, what we've actually been
doing is adding to the number of cores
at each circuit. So it's integrated circuit process.
It now has 256
cores,
but it probably won't have 512.
And and even if it does but even
if it does,
you're still looking at now a chip die
that is Bigger. One and a half to
two times larger
that consumes one and a half to two
times the amount of power.
So you're really not gaining a lot. And
it has 10 times the failure rate in
production Yeah. Etcetera. So all of a sudden,
this is this next generation
big chip
is actually more expensive than today's generation
small chip.
And and it's kind of what have you
won? And the other thing is too, the
physically bigger chip, it takes more time to
get from one side to another. Yeah. Again,
it's slower.
So we're topping out.
CPU processing, three gigahertz clocks, not really getting
faster in production.
Feature size,
we might hit a trillion features per chip.
But beyond that, there's no clear indicator.
Because unless someone thinks of something
as out of the box, so much as
the transistor and the integrated circuit, something else,
Unless something else walks in the room, we've
kind of milked this for all it's worth.
And and my closing thought is, well, what
does that mean?
This means that the future is no longer
a competition
to the current.
I can go back to twenty five year
life cycles on my equipment.
Yep.
I can be
as big as I want without worrying about
my competitors.
And this is even happening down to the
cell phone market
and even to the laptop and the the
home computer market. Right? Like, okay. Used to
be I replaced my computer every two years.
Why? Because
as I upgraded software, it gets slower.
Yep. Now It's it's well, no. You have
to upgrade. No. You have to upgrade because
the current model comes in black.
Yes. That's that's exactly right. That's what's happening.
Next year next year's will come in gray.
Yeah. You know? And that's the the Yeah.
We've moved from capability
yeah. We've come from capability
to fashion.
And whenever you get to fashion, like
Well, the people who are big stay big,
and the people who are small can't compete
because the technological
edge
that gave small its sort of cut through
that actually made Google.
Let's index all the worlds of information. The
incumbents at the time were going, laugh point,
giggle hysterically, you're nuts.
Now Google's the behemoth because it did it.
And we're gonna strike this right now as
a closing thought about AI.
Because the current thought about AI is,
as long as it gets cheaper and bigger
and cheaper and bigger,
this will work.
It doesn't work at the moment. It's funded
by venture capital. It'll work tomorrow. Trust me,
Moore's law.
But what if Moore's law isn't?
What if it doesn't? Yeah. How long does
the venture capital last? Yeah. People say, just
remember about AI that it's the worst it'll
ever be.
And you know what? You should remember the
opposite of that, that it may not actually
ever get much better.
Well, you're relying you're relying on
a universe whose physics are not the physics
you live in. Yeah. You're
relying on something else that we don't understand.
So Yeah. It's an interesting thought that we've
lived out sixty five years of phenomenal,
prodigious growth
coming from those subtle inventions of the transistor
and the integrated circuit. And we've milked them
for all they're worth.
And and the intrusive little thought is,
is that all there is? Have we milked
it as far as it will go? And
if the answer is yes,
start to think differently about tomorrow's world.
Yeah. It might look a lot more like
the nineteen twenties, the nineteen thirties. Thereafter, there
was a huge burst of innovation in the
mechanical world,
and then everything kinda settled down for a
couple of decades and,
you know. Yes. It's it's the same kind
of of of issues flying around here. And
and, you know, that's the transition we're going
through at the moment. So,
I leave I leave our listeners with with
that thought that, you know,
this particular
oh, it's a happy thought. Oh, but the
opportunities of tomorrow, we're not just making today
smaller.
Tomorrow will not be like, you know, will
be
it's a different kind of world when you
just can't rely on the prodigious nature of
Moore's Law to fix everything up,
including AI. You've gotta do something else with
it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Well,
thanks, Jeff, for that,
long or short or however you wanna put
it, that trip through history.
And,
I don't know. I don't have much else
to add to that. So do you have
a place where people can follow you or
get in touch with you if they want
to?
All my ramblings are at dubdubdub.potaroo.net.
You might need a spare hour or two,
but I promise I try and make it
varied and entertaining
with the kind of stuff I put up
there. But they ain't tweets. Oh my god.
No. They're not tweets. I'm sorry.
This is actually the curse of the writer.
Even when I write short post on LinkedIn,
they're, like, 300 words. And, like, I just
can't I just I just I'm sorry. I
can't.
Right. So, you know, if you want the
slightly condensed version, you've got it in one
hour on this podcast here and there. That's
as short as it gets. Exactly.
So I try. Alright. Cool. And I'm Russ
White. You can always find me here at
the hedge at rule eleven dot tech
on x occasionally,
whenever I feel like logging into that account,
and LinkedIn.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The
Hedge. We know your attention is we live
in an attention driven economy, and your attention
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thank you for listening all the way to
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