Engineers
There's a documentary out now about Tom Dowd, a recording engineer. The guy lights up when he talks about music and when he talks about technology. He tells us that he was completely mystified when he first heard recordings by Les Paul, because Paul was playing four or five guitar parts at once. Les Paul had figured out how to do multi-track recording, and Tom Dowd had to be there.
Dowd went out and put together one of the first eight-track machines in the world. Ten years later, he was still way ahead of everyone else; he invented sliders for multi-track recordings; at the time, the Beatles were recording in (at the most) three tracks. There's this great reunion scene with Ray Charles, where Dowd and Charles tell each other how tricky technology used to be, laughing hard.
What was great about Tom Dowd, who died in 2002, is that he had a close, deeply musical rapport with the artists he recorded, and an equally close rapport with the machines he tinkered with. He could talk about the past – he was there — but he wasn't longing for it. In fact, he loved the flexibility and creativity of capturing sound digitally and manipulating every wave.
Here's the question: do the founding engineers of the internet have the same feeling about the future that Tom Dowd did? Many of them are still alive. Are they excited about what will be possible as more of life moves online? Or do they long for the early days, when they knew almost everyone online and hooking in another university was tremendously exciting? Do they think of the internet as a social place, or as a place that's been wrecked by commerce? Do they feel a Dowd-like kinship with the people using the network, or do they feel overrun and ignored?
And who's doing the documentary? Maybe EFF should do it. Or a perceptive blogger. Or someone who can explain to us how things work. The internet of the future will thank us.
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2 Responses to “Engineers”
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Well, I'm not one of the founding engineers, but I've been on the Internet for around 20 years now, from the mid-*80*'s (when I was a student at MIT).
My guess at the answer: All of the above. People vary.
There's definitely good material in the topic, though. I try to convey a certain emotion, and doubt I succeed, in my own line about why I did so much free-speech work: Because I wanted to keep the Internet free (though, in retrospect, on a personal level, it wasn't worth it for me, but that's hindsight). It's all about the world in flux, and what happens when it's formed again.
Begin Ramble:
I was participating in online communities back in the 70's. I used BitNET before the Internet was big enough to reach everyone you wanted. I have to say, there's been less fundamental change in the last 7 years that the 7 years preceding. Really, the last radical change was the http protocol. I don't think things like XML, better 3D games, animating web pages, better multimedia email, better spam filters, better multimedia online communities, and the like to be radical steps forward - they seem to be progressions of directions set by earlier, more fundamental technology revolutions. They just don't seem like things with the potential to result in a larger change in direction. Wireless Ethernet is probably the single interesting thing to spout up in the last 7 years; getting rid of wires seems fundamentally different enough to result in pervasive change. The thing is, really good ideas crop up from time to time, but seem to go nowhere. Not long ago, for example, people were talking about extending the http protocol so that hyperlinks would be self-updating. That would seem to be a semi-radical step froward. It seems like ever since the so-called 'browser wars' was over, innovation with respect to the Internet has puttered out. People are talking about building mesh networks, so one day the Internet might become semi-independent of telecoms. That would be a semi-radical step forward, since telecoms would either change, or go away. Now, the big changes seem to be society catching up the the massive availability of information the Internet makes easily available. That seems to be where the rate of change has picked up lately (like the first persecution for wardriving