Meta: Slow Blogging Ahead

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There will be fewer than usual posts to this blog for a while. I have to write another talk for an intimidating audience, similar to the audience for my 2021 Talk at TTI/Vanguard Conference. That one took a lot of work but a few months later it became my EE380 Talk. That in turn became by far my most-read post, having so far gained 522K views. The EE380 talk eventually led to the invitation for the upcoming talk. Thus I am motivated to focus on writing this talk for the next few weeks.

Wikipedia's description of the image is:

Titivillus, a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes, besets a scribe at his desk (14th century illustration)

The Festschrift For Cliff Lynch

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The festschrift that includes the edited version of the draft we posted back in April entitled Lots Of Cliff Keeps Stuff Safe has been officially published as Networking Networks: A Festschrift in Honor of Clifford Lynch, an open access supplement to portal: Libraries and the Academy 25, no. 3. Joan K. Lippincott writes:

The final CNI membership meeting of Cliff’s tenure, held April 7–8, 2025, in Milwaukee, was to include a surprise presentation of the Festschrift’s table of contents. Though Cliff’s health prevented him from attending in person, he participated virtually and heard readings of excerpts from each contribution. Clifford Lynch passed away shortly after, on April 10, 2025. Authors completed their essays before his passing, and the original text remains unchanged.

Below the fold is a bried snippet of each of the invited contributions and some comments.

The Dawn Of Nvidia's Technology

Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the genius of Jensen Huang, Tae Kim's The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the making of a tech giant, and Steven Witt's The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip. For the later 90% of the history I wasn't there, so I won't comment on their treatment of that part. But for the pre-history at Sun Microsystems and the first 10% of the history I was there. Kim's account of the business side of this era is detailed and, although it was three decades ago, matches my recollections.

Witt's account of the business side of the early history is much less detailed and some of the details don't match what I remember.

But as regards the technical aspects of this early history it appears that neither author really understood the reasons for the two kinds of innovation we made; the imaging model and the I/O architecture. Witt writes (Page 31):

The first time I asked Priem about the architecture of the NV1, he spoke uninterrupted for twenty-seven minutes.

Below the fold, I try to explain what Curtis was talking about for those 27 minutes. It will take me quite a long post.

Cliff Lynch RIP

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Last Tuesday Cliff Lynch delivered an abbreviated version of his traditional closing summary and bon voyage to CNI's 2025 Spring Membership Meeting via Zoom from his sick-bed. Last Thursday night he died, still serving as Executive Director. CNI has posted In Memoriam: Clifford Lynch.

Cliff impacted a wide range of areas. The best overview is Mike Ashenfelder's 2013 profile of Cliff Lynch in the Library of Congress' Digital Preservation Pioneer series, which starts:

Clifford Lynch is widely regarded as an oracle in the culture of networked information. Lynch monitors the global information ecosystem for cultural trends and technological developments. He ponders their variables, interdependencies and influencing factors. He confers with colleagues and draws conclusions. Then he reports his observations through lectures, conference presentations and writings. People who know about Lynch pay close attention to what he has to say.

Lynch is a soft-spoken man whose work, for more than thirty years, has had an impact — directly or indirectly — on the computer, information and library science communities.

Below the fold are some additional personal notes on Cliff's contributions.

Paul Evan Peters Award

Year	Awardee
2024	Tony Hey
2022	Paul Courant
2020	Francine Berman
2017	Herbert Van de Sompel
2014	Donald A.B. Lindberg
2011	Christine L. Borgman
2008	Daniel E. Atkins
2006	Paul Ginsparg
2004	Brewster Kahle
2002	Vinton Gray Cerf
2000	Tim Berners-Lee

It has just been announced that at the Spring 2025 Membership Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Milwaukee, WI April 7^th and 8^th, Vicky and I are to receive the Paul Evan Peters Award. The press release announcing the award is here.

Vicky and I are honored and astonished by this award. Honored because it is the premiere award in the field, and astonished because we left the field more than seven years ago to take up our new full-time career as grandparents. We are all the more astonished because we are not even eligible for the award; the rules clearly state that the "award will be granted to an individual".

You can tell this is an extraordinary honor from the list of previous awardees, and the fact that it is the first time it has been awarded in successive years. Vicky and I are extremely grateful to the Association of Research Libraries, CNI and EDUCAUSE, who sponsor the award.

Original Logo

Part of the award is the opportunity to make an extended presentation to open the meeting. The text of our talk, entitled Lessons From LOCKSS, with links to the sources and information that appeared on slides but was not spoken, should appear here on April 7^th.

The work that the award recognizes was not ours alone, but the result of a decades-long effort by the entire LOCKSS team. It was made possible by support from the LOCKSS community and many others, including Michael Lesk then at NSF, Donald Waters then at the Mellon Foundation, the late Karen Hunter at Elsevier, Stanford's Michael Keller and CNI's Cliff Lynch.

Nvidia vs. Intel

NV1-based Diamond Edge
Swaaye, CC-By-SA 3.0

Today Nvidia replaced Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with a market cap of about $3.6T, about the same as Apple, as against Intel's market cap about 33 times less.

That is a long way from Curtis Priem's kitchen table, a $2.5M A-round from Sutter Hill and Sequoia, and the NV1.

It Was Ten Years Ago Today

Ten years ago today I posted Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks . My fundamental insight was:

• The income to a participant in a P2P network of this kind should be linear in their contribution of resources to the network.
• The costs a participant incurs by contributing resources to the network will be less than linear in their resource contribution, because of the economies of scale.
• Thus the proportional profit margin a participant obtains will increase with increasing resource contribution.
• Thus the effects described in Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy will apply, and the network will be dominated by a few, perhaps just one, large participant.

In the name of blatant self-promotion, below the fold I look at how this insight has held up since.

Warning: Slow Blogging Ahead

Vicky & I have recently acquired two major joint writing assignments with effective deadlines in the next couple of months. And I am still on the hook for a Wikipedia page about the late Dewayne Hendricks. This is all likely to reduce the flow of posts on this blog for a while, for which I apologize.

Dewayne Hendricks RIP

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Dewayne Hendricks, my friend of nearly four decades, passed away last Friday at age 74. His mentors were Buckminster Fuller and Paul Baran. He was a pioneer of wireless Internet connectivity, a serial entrepreneur, curator of an influential e-mail list, and for the last 30 years on the organizing committee of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop.

For someone of his remarkable achievements he has left very little impression on the Web. An example is his Linkedin profile. Below the fold I collect the pieces of his story that I know or have been able to find from his other friends. If I can find more I will update this post. Please feel free to add information in the comments.

Engineering For The Long Term

Content Warning: this post contains blatant self-promotion.

Contributions to engineering fields can only reasonably be assessed in hindsight, by looking at how they survived exposure to the real world over the long term. Four of my contributions to various systems have stood the test of time. Below the fold, I blow my own horn four times.

X Window System At 40

X11R1 on Sun
Techfury90 CC0

I apologize that this post is a little late. On 19^th June the X Window System celebrated its 40th birthday. Wikipedia has a comprehensive history of the system including the e-mail Bob Scheifler sent announcing the first release:

From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler)
To: window@athena
Subject: window system X
Date: 19 June 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday)

I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window
system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code
from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather
than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall
performance appears to be about twice that of W. The
code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are
still some deficiencies to be fixed up.

We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now
actively building applications on X. Anyone else using
W should seriously consider switching. This is not the
ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good
starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment
there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C
interface is in the works. The three existing
applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O
interface, and a primitive window manager. There is
no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to
volunteer? I may get around to it eventually.

Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by
NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945
first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a
tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel
free to get in touch.

Scheifler was right that it was a "good starting point for experimentation", but it wasn't really a usable window system until version 11 was released on 15^th September 1987. I was part of the team that burned the midnight oil at MIT to get that release out, but my involvement started in late 1985.

Below the fold are some reflections on my contributions, some thoughts on the astonishing fact that the code is still widely deployed after 40 years, and some ideas on why it has been so hard to replace.

Blog On Vacation

This blog will be taking a break for a couple of weeks.

The 50th Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop

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Last week I attended the 50^th Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. For a crew of volunteers to keep a small, invitation-only, off-the-record workshop going for half a century is an amazing achievement. A lot of the credit goes to the late John H. Wharton, who chaired it from 1985 to 2017 with one missing year. He was responsible for the current format, and the eclecticism of the program's topics.

Brian Berg has written a short history of the workshop for the IEEE entitled The Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop: Its Origin Story, and Beyond. It was started by "Three Freds and a Ted" and one of the Freds, Fred Coury has also written about it in here.Six years ago David Laws wrote The Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop and the Billion Dollar Toilet Seat for the Computer History Museum.

I have attended almost all of them since 1987. I have been part of the volunteer crew for many, including this one, and have served on the board of the 501C3 behind the workshop for some years.

This year's program featured a keynote from Yale Patt, and a session from four of his ex-students, Michael Shebanow, Wen-mei Hwu, Onur Mutlu and Wen-Ti Liu. Other talks came from Alvy Ray Smith based on his book A Biography of the Pixel, Mary Lou Jepsen on OpenWater, her attempt to cost-reduce diagnosis and treatment, and Brandon Holland and Jaden Cohen, two high-school students on applying AI to the Prisoner's Dilemma. I interviewed Chris Malachowsky about the history of NVIDIA. And, as always, the RATS (Rich Asilomar Tradition Session) in which almost everyone gives a 10-minute talk lasted past midnight.

The workshop is strictly off-the-record unless the speaker publishes it elsewhere, so I can't discuss the content of the talks.

The Little Garden

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Below the fold is the story of how I got a full-time Internet connection at my apartment 32 years ago next month, and the incredible success of my first ISP.

The reason I'm now able to tell this story is that Tom Jennings, the moving spirit behind the ISP has two posts describing the history of The Little Garden, which was the name the ISP had adopted (from a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto) when I joined it in May 1993. Tom's perspective from the ISP's point of view contrasts with my perspective — that of a fairly early customer enhanced by information via e-mail from John Gilmore and Tim Pozar, who were both involved far earlier than I.

NDSA Sustainability Excellence Award

Yesterday, at the DigiPres conference, Vicky Reich and I were awarded a "Sustainability Excellence Award" by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. This is a tribute to the sustained hard work of the entire LOCKSS team over more than a quarter-century.

Below the fold are the citation and our response.

My Old Car

This post celebrates my weird old car's 30^thbirthday. It is a Mazda RX-7 dated November 1993, carrying the California license RX7 DSHR. I bought it new and in the almost 30 years since have driven it for nearly 140K miles. Unusually for an RX-7 this old, it is almost completely stock and has never been on a track.

Below the fold, I recount an RX-7 saga spanning thirty-eight years and well over a quarter-million miles.

LOCKSS Program Turns 25

Happy 25^th Birthday LOCKSS! The fifteen-year retrospective is here, and the twenty-year one is here, in which I wrote:

Thanks again to the NSF, Sun Microsystems, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the funding that allowed us to develop the system. Many thanks to the steadfast support of the libraries of the LOCKSS Alliance, and the libraries and publishers of the CLOCKSS Archive, that has sustained it in production. Special thanks to Don Waters for facilitating the program's evolution off grant funding, and to Margaret Kim for the original tortoise logo.

Now for some more gratuitous self-promotion. This means:

• I started work on decentralized, permissionless peer-to-peer systems a quarter of a century ago.
• It is two decades since we were awarded an SOSP "Best Paper" for Preserving peer replicas by rate-limited sampled voting.
• Next month it will be a decade since my first post on cryptocurrencies, The Bitcoin vulnerability.
• It is five years since I posted Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree, based on the paper by Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark, showing that all the techniques Satoshi Nakamoto assembled to create Bitcoin were published between 43 and 31 years ago now.

Blog on vacation

I have a stack of books that I set aside for summer reading, so this blog is on vacation for two weeks so I can at least reduce the height of the stack.

Crypto: My Part In Its Downfall

I was asked to talk about cryptocurrencies to the 49^th Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. I decided that my talk would take the form of a chronology, so I based the title on a book by the late, great comic Spike Milligan. It became Crypto: My Part In Its Downfall¹.

Below the fold is the text, with links to the sources.

Brio-Compatible "Big Boy" Model

One of the things our grandson is interested in is trains, especially steam trains. Via gifts from various friends and relations he accumulated a vast collection of the Brio wooden model trains and tracks; it is favorite plaything at our house. I added needed pieces to the collection by downloading models from the amazing selection of Brio-compatible pieces on Thingiverse and printing them using the Creality CR6-SE that I got via Kickstarter two years ago. These included switches, buffers, gender changers and long straight tracks.

E's & D's Adventures in Life
CC BY 2.0

Another part of his train interest is "Big Boy", Union Pacific 4014, "the biggest steam train there has ever been in the whole wide world". So my wife decided that a suitable Christmas present would be a Brio-compatible model of Big Boy. You can't buy one, and I couldn't find one on Thingiverse, so I flexed my Tinkercad muscles and started on what turned out to be quite the saga. Below the fold, the details.