Software Vault: The Sapphire Collection/Software Vault (Sapphire Collection) (Digital Impact).ISO/cdr16/wired1_1.zip/ELECTROS

Text File | 1994-09-18 | 30KB | 565 lines

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_Wired 1.1_
Electrosphere
*************

Electrons or Photons?
Read this before you bet on the Outer Limits of Computing.

by Frederic E. Davis


Chip technology mutates by megatrends and each new generation of chips
instantly antiquates the most recent state-of-the-art version. Intel's
new Pentium packs millions of transistors onto a single chip,
transforming your computer into the rival of many a mainframe. Had
automobile technology advanced at a similar pace over the past 20 years,
your car would travel 500,000 miles an hour, get a million miles to the
gallon, and only cost a measly $1,000.

But is there life after Pentium? Despite the dizzying evolutionary pace,
chip technology may be running into a silicon wall. Semiconductor
circuits presently incorporate tiny threads of precious metals, some as
small as 1 micron wide - that's a millionth of a meter. But the current
technology may be approaching a barrier of .25 microns that will be
difficult to overcome. This barrier will limit the number of transistors
that can be placed on a single chip when using traditional design and
manufacturing techniques.

A superchip breakthrough is imminent, though, and promises to offer all
you digitally attuned folks a sustained tempo of mind-boggling
technological treats. In addition, superchips will do more than enhance
speed; they'll open doors to new computing (and existential)
possibilities, such as multimedia creations (audio and video), speech
recognition, artificial intelligence, synthetic secretaries, and virtual
reality. A single superchip could be programmed to simulate a diverse
range of hardware devices. Modems, fax modems, network cards, sound
cards, and video cards may fall the way of the slide rule.

Two trends support this prognostication of sustained rapid evolution:
First, the granddaddy of chips, Gordon Moore, predicted in 1975 that the
maximum possible number of transistors - the basic building block of
computer chips - would double every two years. His claim was ridiculed
at the time, but he turned out to be almost right: The number of
transistors per chip has increased about 40 percent each year.

Secondly, by making transistors smaller, one can make chips that run
faster while using less power. This increase in the number of
transistors on a chip has souped-up operating speeds to supersonic
levels. Today's densest CPU chips, which are clocked at up to 100-Mhz
and have 32-bit data paths, contain just a few million transistors per
chip and run at speeds nearing 100-million instructions per second. Even
within the limits of current technology, the year 2000 could bring us
500-Mhz, 64-bit chips packed with more than 100-million transistors that
could cruise at more than 2-billion instructions per second.

RAM, the basic component of computer memory, will undergo a similar
growth in capacity. Semiconductor manufacturers claim that they will be
able to produce gigabit (a billion bits) RAM chips within the next 10
years. By comparison, today's RAM chips just recently hit the 16-Mbit,
or 16-million-bit, level. (An interesting aside: one of those
manufacturers also predicts that by the year 2000, most RAM will go into
HDTV sets, not traditional computers.)

But even those estimates may be conservative. One near-term breakthrough
aims to develop a new breed of superchip that crams several separate
chips into one package. This technique can be used to create either
multi-layered 3-D chips or multi-chip modules.

The multi-layered approach stacks chips on top of one another. This type
of 3-D cube configuration provides symmetrical multiprocessing at a
relatively low cost. It's cheaper to attain 400-MHz performance levels
by stacking four 100-MHz processors in a single chip, for example, than
it would be to produce a single 400-MHz processor - something that can't
be done with current technologies anyway.

Multichip module technology melds a variety of different chips into a
single package. This technique could help eliminate bottlenecks in
system performance by placing items such as RAM, video, and input/ouput
(I/O) support in the same chip package as the processor, bypassing any
slowdowns imposed by the computer's motherboard circuitry or expansion
bus.

A far more radical approach to chip development argues for the
abandonment of electronics in favor of photonics - a technology based on
the use of photons, the basic particles of light. Digital photonic
processors have already been demonstrated by scientists at AT&T's Bell
Laboratories, but commercial applications are still many years away.
AT&T's experimental photonic processor uses the world's smallest laser
to send light through a chip composed of many microscopic lenses and
mirrors etched into quartz.

Photonic processors outshine electronic chips in several ways. Most
important, light can carry more information than electricity, and more
quickly. AT&T scientists estimate that photonic processors will process
more than 1,000 times as much information as today's most powerful
supercomputers.

And because light beams can pass through each other without affecting
the physics or path of the beam, they can be packed more densely than
electronic circuitry. Should photonic processors become available, the
idea of today's 16-bit or 32-bit buses would appear quaint compared to a
photonic data bus that could be as much as 10,000 bits wide.

With photonic processors, one can also expand the capabilities of the
chip's data paths - a profoundly important feature. The biggest
performance bottleneck of future systems will not be the speed of the
processor, but rather the speed of getting information on and off the
chip. With photonic processors, a computer could have an optical
backplane that provided more than 1,000 I/O channels, each running at
speeds of more than a gigabit per second, compared with the 5-Mbyte-per-
second speed of standard personal computer buses.

And for a quantum leap forward in chip technology, expect to see major
breakthroughs in quantum mechanic electronics, which offer awesome
potential for making one's chips fly. Quantum mechanics is the branch of
physics that deals with the minute particles that compose atoms. The
electronics part of quantum mechanics exploits the unique properties of
subatomic particles, which can be packed a thousand times more densely
than the precious metal circuits used in contemporary chip-making. By
manipulating subatomic particles, designers hope to create terabit (one
trillion bit) RAM chips as well as teraherz processors.

In order to build quantum electronic chips, scientists are developing
nanotechnology, a process that creates minuscule machines from
individual atoms. These "molecular machines" will be able to manipulate
other atoms and particles to create almost anything imaginable: from
other molecular machines to quantum chips, new chemicals, or tiny robots
that could roam inside our bodies to fight disease and perhaps reverse
aging by reprogramming our DNA. Incorporated into chip technology, these
molecular machines will enable computer users to someday reach levels as
yet "measureless to man."

***************************************************************

Is Stallman Stalled?
One of the Greatest Programmers Alive saw a future where all software
was free. Then Reality set in.

by Simson L. Garfinkel


After nine years, people still don't get it.

"The word 'Free' doesn't refer to price; it refers to freedom," said
Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation.

Most software these days is sold in shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes,
often for hundreds of dollars. For that, you get a floppy disk
containing a program that the computer can execute, but which can't be
modified.  Companies keep their source-code - the actual language in
which programmers write - a closely guarded secret.

Stallman's vision of freedom is software that has no secrets. It comes
complete with source-code so that anyone who gets it can take it apart,
see how it works, and make changes. But most important, people can share
free software with their friends - just by making a copy - without
having to pay royalties,  shareware fees, or anything at all.

In the shrink-wrapped world, that's called piracy. In Stallman's world,
it's called being a good neighbor. "I don't think that people should
ever make promises not to share with their neighbor," he said.

Stallman was always a champion of free software. Throughout the 1970s,
he was one of the most prolific members of the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, and one of many exuberant hackers who thought
that powerful computers, free software and free information would change
society. Then in 1982 he saw the Lab's premier operating system licensed
to a computer company and turned into a proprietary tool for making
money.

Stallman fought back. He quit his job and started Project GNU. The goal:
create a free operating system that people could use and improve and, in
so doing, establish a worldwide community of people sharing software.
Stallman chose to model his effort on AT&T's proprietary Unix operating
system, which was beginning to take the computer world by storm. Hence
the project's tail-chasing name: GNU's Not Unix.

Working day and night for two years, Stallman created EMACS, an
extensible text editor for Unix. That same year, Stallman incorporated
the Free Software Foundation, the world's only charitable non-profit
organization with the mission of developing free software.

Because FSF sold EMACS in source-code form, people around the world
started making additions to the program and porting it to different
manufacturer's computers. Today, EMACS is a mammoth system that helps a
person do everything from read electronic mail to develop software.
Because of its popularity, many computer companies, including IBM,
Digital Equipment Corp., and Hewlett Packard include it as standard
software with their Unix operating systems.

Since then, the GNU project has finished dozens of other programs. Half
the work has been done by volunteers who have written programming tools,
a free implementation of the PostScript language, and a C++ code
compiler, among others. The foundation has attracted more than $350,000
in grants from private companies, money that allows Stallman to hire a
staff of programmers and technical writers.

FSF also makes money by selling manuals for its programs and computer
tapes containing "free" software. Selling free software is not a
contradiction,  Stallman insists: People who buy the tapes are free to
make copies of them and give them to friends, sell them at a profit, or
sell support for the software.

One company that has done just that is the Palo Alto-based Cygnus
Support, which has prospered selling support for GNU software to major
corporations. In the last year, Cygnus has grown to 32 employees, moved
to new offices in Mountain View, Calif., and opened a branch office in
Cambridge, Mass.

But lately, things seem to have bogged down for Project GNU. Stallman
learned long ago not to make promises about delivery dates. This winter,
FSF will release EMACS version 19 - nearly three years later than
originally planned. And the basic GNU operating system has been delayed
for two years by Stallman's decision to base it upon the Mach
microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University (university lawyers
have spent most of those two years working out terms for the software
license, said Len Tower, a member of the FSF board of directors).

Although the original Unix operating system was written in less than a
year by two programmers at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, the system that
Stallman is trying to clone has been evolving for more than 20 years.
"He's trying to build a complete system. That is just a tremendous
undertaking," said Keith Bostic, the No. 2 person at the University of
California at Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group, which oversees
Berkeley's own brand of Unix.

In the meantime, two competing Unix clones have appeared on the market.
But both of those systems are limited to personal computers using
Intel's 80386 chip, while the GNU operating system is designed to be
portable.

Ironically, the problem now is money - the very thing that Stallman is
trying to avoid. Predictably, it's hard to sell tapes to people when
they can easily acquire the software free. In better economic times,
customers were willing to pay the FSF for a tape as a sort of charitable
contribution; but recently those good Samaritans have disappeared. And
FSF's grants, which once accounted for half of the foundation's income,
have dried up. "There's a recession on," said Lisa Goldstein, the
foundation's business director. Last year the FSF was forced to lay off
three of its 15 full-time employees.

Things have gone much better for the fast-growing Cygnus. "The real
difference is that we are running a company," said Cygnus president
Michael Tiemann. One reason, Tiemann said, is that Cygnus "is willing to
hire managers, sales people, marketing people, administrative support,
and pay all of these people very well for doing a good job. My view of
the FSF is that [Stallman] does not believe in managers because he views
them as overhead - leeches on his operation."

Stallman counters that while Cygnus has made significant contributions
to GNU, the company exists not to further the cause of free software,
but to make money by serving the needs of its clients. "Serving them is
not a bad thing, but it is tangential to the goal of the GNU project,"
Stallman said. "FSF spends its money specifically on advancing GNU."

The point, according to Hal Abelson, a professor at MIT and a FSF board
member, is to finish GNU, not to make money. "FSF never had any purpose
other than to make the GNU operating system," he said. "As far as I am
concerned, if it makes this GNU OS and then closes down, it will have
been a complete success.

**************************************************************

Flyaways
CNN Packs a Satellite TV Station into a few suitcases

by Connie Guglielmo


Historians and politicians continue to debate who won the Gulf War, but
anyone glued round-the-clock to their TV set will tell you the winner
was CNN. With its live, raw, and riveting coverage, Ted Turner's 24-hour
Cable News Network became the information source for an international
audience that included everyone from competing news organizations to
Saddam Hussein.

For many of its live visual reports, CNN relied on one of its four
mobile satellite communications systems, also called transportable earth
stations, or "flyaways." The flyaways accept signals from standard video
cameras and include video and audio processing equipment, a dish antenna
for transmitting the signals via satellite, and amplifiers for powering
the system.

Mobile satellite technology has been in use at CNN since 1984, according
to Dick Tauber, director of satellites and circuits for CNN. But the
recent development of more compact earth stations, with smaller antennas
that broadcast on the higher-frequency Ku-band rather than C-band, has
increased the systems' mobility and has cut the amount of time it takes
news crews to set up and link up with a satellite. What once took nearly
a day now takes a few hours, he said.

"The C-band transportable earth stations took up a lot of cargo space -
you needed a large truck, an 18-wheeler, because of the great big
antenna," Tauber said.

With Ku-band flyaway systems, antenna sizes have shrunk to about six to
eight feet, compared with the more than 100 feet needed for C-band
communications. The 13 components of the S-1 Flyaway weigh less than 100
pounds each and fit into crates approved by the Federal Aviation
Administration.

FAA approval is a major selling point for the technology - instead of
sending the flyaways as freight using cargo services, "we can ship the
whole thing as excess baggage on a commercial flight," Tauber said. "Now
everything hits the ground at the same time: crew, reporters and a dozen
or two boxes."

The flyaways sell for between $200,000 to $340,000 and are approved by
the Washington, D.C.-based International Telecommunications Organization
(Intelsat), a 25-year-old cooperative of more than 120 member countries
who own and operate a global communications satellite system. "It's the
concept of the global village," said Arnold Meyers, manager of broadcast
services for Intelsat. "If anything happens in a country, there's more
interest in seeing pictures live."

During the Gulf War and the tense period preceding it, CNN found itself
competing with news organizations that also had deployed earth stations
for live broadcasts. It had to move quickly to contract for satellite
access time with the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian government
ministries responsible for handling Intelsat communications services - a
logistical nightmare Tauber described in one word: "Maalox."

Today, three of CNN's flyaways are based in Atlanta and a fourth is
stationed in London. "Before the war, there were 30 to 40 licensed
transportable flyaways around the world," Tauber said. "But by the time
the war was over, there were 130."

Along with the flyaways, CNN has been issuing portable satellite phones
to its news teams, Tauber said. With these phones, CNN reporters and
crews in the field are virtually guaranteed an open channel of
communication with more than 15 foreign bureaus and CNN's Atlanta
headquarters.

But no matter how successful its satellite communications solutions have
been, CNN continues to explore even better ways to provide live coverage
>from news scenes around the world. Tauber's group is watching the
development of new digital video technologies, including video
compression, that will make it possible to send live video over the
telephone.

One of the most promising of these technologies is Motion Picture
Experts Group (MPEG), a video and audio compression standard expected to
be finalized later this year. C-Cube Microsystems, a San Jose, Calif.-
based compression systems developer, and Bell Atlantic have already
demonstrated a prototype MPEG-based system capable of transmitting high-
quality video from a central video file server to subscriber homes via
standard copper telephone lines.

Tauber believes it will be three to five years before digital video
technology will be cost-effective and capable of handling the network's
broadcast-quality requirements. But he's not worried about the wait.
"Time flies when you're doing bench tests," he said with a laugh.

****************************************************************

If Your Toaster Had a Brain
Echelon pushes chips for everything from trains to beer taps.

-by Art Kleiner


Back in 1983, when A. C. (Mike) Markkula was Apple's chairman, he and
Steve Jobs recruited John Sculley to head the company. Markkula
volunteered to educate the new chief executive about the industry, and
drew a chart showing how every time the price of computers dropped 10
percent, sales multiplied tenfold.

Personal computer prices were approaching $1,000, and 10 times as many
personal computers were selling as when workstations had cost $10,000.
"That's interesting," Sculley said. "But what happens when they hit
$10?"

Markkula said he didn't know. "There'll probably be some clever
invention that will make somebody a lot of money."

Today, Markkula is trying to make his own prophecy come true, through a
new company called Echelon. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Echelon makes
what it calls "neuron chips" - actually board-like modules about the
size of index cards, comprised of three microprocessors each. Each board
is one small component of giant computers that will, should Markkula's
vision turn real, surround us someday.

"If you put 1,000 intelligent, distributed nodes inside a building, and
you add up all their computing power and memory," Markkula said, "you
end up living inside the equivalent of a very powerful central computer.
But it would be impossible for a single computer to do as many things at
once as this network could do."

Echelon actually represents the third stage in Markkula's career. A
dapper man in his 50s who slightly resembles Jimmy Carter, he became a
millionaire marketing chips for Fairchild and Intel in the 1970s. After
retiring in his mid-30s, he was known in Silicon Valley as "the third
Steve," the man who bankrolled Jobs and Steve Wozniak to help found
Apple (and who, among other things, persuaded Wozniak that floppy disks
were worth using).

In the mid-1980s, while trying to wire his house for a "smart" lighting
and entertainment system, Markkula remembered his remark to Sculley
about the market-reach of $10 computers. Commanding devices around the
home had been a longstanding dream, but the results always turned out
half-baked and cumbersome. A digital machine couldn't easily manipulate
the analog knob of a toaster or TV.

But if you attached a $10 digital controller to that appliance, Markkula
reasoned, and made it as programmable and customizable as a personal
computer, the difficulties might evaporate - especially if the chips
could cue each other over power lines, radio waves, telephone wire, or
infrared beams. He called the chips "neurons" - not after neural
networks, which they vaguely resemble, but after the independently
active, inter-related neurons of the human brain.

This year, products containing the chips are just beginning to appear
commercially. Their implications go far beyond merely automating homes.
Echelon's tools, in fact, may never automate many toasters, but they
could reshape industrial society.

"Among the makers of microcontrollers, Echelon has the broadest
potential influence," said David Mason, who follows the future of
information technology at Northeast Consulting Resources in Boston.
"They have a completely organized view of their chips as not just an
isolated device, but a brand name for an idea of fitting them together.
A house is just one example. People might happily buy into one use for
the chips, and that will be a Trojan Horse for the whole Echelon
system."

A demonstration of the neuron-chip system begins, in fact, with Trojan
Horse-like simplicity. You twirl an ordinary dimmer switch, and a light
bulb, mounted nearby on the same panel, brightens and dims. Then you
reach beneath the dimmer switch and tap a small button. Now, when you
turn the dial, two lamps brighten and dim. With more taps, you add
another switch to the circuit; now both switches adjust the same lamp's
brightness. Then you rip the second switch off the wall (to which it is
attached with Velcro), and move it three feet to the left. It still dims
the bulb, sending its commands over a radio link. Wouldn't it be nice,
you think, to be able to move around and reprogram all my own light
switches this easily?

"If you think about how dimmer switches work," said the Echelon engineer
who guided me through the demo, "you realize you couldn't do this in an
ordinary house." Two dimmers, wired in sequence to add resistance to the
wire, can't operate one bulb; if the first switch squeezed the current
to a trickle, how could the second release a torrent?

Echelon's system accomplishes the feat by attaching the dimmer (a
resistor circuit) inside the lamp, with a neuron chip controlling it.
The light switch merely sends a signal through the power line, telling
the lamp's neuron chip how much to brighten or dim. The lamp, like every
appliance in an Echelon system, is programmed to recognize its own
eight-bit binary code; when a transmission carrying its address passes
by, it snags the instruction and responds.

Echelon doesn't make the lamps or switches. It provides the
infrastructure which connects them. It sells boards (with chips made by
Toshiba and Motorola) to makers of appliances and other "smart"
hardware. Developers also buy the kits for programming the chips (by
attaching them to an IBM PC or clone), and the network interfaces, which
link them across the developer's choice of power lines, radio waves,
telephone wire, or infrared beams.

Notwithstanding industry skepticism, Echelon has managed to line up some
of the largest consumer and building companies as customers, including
AT&T, Honeywell, and the Swiss contracting giant Schlumberger. Like
Apple, Echelon sends out "evangelists" to third-party developers to
entice them into building with its chips (which cost $10 now, and are
supposed to drop to $2 by 1995 - not much to add to the price of a
crockpot or alarm system).

But where Apple sought out freewheeling software designers, Echelon must
cultivate a much more staid group: lighting manufacturers, security
companies, and consumer electronics firms. Many demur because the home
appliance industry has its own rival system, called CEBus (for "Consumer
Electronics Bus"). Like MS-DOS in Apple's early days, CEBus doesn't
quite match the power or inventiveness of the California upstart, but it
has the blessing of the establishment. The CEBus also has a big plus -
the ability to carry video images - and a big minus - it doesn't quite
exist yet.

Because of the CEBus competition, Echelon is more likely to appear first
in industrial circles. Locomotives and factory assembly lines, for
instance, can have their massive (and expensive) electrical cable
harnesses replaced with a single loop of wire exchanging messages
between neuron chips connected to hundreds of devices within the
machine. Eventually, autos might be built around Echelon systems;
drivers could reconfigure their dashboards when the mood struck, as if
they were setting new preferences in their computer software. ("I'd like
my mileage in kilometers today - or how about in leagues?")

Markkula, who owns a cattle ranch, talks about strapping neuron chips to
his cows' hooves to check their weights from afar, or find a particular
calf by triangulating a signal to a homing device. Small children, he
muses, might carry similar chips to help their parents find them in a
crowd. Echelon's chief executive officer, Ken Oshman (formerly of the
Rolm telephone system company), talks of sensors on a race car that
instantly download performance data into diagnostic computers as it
rolls into a pit stop.

All sorts of innovations seem dazzlingly possible - light rail, smart
factories, and ultimately homes as charming and responsive as those in
Toon Town, in which everything you touch, from the doorbell to the
commode, can have a customizable personality.

Today, prototype neuron chips exist in Amtrak trains, shuffling the
destination signs when cars are recoupled. In a Florida parking lot,
they prompt lights to lead people as they walk to their cars. The French
government is installing an Echelon system for apartment buildings; it
can convert messages from Minitel (a French online system) to voice-mail
and read them through a speaker in the wall.

But the most commercially successful system so far is probably the
liquor-dispensing apparatus in a casino in Loughlin, Nevada. Rows of
bottles sit behind the bar, pointed downwards with tubes coming out of
them. When the bartender rings up a sale, one chip calculates the
change, another updates the inventory list, and a third controls the
flow of liquor into the glass. Why the investment? To keep bartenders
>from pouring extra-heavy drinks.

If Echelon's world follows that pattern, it will be pitiless to rule-
benders - thousands of chips implanted in everything from fireplugs to
mailboxes could keep tabs on the people around them. Like many
technologies, Echelon's systems will have to find a way to guarantee the
privacy of people who use them. They will also have to safeguard against
intrusion - which they now accomplish with randomly generated
authentication codes and passwords, much like the PIN codes of credit
cards. As Markkula said, "You don't want anybody to be able to turn on
your garbage disposal while your arm is in there."



Copyright (c) 1993 Wired magazine