Oh, those early Internet days

 Walt Underwood has been a long-time reader of this blog, and has graced us with a couple of comments for recent posts.  See 'comments' at the bottom.   I used to be able to 'see' these comments without extra steps, but apparently now you need to click on them.

Anyway, Walt was the original designer for what became the HP Internet in 1985, recruiting Bert Raphael and Tony Fanning, who had been managers of the SRI Arpanet node before they joined HP.  Bert, in fact, managed Doug Engelbart and his merry band, and sold them all to TimeShare which in turn was bought by McDonnell-Douglas.   I had purchased rights to that system for HP prior to the work we started.  

Walt shared this morning that "When they (Bert and Tony) presented at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference, the folks there didn't quite know what to do with them. All the other papers were research systems and they were reporting on actual use!

"The best paper on the beginnings of the HP Internet was only published in an internal HP conference in 1987 (European Software Engineering Productivity Conference, Böblingen). Luckily, I have a copy. Here it is.  This particular paper is by T.W. Cook and Walt Underwood, with the opening shown below the citation.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e5zi4807u353wmpr8ipwr/hp-internet.pdf?rlkey=r8phrssu9rbu4lctspy1pts4b&st=p1c38rio&dl=0

Another backgrounder for all of this that is a 'blast from the past' was noted in my HP blogpost from February 2010:  https://hpphenom.blogspot.com/2010/02/cisco-day.html 

I did an article in 2016 for the Computer History Museum magazine, Core, pp. 46-51, about Sandy, but I don't mention that HP was their first customer in it:

https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/core-2016.pdf

Turns out that Bert told me about this little company, Cisco, which had a cool router, and we should look at it.  Also turns out, we looked, and I signed the first commercial order for Cisco Inc.   Moreover, HP was Cisco's only commercial customer for 27 months, until Boeing signed in (and that, I believe, was instigated by Dave Packard, who was on the Boeing board for years).   There is a cute story about how Bert got to know the Cisco folk--it wasn't through either SRI or Stanford, but instead through his wife's travel agency (which Bert helped with), because Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack used them for travel, and. on occasion had some 'interesting requests'.  

Bill Johnson and Gifford Pinchot III

 A few days ago, I was musing about Reflections.   Wow, some just come roaring back.

In early 1982, I was promoted into a new role at HP.  Instead of a Divisional Manager with a Profit-and-Loss division 1,000 miles from HP's Palo Alto headquarters, I was named Corporate Engineering Director with an office next door to Davd Packard himself.  The send-off from Colorado Springs, where I'd worked for 18 years, featured a set of gag gifts--among them, a certificate entitled Medal of Defiance

The certificate was laying atop a bookcase--not inconspicuous, but not really on display.  A fellow named Gifford Pinchot had come to interview me for a book about corporate innovation, sent my way by R &D VP Bill Walker of Tektronix.  I'd been in the US Forestry during college, so I knew the Pinchot name.  Indeed, his grandfather started the US Forest Service for Teddy Roosevelt. Espying the certificate, he whipped out a Polaroid camera, which is the only reason I can describe the award today.  I figured it was indeed a gag gift, and tossed it a few weeks later.

The manuscript arrived three years later to HP Public Relations, who blew a headgasket--taking the name of our founder in vain.  They showed up at my desk with a sheaf of paper--Chapter 1, of a proposed book named Intrapreneuring.  Nonplussed, I thought--ut-oh, here goes my job--but I said, "Maybe Dave is in, let's ask him."

Packard was in, and as I intoned something like "You probably won't remember this incident, since it was 15 years ago or more" he grabbed the papers, and scanned the front page.   Turning to me, he jabbed a finger at me and said, "Young man (I was 45), you're in a job now that you can stop lots of good things from happening.  Make sure that you don't."  He then handed the sheaf back to the hapless PR folk, and said, "Print it."

Pinchot's book garnered a New York Times article, a Time magazine story, and a spot on Jane Pauley's The Today Show, but Pinchot needed a compelling example.   He came back to HP, who turned him down cold, even though Robert Waterman and Tom Peters' book In Search of Excellence had come out (1982).

HP leaders had a long history of ducking the limelight.  Both founders eschewed press coverage; their approach was decidedly stealth mode.  We all knew the drill--no surprise.  HP PR did call me to say that Pinchot had asked, and that they'd declined, thanks.  And by the way, if he tries to go around them, don't.  I understood, perfectly.

HP's Management Council, 22 folk plus Dave and Bill who were now semi-retired, met once a year, in 1985 at the tony Meadowwood resort in St. Helena, CA.  The group had never before studied any competitor, but this time a facilitator launched the two-day meeting by handing out DEC's annual report.  He asked us to skim it, and then turn to the back page with the list of board members and officers.  He said, "I will go around the room, and I want each of you to describe who on that list you have met, and had a conversation with, and give us the context."

I was 21st to answer, and the first who had met any.  I knew two, both engineering Vice-Presidents.  Asked to describe how well I knew them, I asnwered, "Well, one of them (Bill Johnson) slept in my master bedroom last Saturday night."  That stopped the clock!   

The discussion with the facilitator was desultory--the group as a whole didn't think of DEC as a worthy foe.  We moved to other topics.  The group, it always seemed to me, preferred tactics to strategy, and evolutionary tactics at that.

The next morning, COO Dean Morton was given a phone message.  Do you remember those pink message slips that receptionists scribbled before cell phones?   Morton read it, blinked and then groaned.  Usually calm, he interrupted the speaker demanding, "What the hell is going on?  Forbes, Fortune,and the Wall Street Journal have canceled attending our annual press conference on Wednesday; they're each going to Apple's instead."

HP had just posted its best year ever, with CEO Young chairing a new Council on Competitiveness for President Ronald Reagan.  With $6 Billion revenue, four times that of Apple or Intel, HP was far and away the biggest high-tech company in Silicon Valley.  Sun Microsystems was a puny $38 Million.  Cisco an Oracle didn't yet exist.  Totally exasperated, Dean said, "What is this crap with Apple?  Don't we have anyone exciting like that noisy guy?"

I don't know what compelled me, but I heard myself exclaim: "I just got called by Time, the New York Times, and The Today Show, but Corporate pulic relations turned them all down."

Morton turned purple, then bellowed:  "Call them back.  Get on those programs!"

Serendipity often plays a huge role.  I booked the gigs, before Morton asked why they wanted me.  The NY Times and the Time magazine article were good, but not show-stoppers.  But when Jane Pauley featured Gifford and me on the Today Show, all bets were off.  The program aired around the world, re-running for years.  Michael Schrage did a story about it for the Harvard Business Review 25 years later, citing it as the poster-child for corporate innovation, for intrapreneuring, a word that stuck.

And while I owe it a lot to Pinchot, and to Packard's grace at a pivotal time, I also owe Bill Johnson a debt of gratitude for sleeping at my place when he and I decided to experiment with DEC and HP network ideas.

Oops, must have hit a nerve

 The posts about "2nd largest corporate electronic network" in the Surface Mount Tech post yesterday, prompted a quick response from Walt Underwood, the original designer of that network.   Here's his pithy commentary:

I was the designer of the HP Internet. Chuck gave me some very simple parameters, like 12 months and $100k and told me to come back when I had a plan. 

Bert Raphael and Tony Fanning were tremendously useful because they'd come over from SRI.

Second largest private network (not just "corporate"), but the largest private IP network. I think the bigger network was the "DEC Easynet" at Digital, and that ran on DECnet protocols, not Internet protocols. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet#DEC_Easynet

Quite the story, from the designer who should have gotten the award.   But Walt's note prompted thinking along these lines, again this is a story from 40 years ago, so I had to 'research' some of this.

First, Bill Johnson (BJ), a senior VP at DEC, was a colleague I met at Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, in their pioneering Graduate College program, based on computer conferencing.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Behavioral_Sciences_Institute

BJ pioneered the DEC Easynet, based on the EIES system and I stimulated the Confer System at HP with the lightly structured 'instruction' for Walt Underwood described above.     BJ and I decided to run a joint experiment with our companies, can you imagine?   I cannot find BJ on the Internet today.  He left DEC in their 'crash and burn' phase circa 1990, and went to IBM where Lou Gerstner honored him as one of the 'new wild ducks' circa 1992.  That story should be findable, but I cannot find it right now.  BJ left IBM circa 2002 or so, and became Chancellor or President of an Eastern University.  I thought it was Rensselaer, but again, no luck finding him today.  Humnn, Roland Schmitt went from GE to President of Rensselaer -- ah, yes, I do recall that now.     BJ might have gone to Worchester Polytechnic, but I cannot find him listed there either.  Time plays hob with all of these wonderful deeds from yesteryear.

Some of the antecedent for all of this is reported in Ray Price's and my HP book, The HP Phenomenon, for example with this opening pair of paragraphs on p. 280 that goes on for five or six pages:

The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) created the first distance learning computer-conferencing system to support an alternative MBA in strategic studies in 1982. Attendees included Bill Johnson (B. J.) from Digital Equipment and Chuck House from HP, along with Dennis Hayes, founder of Hayes Modem, and Stewart Brand, who had profiled XeroxPARC for Rolling Stone magazine. House and Johnson agreed to install computer-conferencing software as an experiment and to share the sociological lessons that resulted.   An Industrial Research Institute membership starting in 1984 allowed House to form a virtual team with R&D leaders Roland Schmitt and Fred Geary of General Electric, Lew Lehr and Les Krogh of 3M, Ian Ross at Bell Labs, and Dan Stanzione at Bellcore. This became a loosely federated core experimental group wrestling with the import of and lessons from innovation in this “digital world.”33

It was experimental, not conceptual. As such, it was exploratory, adventuresome, and pioneering. Amid conflicting advice, the Corporate Engineering team—Bert Raphael, Tony Fanning, and Mark Laubach—brought five different e-mail systems together with an overlay interface, allowing all of the company’s people to communicate. They evaluated two leading university computer-conferencing systems, Confer and EIES, installing Confer to give discussion forum capability to HP employees. 

The Confer story is told nicely, in considerable philosophical perspective in an ACM article by Tony Fanning and Bert Raphael, presented at CSCW '86.   https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/637069.637109

And guess what?  The leading example they use for Confer is Surface Mount Technology.  Which was my attempt to get Femcor (and me) out of the cross-hairs described in the earlier post.

Why do you need a Passport?

 For reasons that escape me now, I found myself in Waltham, Massachusetts one day, speaking to an assembled crowd of designers and product marketing managers.   It might have been due to a scheduled Logic Analyzer talk, or it might have been a Corporate Engineering visit.   The former would have been circa 1978, the latter about 1982 or 1983.  I imagine that it was the latter.

Whatever the gist of it, I was 'on-stage' in front of 200+ folk, who had just learned that their division was being carved up, that Boeblingen would be allowed to enter the ICU monitoring business, since they had essentially defaulted on serving the European medical market. 

Mad as hornets, they saw me as a 'corporate puke' at the moment, and I must have been part of the game to strand them!   Well, I knew nothing about this, but there I was, more or less unarmed and defenseless.  My first feeble attempt was to say that they, this very division, had taken my graphics program away from me in Colorado Springs because Dave Packard thought that they could sell displays far faster than we could.  He probably was right about that--in 1970, hardly anyone but the U of Utah and Alvy Ray Smith's NYIT thought displays for computers was a good idea.   

That didn't cut any ice with them, so I tried another tack.  I said, "what are your sales in the US, and what are they in Europe?"   The answer was that basically no one in the room seemed to know.  Later, I checked, and the sobering truth was that four years earlier, Waltham and Andover orders were $104M in the US, and $36.7M in Europe.  Now, four years later after lots of 'push' from Corporate to "do more" in Europe, the numbers were $183M to $49.8M.  Sales in the US had grown 76%, vs. 36% in Europe.

But I didn't know that at the time.  I had a simple question:  "How many of you have been to Europe this year?"  No hands.   "How many last year?"   No hands.   

"How many of you have a valid US Passport?"  Four hands.  Probing, I found that wo of them were only for vacations in the Caribbean; the other two were for international travel, but neither had done so fo more than three years.

I heard myself practically screaming, "I'm glad they took your charter and sent it to someone else.  You're not running your business as a worldwide business in any way."

It did not endear me to the crowd, needless to say.  But I did keep track, and in 1982, four years later (which is way too quick for a new division to gear up, and especially to invent something for the 'local market), the overall numbers were $308M to $74M.   The US sales up another 68%, Europe up 49%.  Getting slightly better.  Four years more, and the results were $421M to $152M -- now we're seeing 37% growth in the USA, and 105% in Europe.   

Vindication?  Yes, but it took almost a decade.  These kinds of business strategic decisions don't change things 'overnight' and my guess is that few, if anyone, in the room that day ever calculated the numbers a decade later, to say "Hummn, guess they had a point there."

But, for me, the question was: "How did I come up with that question about passports?  And was that the key to the puzzle?"

SURFACE MOUNT TECHNOLOGY

It's a forty-year old story, but the moral of the story is timeless.

I had moved into a co-ordination role for HP in 1982, called Director of Corporate Engineering.  You could define that narrowly as Director of a small group labeled "Corporate Engineering" which was in fact true.   You could alternatively define it broadly as Director of Engineering for the Corporation, which at times for various topics was also true.  Topics like control of worldwide Capital Equipment budgets for all 91 R&D centers, or design standards for such topics as co-ordinated Human Factors when new icons and varied meanings proliferated when CRT displays displaced analog meters and digital Nixie-tubes.   I found, for example, that there were something like 23 variations of HP Basic from like 17 divisions--which made a mockery of the HP Computer Group's broad claim of inter-activity for a synchronized Manufacturing floor.   We reduced it to 2 dialects, but could never get it to one--so the Fort Collins desktop computers and workstations never 'joined the party' for the Cupertino-based CPU networks.  And things like building a truly-networked corporation for the 15,000 design engineers--which we did,

One thing we were always on the lookout for was innovation in a single division, that might be helpful for other divisions if they simply knew about it.   So, how do you tell them?  To that end, we had a Corporate Engineering newsletter, called HP Network, surprise, and we built a leading-edge electronic network that we called HP Internet circa 1985.   I later got a couple of big awards for catalyzing that network, which at the time was cited  as the 2nd largest corporate network in the world (HP' was like the 60th largest company in the US, so hardly to be expected, right?). 

The citation was in Jessica Lipnack's and Jeffrey Stamps' book, The Networking Book, November 1986.  I'd met them and worked with them at the innovative mid-life crisis school, Western Behavioral Science Institute in La Jolla, CA from 1982-1984.  

https://www.amazon.com/Networking-Book-People-Connecting/dp/0710209762

They would go on to write the earliest and best books on Virtual Teams, and multiple Networking discoveries--some while teaming with the NJIT folk who had built EIES, the Electronic Information Exchange System that WBSI used for its innovative post-graduate college program.  More about EIES and its leaders, Murray Turoff and Rozanne Hiltz, are here:

https://computing.njit.edu/news/njit-research-1970s-became-vital-parts-todays-social-media-recipe

So, I got a head-start on interconnecting folk from these activities.  SME (Society for Manufacturing Engineers), a group I'd never been part of, gave me their 1986 Award for "International Contributions for Engineering and Scientific Communities Award:

Some years later, Smithsonian and MIT selected a set of 200 "Wizards and their Wonders" and this international network was key to my selection (being ACM President didn't hurt either).

Okay, so on with the story.  As the Corporate Engineering Director, my job, among other things, was to visit each of the 91 divisional R&D (mostly D) labs and 25 research groups in HP Labs once a year.  When Dave Packard outlined that expectation to me, I whistled--"whew, that's a lot of travel.  What do I say to them?  I'll be so busy traveling that I won't have time for much else."  

His laconic answer: " Just tell them what you learned at the last place you visited."

Well, first of all, I did indeed do a lot of travel.  I didn't make every spot every year, but probably more like every 18 months or so--became an easy "million-miler" for United Airlines among others.  "Join the Navy, see the world" and "IBM = I've Been Moved" were two mottos I could now appreciate better.

But, the fateful day in McMinnville, Oregon, at a tiny acquisition (Femcor) with maybe 70 employees basically 'off-the-radar' in the Medical Group, I was shown superb NEW technology called Surface Mount Technology.  Wikipedia informs: Surface-mount technology, originally called planar mounting, is a method in which the electrical components are mounted directly onto the surface of a printed circuit board. An electrical component mounted in this manner is referred to as a surface-mount device.  

I liked it.  And it was nowhere else in the HP pantheon, so I couldn't wait to describe it in our newsletter, which we did in the next issue.  (I cannot find a copy today, but might when I tackle the stacks of boxes in the garage).   

Recall what Femcor did: "Medical, industrial and portable X-ray systems, field emission X-ray and electron beam tubes, pulsed X-ray and electron beam systems, cardiac resuscitation systems."  Not exactly the center-weight for an increasingly computer-systems oriented corporation, for which Femcor accounted for less than two-tenths of one percent of HP revenues.

And soon enough, I got an from the general manager at Femcor, mad as hell.   It seems he had been inundated with calls and visitors from around the HP loop.   He said, with some vehemence and invective that I cannot repeat verbatim, something like: "we've had four times as many visitors as we have employees.  The first two were great, and then it got bothersome, and now we cannot get a damn thing done because of your damn article.  CALL OFF THE DOGS."

I'd had a somewhat similar experience with an Analytical division in Karlsruhe, Germany, which made liquid chromatographs with great 3D pictures that I extolled for better informational content.  But Karlsruhe was 55 miles east of Böblingen, where HP's German efforts were concentrated.  The nearest town was Baden-Baden, known for its thermal baths--impressively remote for most potential HP visitors.  And 3D images were much less in vogue than potential packaging technology for computers.

So I didn't get much push-back from the Karlsruhe team, but the lesson stuck from the Femcor folk.

The lesson: Not everyone appreciates shining a bright light on them--notoriety is not necessarily good.