[FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable
Frank Wimberly
wimberly3 at gmail.com
Thu Dec 26 13:30:17 EST 2019
Steve,
You should write a memoir.
Frank
-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly
My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
Phone (505) 670-9918
On Thu, Dec 26, 2019, 10:42 AM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> Frank -
>
> It is fascinating to hear that you were in the "belly of the beast" if
> only for a short while. I suppose we have all been in the belly of *some*
> beast in our various times.
>
> My earliest years were without a telephone in the house (camp-trailer in
> the woods) followed by several party lines (shared in 2 cases amongst other
> USFS families in forest-camp compounds) and understanding that the magical
> rings and voices coming from the handsets in the house were modulated
> (whatever that meant to a 3 year old) over the insulated bundles of wires
> running from tree-to-tree and pole-to-pole... It wasn't hard to
> understand the idea that if voices could travel over single wires, that any
> one of us on a party line could pick up and hear the other's voices during
> a conversation or even that the volume/static on the line would abruptly
> change if someone picked up (say to listen in?). It made perfect sense
> that such resources (wires on poles) were very scarce and needed to be
> shared... I had heard of operator-assisted calling which made great sense
> (patch panels) but the idea that the pulses sent via the spring-loaded
> rotary dial could "tell" a electromechanical switch (my father showed me
> the one in the main location at the second forest camp when I was about 5)
> and I remember watching/hearing a call go through it... relays opening and
> closing as ring pulses went through...
>
> One of my friend's father was the local telephone lineman and he was busy
> all the time either going out on trouble calls or doing maintenance on the
> switches. Realizing that in a community of roughly 300 (600 in the county
> at the time!) was keeping one man busy (more than) full time doing this was
> my first taste of "infrastructure". I don't know what kind of backup he
> had... I never saw anyone else working with him nor heard of anyone else
> employed... though I do know sometimes there were company trucks parked at
> the fenced yard next to his house... probably for new line buildout?
> Another father of a friend owned/operated the local "vending" routes which
> included soda machines, candy machines and best of all pinball machines.
> HIs territory must have been pretty wide because our 300 town only had one
> soda/candy machine at each of 2 gasoline stations and 3 pinball machines at
> the drug/variety store. I got to see the ones in their shop behind the
> house under repair opened up and really got a kick out of trying to "trace
> the logic" of a coin-drop/lever-pull, delivery-chute... and even better,
> the complex logic of a pinball machine. Yet another father drove the
> propane delivery truck (he had a boss who drove some, but he was the main
> driver) and another who ran the local branch of the power - coop along
> with his wife. They had more trucks that came in from the next large town
> (60 miles and maybe 1000 people?) to do major repairs/upgrades, but he was
> out in his truck all the time fixing/installing *something*. Several of
> these men ran an ad-hoc cable network in the core of the village...
> nothing came in by antenna and I guess they had their own up on a mountain
> with a rebroadcast system... the network was down as much as it was up
> and while *some* of the customers had to have been paying customers, it was
> these guys who somewho cooperatively kept it going. I *knew* that someone
> besides these men were *designing* and *building* the systems they
> maintained (thought the cable TV thing was more DIY).
>
> Many years later, we moved to a large town/small-city (2 supermarkets, a
> dozen motels and gas stations?) and our neighbors at the edge of town owned
> the local AM radio station... they solicited me to clean the station every
> Saturday and after a few months of that I graduated to typing up station
> program logs and then began to operate the station under supervision...
> they were largely "automated" which meant 4 big carousels with 4-track
> endless loop (similar to 8-track) cartidges that we would load with music,
> PSAs and commercials which were then "programmed" by inserting pins in
> different patch-panels... there were two modes... for example, the system
> that took over on the top of hour for the network news would inject one of
> a small handful of instrumental tunes that could be faded/interrupted
> at-will to flip over the newsfeed. The rest of the time, the system had a
> priority stack and the commercial/PSAs stack had priority in the sense that
> it wanted to play out it's queue within the allotted time (usually one
> hour) no matter what... while the music queue would simply play whenever
> one of the others were not... only rarely (due to bad planning) would a
> commercial or PSA go unplayed. Not every hour was different, but there
> were periods (8-12AM, 1-5PM, 6-10PM) that had a particular character and
> there was some variation within it. By the time I was 15 (Freshman in HS)
> the station owners saw my diligence and curiosity (the Station Engineer
> would take the time to explain most everything there to me in as much
> detail as I had time for) and offered me a nighttime live show which I ran
> for most of my HS years. I always had the option to fire up the automated
> system, as I was also trying to do my homework during that time. I went
> in to the station before 4PM to handle the 4-6 news programs (I can still
> hear Paul Harvey ringing in my ears) and then the (automated) 6-7 PM
> "sundown serenade" curated by the wife but executed by me (most of the
> time). At 7 we rolled into "the Night Show" which was conceived by the
> owners to be something for the "youth crowd". It was nominally a Rock show
> but was really Top-40 by their measure... We had the full array of classic
> rock vinyl in the shelves and I was allowed to use (most of) it but there
> was the top-40 billboard charts to be serviced which meant a lot of
> pop-rock and country-rock and pop-pop.
>
> Yet another exposure to the complexities of "programming" and "logic" from
> a somewhat different perspective. The engineer at the time had been on
> the predecessor to the NIF fusion project in Livermore (MFE?)
> (designing/building the capacitor banks) and clued me in a lot of things.
> He was a greasy-haired wiry little hippy that drove an old italian
> convertible (very finicky with dual carbs...) and had a penchant for
> visiting the bars/brothels in Mexico (this was a border town) and probably
> got rolled by someone at least once a year... and had the stories (and
> scuffs) to tell about it. He taught me binary logic/arithmetic and showed
> me how that related to the somewhat similar/different discrete/analog
> systems behind the carousels (all the electronics were exposed, so you
> could trace wires and watch relays open/close) and even taught me the
> basics of analog circuits including soldering, relays, power
> amplifiers/transmitters. Later, as I went into the all-digital world of
> Computer Science, It was as if I was learning about Mammals after growing
> up among only Marsupials. Of course automobiles had their own share of
> analog-discrete logic with an HV (timed) side and a 12V mostly continuous
> (but with switches/relays) side. This was the 70s and the autos of
> interest were mostly from the 50s/60s.
>
> I went to LANL in 1981 to work on the Proton Storage Ring which was in
> some ways the epitome of an anolog/digital hybrid systems with huge
> subsystems being HV and HF while others were "utility" (110/60) and yet
> others were TTL. The place was "in flux" all the time... with magnetic
> fields (intended and unintended) coming and going effecting everything.
> It was a quite the milieu. Moving to HPC was both a relief and a whole
> new world... even though I still worked with some analog systems, they
> were much less dangerous and much less high speed... the digital stuff was
> lickety-split (by those days standards) and the introduction of vector and
> parallel (and eventually distributed) processing was new and interesting.
> By the time I was mentoring others (90s), the backgrounds were almost
> exclusively digital and most if not all of the "kids" that came through had
> never even worked on their own cars, much less vending machine or automated
> tape carousel logic.
>
> As Y2K approached, a consultant from SAIC was working in my general
> area... we became friends... but his role and way of thinking was
> incredibly foreign to me. One of his roles (he felt like a plant from the
> military-industrial into the military-scientific establishment) was to
> consult on Y2K readiness. My system at the time had been hand-built on
> top of UNIX (replacing a VMS system that was falling apart every day) by a
> small team (3-5 of us) and while I did not know every line of code in the
> system (I had written a good portion of it), we had coding practices and
> standards and code-reviews and I was roughly 99.9% confident that we didn't
> have a single 2-digit date in the system, nor did we depend on any
> libraries or system code which did. The open-source/community nature of
> BSD Unix meant that everything we relied on and trusted without inspecting
> personally had been inspected by hundreds or thousands of others. The Y2K
> problem had been discussed a lot and there were plenty of procedures in
> place to encourage (though never ensure) that every code-team/system had
> expunged any possible Y2K bugs. My SAIC buddy talked in SLOC and had
> metrics up the wazoo about things which almost exclusively did not apply
> (well) to our systems as-designed and as-built. There may well have been
> (especially in the Business Processing side of the house) some big
> risk/holes, but I knew my system intimately and the other major/similar
> systems (slightly larger development teams with more turnover) were well in
> hand.
>
> We (the three major systems) also had on-call responsibility and were used
> to being called at 3AM if something wasn't right.... *we* had been trained
> by the operations staff to not leave them hanging... they could be pretty
> easy-going/helpful with those of us who answered our phones and were
> easy-going/helpful with them, but the few who thought they shouldn't have
> to help stand up a system they built when it fell over (or sprung a leak)
> at 3AM on a holiday discovered quickly that they would not be let off
> easier just because they were reluctant or pissy about the call. Bottom
> line was that we (developers) knew that our systems had to run 24/7/365 and
> the 00:00:01 01/01/00 was just like any other day, and if/when/as the
> dominoes might start to fall, it was OUR job to be right there standing
> back up any of OUR dominoes that might fall on their own or be knocked down
> by others. There was a little rivalry between systems (operations as well
> as development) but for the most part of someone else's system was falling
> down and making a mess (creating possible/implied bugs in other systems)
> we all pulled together pretty well. I don't know to this day if my SAIC
> friend understood how coordinated and intimate we all were, because he kept
> on predicting gloom and doom for us as the date approached. As it was,
> there wasn't even much scurry as the calendar/clocks cranked over Y2K, and
> I don't remember any acute problems. We (wanted to?) believed that the
> ADP side of the house had no end of problems due to their heavy dependence
> on commercial systems/layers/middle-ware/vendors. As I remember it, Y2K
> was pretty much a flop everywhere.
>
> All this in response to "IT is Not Sustainable". I would claim that
> virtually NOTHING we build is sustainable... or at least there is a huge
> spectrum. Engineering can be incredibly robust within it's design
> parameters, but is often incredibly fragile when confronted with a
> unexpected conditions... Evolved systems are also simultaneously fragile
> and robust. They are robust within the "basins of attraction" implied by
> the ecosystem they operate within but once pushed out of those robust
> regions they can self-destruct quickly... I've been studying (very loosely)
> the myriad examples of species extinction and habitat loss and cascading
> failures (in progress and/or impending) in our ecosystems and am appalled
> at how unprepared we (humans, engineers, even scientists) are to apprehend
> the fragile interconnectedness and "designed for near-optimal-conditions"
> we have set up. Not precisely a house of cards, a line of dominos, a
> stack of Jenga sticks, but not precisely NOT those either.
>
> My recent trip to Europe/Scandinavia opened my eyes to some things I was
> previously under-aware of. The evolved-engineered systems of polder and
> canal and dike and hydrology in the Netherlands is perhaps the most
> impressive. Realizing that they started significantly holding back the
> north sea during the "little ice age" (dikes and polders had started
> earlier, but this was when they really came into their own?) helps me to
> appreciate the difference between what they have done there over centuries
> vs what our own Army Corps has done in less than 100... and most to the
> point, the ways a whole culture can adapt to things including their own
> engineering given many generations, but how we "moderns" don't have time to
> adapt culturally to the changes. We DO adapt (the talk of telephones and
> the earliest examples leading up to a global wireless,
> multi-system-technology mesh/grid being an example), but it isn't clear to
> me that our adaptation is *deep* enough to be robust...
>
> Another example in less detail is what has been come to be called "the
> Nordic Secret" which is roughly the response of Scandinavia to the
> enlightenment followed by the industrial revolution and perhaps most
> acutely the post WWII industrial/cultural explosion in the west. In many
> ways they follow the rest of the West, but it seems they may actually know
> "a secret" about sustainability, both industrially and culturally.
>
> The "Endogenous Existential Threats" of our time are many/myriad and to
> the point... Endogenous... self-generatated... and while we may be taking
> down a lot of the biosphere-as-we-know it with us, the biggest tragedy
> seems to be set to land ON us, and those closest to us (our domisticates
> and the remaining large mammal species)... though that also may simply be
> an anthropocentric view.
>
> As Dave's title says "IT" is not sustainable... you name the "it" and it
> very likely has a lamer lifetime than you imagine (my Y2K anecdote
> notwithstanding)...
>
> I WILL say that despite my neo-Luddite rants, I've become more of an
> Eco-Modernist of late... not necessarily wanting to trust that we can
> "technology" our way out of the disasters we are creating with our
> technology, but recognizing that perhaps we have little other choice
> (culturally)... and that we must *try* to walk the tightrope of using
> "fire to fight fire" but with (perhaps) a lot more self-awareness than that
> which we used to paint ourselves into this (mixed metaphor of a) corner.
>
> </ramble>
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On 12/26/19 9:08 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>
>
> "CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) has set a goal to reduce power consumption on its
> public switched telephone network by nearly 22,000 megawatt-hours a year,
> reducing greenhouse gas emissions as more customers migrate to VoIP and
> mobile voice services.
>
> Although CenturyLink is growing its IP-based voice service, this project
> is focused on consolidating more than 400,000 legacy PSTN subscriber lines
> across 50 Class 5 voice switches. "
>
>
> They're called class 5 because of 5ESS which is the most used class 5
> switch at CenturyLink.
>
> Sorry, but I had to clarify this.
>
>
> Frsnk
> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
>
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019, 8:43 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> June 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this template message). 5ESS
>> used in a mobile telephone network. The 5ESS Switching System is a Class 5
>> telephone electronic switching system developed by ...
>> -----------------------------------
>> Frank Wimberly
>>
>> My memoir:
>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>>
>> My scientific publications:
>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>>
>> Phone (505) 670-9918
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019, 8:36 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Frank writes:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> “This was the telephone network in question.“
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> With the mobile carriers and VOIP, I wonder how much of that code is
>>> still used? I once worked for a small company that wrote software to do
>>> billing for long distance telephone carriers. I was amazed by the
>>> seemingly arbitrary complexity. Complex at a policy and
>>> inter-organizational level, not just the software.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Marcus
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Frank Wimberly <
>>> wimberly3 at gmail.com>
>>> *Reply-To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>>> friam at redfish.com>
>>> *Date: *Thursday, December 26, 2019 at 5:39 AM
>>> *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>>> friam at redfish.com>
>>> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> At Bell Labs we sure didn't pay anyone by LOC. We also had code reviews
>>> and software tools to enforce standards and very high pay. With a brand
>>> new PhD I made more than all but the 3 most senior members of the CS
>>> faculty at Pitt where I was a grad student. This was the telephone network
>>> in question.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Despite the high pay I disliked software administration methodology.
>>> The disagreements between the software tool developers (version control,
>>> integration of subsystems, compilers, etc) and the implementors of the
>>> applications, such as call processing, were epic. Recall that Bell Labs
>>> invented C and Unix. After 18 months I returned to Pittsburgh to work at
>>> Carnegie Mellon in Robotics for two thirds the salary.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Number 5 ESS was first deployed in March 1982, 4 years after work
>>> began. I suspect that it didn't have 200 million lines of code then, but
>>> close to it. Maybe Dave doesn't consider it an IT project but many of the
>>> software tools that were developed were included in later Unix releases, I
>>> believe.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It's going to be a beautiful day in Santa Fe.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Frank
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----------------------------------
>>> Frank Wimberly
>>>
>>> My memoir:
>>> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>>>
>>> My scientific publications:
>>> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>>>
>>> Phone (505) 670-9918
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019, 1:28 AM Gary Schiltz <gary at naturesvisualarts.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Spot on.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 2:29 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Most programmers won't struggle to rationalize or improve code written
>>> by other people. The problem is that people are selfish. They think
>>> that their 10K LOC problem is beautiful and nimble, but that 1M LOC was
>>> once that too. It's the behavior of teenagers.
>>>
>>> On 12/25/19, 10:47 PM, "Friam on behalf of Russell Standish" <
>>> friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of lists at hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
>>>
>>> It's all about the LOC! Actually, I kind of agree - having worked on
>>> some MegaLOC codebases that functionally seemed to be no more complex
>>> than a 10KLOC project I'm involved in, the 10KLOC project is much
>>> more
>>> nimble - compile times are far less, making changes to the code
>>> easier
>>> and bugs less troublesome to winkle out.
>>>
>>> I've also refactored or rewritten pieces of code to slash the LOC by
>>> a
>>> factor of 3 or more for that particular section (eg 3KLOC -> 1KLOC) -
>>> but usually when bugs and problems kept on cropping up in that
>>> section.
>>>
>>> Even though the LOC is an entirely bogus measurement - if you paid a
>>> programmer by LOC, you'd get boilerplate and crappy comments.
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
>>> Principal, High Performance Coders
>>> Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
>>> Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>>>
>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
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>>
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