07.1 Hist 20 podcast: 1960-69

events in the 7th decade of the 20th C

Transcript

University of California UCOP | Hist20 podcast 7.1

Hi, guys. So much stuff happened in the 1960s. It's hard to know where to start. I'm not even talking about just the

great music and Woodstock concerts and the love and peace movement. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time

or any time actually talking about China's cultural revolution, and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, or the Vietnam

War, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the fact that Che Guevara died in this decade, that India went to war with

China, that the Civil Rights movement in the United States really took off, or that the United States landed the first

man on the moon. This was a pretty amazing century on that front.

But the mouse was also in the 1960s. You know, that little device that lets you move your cursor across the

screen? Most of us use a finger tracker now. But in 1964, before personal computers were even a thing, the

mouse was invented by a man called Douglas Engelbart. And the ballpoint tracking device, which essentially was

sort of in the mouse-- that preceded in mechanically inputs in fact invented during wartime. But the 1960s are

when the mouse also becomes a thing.

There's an entire book written about just the year 1968, because so much happened in that year, so much

happened in that decade. But largely when we're thinking about culture, and politics, and economics, so much in

the 1960s really hinges on the overwhelming power play between the US and the USSR. The war in Vietnam is

really taking over most political decisions in the US, and both the right wing or left wing authoritarian regimes are

really literally getting away with murder in Latin America and Asia.

So we could continue to discuss this, and then I'd probably have to take four hours every time today. And so I'm

not going to do that. These are things that I hope you're going to explore in your independent projects. But what I

really want to focus on is some of the underlying events that are going on-- not so much events but the little things

that end up changing the world.

Very often it's what we could call the un-sexy little things. And I'm going to start with-- I don't know if you guys

know what the DRAM is-- Dynamic Random Access Memory. So for hard technological infrastructure and

specifically components that make up the computer that you might have downloaded this podcast from, dynamic

random access memory-- that chip-- is one of the most important tiny little things that made a huge impact and

continue to make an impact today.

The DRAM, which we'll just call it that, was invented in 1968 by a man called Robert Dennard. He's an American.

He and a PhD from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. And obviously this was a collaborative

effort. But let's just focus on what the chip did.

It really increase the memory capacity of computers which were, as you now know, becoming a major part ofeveryday life. And the chip made it possible to increase the capacity of computers at an increasingly cheaper

price, which meant that much more powerful technological products could be created for a market that could be

larger because it wasn't just limited to the army or even entertainment. So it provided a huge amount of memory

for a really affordable budget.

And DRAM was everywhere. Some form it sits in any of your devices. It's in gaming consoles. It's a telephones.

It's in any computer. It's in your digital cameras. It's in your Roku Stick.

The memory chip also allowed for huge gains for companies because it essentially lowered the barriers to entry

into the processing power of computing, meaning that computers could now be as in almost any context. And

that's a big deal because the increased accessibility to computing power allowed companies to become more

powerful, efficient, and effective than ever before. The other part of the memory chip is that it's a pretty huge part

of the argument in support of Moore's law. Moore's law in it's simple definition is the observation that the

processing power for computers will double every two years. And that law pretty much remains intact to this day.

What constitutes processing power has pretty much shifted. We're no longer thinking about the internal circuitry.

We're talking about the cloud, and essentially the processing power is doubling exponentially.

Now there's a downside to this-- it's not a downside, It's just a corollary-- which is that as processing power

becomes more powerful and we can adapt more computing power throughout the economy, there's an effect on

labor essentially that workers need to also keep up with that processing power. And mechanization can take over

from some manual tasks, and so we see also a shift. And that probably started already in the '50s. But you really

see it in the '60s, and we'll see it in the '70s of labor having to essentially educate itself beyond the specific skills of

a particular task, which is something that we might have sort of expected in the '20s and '30s when most people

worked at factories to shift into programming. So a huge part of modern labor is going to be more about the sort

programming of the machines as opposed to the operating of the machines.

Another un-sexy little thing really major innovation of the 1960s was Telstar. By 1962, some governments had had

already launched satellites largely to carry out experiments in outer space. But in 1962, the first commercial

satellite went into orbit, and that really changed the face of communications. This was not about exploring. This

was actually about putting something into space that would be useful to the planet.

Telstar 1 had its origins in a transcontinental partnership between Bell Labs, NASA, AT&T, the British general post

office, which handled Britain's telecom services, and France Telecom. And the satellite was small. Telstar 1 is less

than 3 feet long and weighed about 170 pounds. And it used solar power when it was in service. And it's really

hard to overstate how important Telstar 1 was to humanity.It was the first device the human race used to relay phone calls, fax images, and television pictures. It connected

the globe. And that was a pretty big deal because July 1, 1962, was the first time that it relayed nonpublic TV

pictures, that across the globe you could see a baseball match. But there was a catch.

Since Telstar wasn't in a geosynchronous orbit-- so it was fixed to the same point above the spinning Earth--

those transatlantic TV broadcasts only lasted 20 minutes during its orbit of 2 and 1/2 hours. So once we lost it,

once the planet moved beyond where the satellite was, you'd have to wait another 2 and 1/2 hours. So it wouldn't

be more than three years before communication satellites could be in geosynchronous orbit-- essentially move

with the Earth and have an uninterrupted signal.

Now, the irony-- because politics is always going to come mess with this-- is that because Telstar was a product of

the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, it would also be what ended it. So just a day before Telstar

launched, the US tested this high altitude nuclear bomb. And it didn't affect Earth, but it affected part of the

atmosphere that Telstar orbited in. So the radiation increase caused by the bomb with a bunch of other high

altitude tests, which the Soviets had done in outer space, damaged the satellites really delicate transistors. And it

knocked it offline in November.

Now, they managed to kick started again in January. But soon enough there was another bomb test in outer

space and a catastrophic transistor failure. But Telstar survived seven months. And during those seven months, it

handled more than 400 total transmissions and essentially showed us that we could do this. And it was the

beginning of many satellites.

And when you look up to the sky at night, you know Telstar 1 is still up there. It's floating around. It's a little piece

of communications history of technological history floating up there orbiting in the sky.

All right. Now, this is one of my favorite innovations of the '60s. We have to talk BASIC-- just basics. And when I

say basics, I mean the language BASIC-- a programming language. If you want to create a revolution, you need to

get as many people to participate in that revolution, right? And in order to have all these people participating in a

revolution, you need to make sure that they talk to each other. And in order for them to talk to each other, they

need to speak a common language. And that's where BASIC comes in. BASIC programming language is a

language that essentially united the world in a programming revolution.

BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. And it was created by two Dartmouth

professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1964. Now, what BASIC allowed the user to do was nothing short

of revolutionary. So previously, computing involved an insane amount of expensive mainframe machines, and

these are the kinds that fill up rooms. And they have things that look like film reels on a projector.They are slow. They are loud. They get really, really hot. The system involves punch card production, which would

allow the machine to read the computer program.

It needed several trained operators. And I'm going to say these were the middlemen because they were mostly

men. So where women used to do the computing when the computers became machines, the operators were

men. And these middlemen handled the input and output of the process. And there was a huge waste between

inputting the punch cards in, putting the program in and the data, and getting results.

So the time sharing system developed that BASIC hinges on was based on a series of technological

breakthroughs that preceded it. But they allowed these processes also to happen simultaneously, right? So all of a

sudden the computing process was consolidated that allowed the hardware and the software to essentially

combine and become much lighter. BASIC was the language designed to allow users to interact with the

computing configuration.

So people could directly communicate with a computer through a terminal with keyboards and teltech printers.

And these teletype printers eventually would become the display screen-- sort of like what you're looking at now if

you haven't downloaded the podcast, if you're listening to it on your laptop. Now, it's really crazy to think about it,

but the computers we know now and the way we interact with them-- with monitors, and the mice, and keyboards-

- that all hinges on that innovation, on BASIC. So it's two things that happened in the '60s-- BASIC the computer

computing language and the invention of the mouse.

Another aspect that really is important is that that language was really easy. It was excessively teachable, and it

was designed and fostered in an environment that was built around teaching, right? And it was built to be taught to

a large number of people. This was not designed in a military environment. It was designed in an academic

environment.

And this is actually key. The act and culture of computing were essentially sort of democratic and democratized in

an academic environment. And that allowed for an exponentially large and growing number of people who could

learn it and thereby solve issues of computing and explore new ways of integrating into the wider world. So

essentially if you think about sort of open source coding, it requires a language that allows everybody to

essentially speak the same language, read the same code.

Today, the closest equivalent we have to BASIC is probably Ruby on Rails-- so the Ruby language. Because it's

an easy to understand deployment framework. But I kind of like to think that ubiquitous computing started 50

years ago, well before I was born. So that's pretty cool.

So we've talked about mice, and we've got computing language and computers. So what's next? Well, in the1960s the internet was born. Yeah. It wasn't Al Gore. The internet was born in the '60s.

Now because of the staggering cost of computing in the '60s, a lot of innovation surrounding it came from

government and military funding because they're the ones that have the big bucks. And the internet is no different.

A top secret part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency-- the acronym is DARPA-- began developing

a new protocol called the Network Control Protocol. And that made its first connection in 1969.

And this early internet protocol, which essentially is a way of determining how computers function together and

talk to each other-- that led to the creation of ARPANET. There's some dispute over what exact need the military

had for this technology. I can imagine a few. But regardless of why they needed computers to sort of talk to each

other, they wanted to do it quickly. And they needed a way for computers to quickly and easily share data between

nationwide computers. And obviously this is eventually going to go well beyond nations.

The developer that spearheaded by research at DARPA most notably was a scientist brought over from MIT. His

name was Lawrence Roberts. But some of the biggest concept behind how this connection should function were

actually developed years before. And one of the most important was a concept called "packet switching,

" which

put content neutral data into these small blocks of data, and those could then be easily transferred. And that had

been in development for a decade, but that essentially is the building block of how computers talked to each other.

Now, the ground works of how computers help us exchange data-- essentially when we think about File Transfer

Protocol, the FTP, these things were set up in the 1960s. And that allowed remote desktop connections to be

made. Now ARPANET was eventually replaced by a military-wide internet service in the early '80s and then the

more modern internet protocol, which is the TCP, Transmission Control Protocol, which opened up more

possibilities beyond the military.

So you and I did not start using the internet until sort of the mid '80s-- well, you guys probably didn't, but I did. But

the groundwork for the internet that is worldwide and open to all of us-- that was laid in the 1960s. And all this

technology isn't just going to matter to us in our current present, which is the future. But it matters right then in the

'60s because what this is doing is it's supporting a communications revolution.

In decades previous, it would have taken a significant time for people to find out-- well, not just what computers

they were using, or what language to use, or how to compute better-- but essentially to find out about events.

They might have heard it on the radio, or somebody would call them and tell them. But they wouldn't see it. And in

the '60s, televisions are now relatively standard in homes around the world, and that means that not only were

people finding out about events happening on the other side of the world, they were seeing them happen.

Now, imagine the effect. And decades earlier, you would have read about a massacre in Vietnam, and now youcould see images of it. TV brought the world into people's living rooms, and parts of the world where literacy was

perhaps really high, like where people wouldn't be able to read the newspaper, TV bridged that skill gap. And all of

a sudden you would have a television. You'd watch a soccer match, but you would also see images of what was

happening in the rest of the world. And you would watch soccer matches from across the world.

And so when human beings see what is happening elsewhere, they can connect to people across the globe, even

people they don't know. They can see the effect of certain policies that their governments are designing on people

elsewhere, on people those policies were directed at. And they can then express their support or what was

increasingly happening in the US and Europe the complete lack of support for these policies. They can express

solidarity with humans across the world as opposed to a support for domestic policies.

So it's really one thing to support the United States, which we all do perhaps. It's also another to see the US

troops in combat, right? So one the one hand, you can support the US and not want US troops to be exposed to

the risk that combat in the '60s would put them in. I cannot stress enough what a difference these visuals have on

the civil engagement commitment of societies across the Western world. So a large part of what we see during the

summer of love in '68, the love and peace movement has a lot to do with the fact that these images were

immediate, that we could see bombings happen almost in real time.

There are other things that were shown on television. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos both raised their fist

in a show of solidarity with the black power movement in the US at the 1968 Olympics, the whole world saw that.

There was no way of hiding that gesture. They both respectively won the gold and bronze medal of the men's 200

meter race, and they were both members of something called the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which was

set up to protest racial segregation in the US and in South Africa, and, in general, protest racism in sports.

Now Peter Norman had won silver. He was a white Australian runner, and he's the one that suggested Tommie

and John share a pair of gloves. So if you look at the photograph of-- that's an iconic image of the 1960s-- you'll

see that one of them is wearing the glove on the right hand and the other one on the left hand. All three of them

suffered some kind of ostracization or punishment for being so overtly political in the Olympics, but they were by

far not the only ones to be political in the Olympics.

The 1968 Olympics were, in fact, rife with politics, especially among also Eastern Bloc countries-- those that under

Soviet wing. So for example, the USSR had just recently invaded Czechoslovakia after President Dubcek, the

Czech President, had initiated a series of reforms to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia,

which was in a sense, an act of defiance against the centralized power that the Soviet Union was trying to impose

on it. That happened during the Prague Spring, and it was squashed by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union saw

that as a sign that Czechoslovakia was becoming more like the West. And in other words, it was in danger ofslipping to the US side.

So just like the US had done in Guatemala and Iran in the '50s, the USSR was doing in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

And just like that, 100-plus people were dead, and the Czechoslovak people were back under the thumb of the

Soviets. But during the Olympics, each country that was under the wing of the Soviet Union was competing.

And so when the Czech winners of certain medals would not look towards the flag of the USSR-- if they were, for

example, on the pedestal-- that was seen also as a political act. And so Tommie Smith and John Carlos and Peter

Norman were by far not the only ones to be accused of being political in a context it was meant to not be political.

But at the same time, I think thinking about them is a really good way of thinking about the increasing tension in

the 1960s between a society that is modernizing and advancing in technology and the political environment in

which an enormous amount of human frustration and human pain is being expected from society in order for

these political goals of two nations to come true.