For nearly 20 years, technology – specifically. information technology – has been the means by which I’ve made a living. Over that period of time, the evolutionary nature of technology has fascinated me – why one technology endures and another fails, why some technologies become indispensible, integral parts of our lives – and the pure, dumbfounding rapidity of progress is thrilling…at least to geek in us. As a huge proponent of open source software, the ubiquity of “lessons learned” that others have gifted to the Internet landscape is impressive and, as I can, I’ll contribute some of my own experience so that the learning, that wonderful evolution, can continue in earnest.
But what would any of this mean were it not for some context – technologically speaking, of course. Growing up, my father was one of an elite faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU). Dr. Richard Cyert, the dean of the business school – Tepper now, but the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) at the time – convene an august body including the likes of Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon and the distinguished economist Allan Meltzer. My father was the one of the management of information guys, in the early 1970s, and as a kid, I was probably the only one in Fox Chapel who had a modem in his house – one of those coupler devices that looked like a slightly off balanced two-cup holder. Perhaps not the most impressive of technological advances but, indeed, the precursor to being both witness and participant to the technological progress I have been fortunate to be a part of.