Today I am going to a talk at 1871 by Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the fathers of the modern computing industry. In early 1993, I saw an article in the New York Times with a picture of McNealy and some of his colleagues looking at video over the internet:
Tech Notes; Sun Microsystems’ Global Greeting Card
MOST of this season’s holiday greeting cards are by now part of Christmas past, but at Sun Microsystems employees are talking about their chairman’s greetings as a preview of things to come.
On Dec. 15, at 10 A.M. any of Sun’s 13,000 employees sitting at their work stations could open a 2.5-inch square window on their screens and watch the computer maker’s chief executive, Scott McNealy, wishing them holiday greetings from his Palo Alto, Calif., office.
Sun has a worldwide computer network with connections in the United States, England, Scotland, Brazil, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Hong Kong, and Mr. McNealy’s video greeting was displayed simultaneously in all those countries on any work station “tuned in.”
Because the Sun networks were designed for data transmissions and offer limited speeds, the video was not up to television standards. The signal was restricted to five frames a second — a fraction of normal motion-pictures — with audio transmitted at telephone quality.
The technology, which was developed by a Sun research group based in Cary, N.C., working on computer graphics technology, is experimental. But in the future Sun plans to use it widely for internal corporate communications.
“It’s a great way for Scott to spend five minutes and communicate with everyone worldwide,” said a Sun spokeswoman, Cindee Mock.
The compressed video and audio were sent internationally over standard 56 kilobit telephone lines; no special computer hardware was needed to view it. While the resolution of the Sun digital video channel was not impressive, it was adequate, according to Mr. McNealy. Sun employees who looked carefully could see a San Jose Sharks hockey team pennant that hangs in his office.
I was pretty blown away by the idea of doing a show over computers. Kurt Heintz, a friend from the Chicago poetry scene, was really into transmitting poetry over video, and I wanted to ask the people in the story about how I could get involved.
So I called 411 and asked for the number of Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto. I called them and asked for Scott McNealy. He answered the phone and I explained that I was a poet in Chicago interested in doing some of my shows on this video network thingy.
He told me to call some dude named Carl Malamud, because he was the most creative person he knew and he had done a lot of thinking about stuff.
I called him and he was nice enough to talk to me for 15 minutes about video and networked computers.
Circa 15 years later he became an important part of my life as an organizer of the weekend un-conference that led to the 8 Principles of Open Government Data in 2007. I also helped him organize the Independent Government Observers Task Force in 2008.
I am grateful to Scott McNealy. And telephones. And 1871.