It was inevitable as it was
obvious. An evening walk with my grandfather. He had spent the past fifty years
working with technologies and, given as it was 2074, the technology changes he
had witnessed could only be described as dramatic. Walking from his office I
caught a glimpse of framed emails he had kept as artifacts from his earliest
days in IT; a rare sighting by any measure.
As a new hire fresh from college,
he had joined HPE, as it was called in those years. Following a series of
mergers followed by a number of spin-offs, it was hard for me to visualize what
it must have been like back then.
“What you think of today as
technology didn’t exist back then but circumstances changed and ambitions
exploded,” he said. “I recall clearly when individuals wrestled total control
of tech away from state-supported institutions as the idea governments could
foster any level of cooperation needed to break through barriers.”
Quickly revisiting the past
and stories that I’ve heard before, I was reminded how grandfather, having
joined HPE had elected to work in the niche business unit, Mission Critical,
where his specialization was the NonStop system. At a time where proposed tag
lines included “won’t stop; can’t stop; NonStop” the concept of fault tolerance
was not widely followed by mainstream vendors. There were even whispers down
corridors that it was outdated, unneeded and perhaps a legacy reminder of the
uncertainty of then-current technology.
Today, fifty years later, so much has changed. At the highest level, all
enterprises are tech vendors so much so that specialization has created many
niches. Continuous processing entered the mainstream long ago and was a
contributing factor in the transformation of HPE, a company we all know today
as HPT (HP Technologies) - as the addition of Enterprise and addressing the
market for businesses that cannot stop became a minor case of tautology.
As for Mission Critical, given all enterprises now have to run 24 x 7, that
term is now the sole brand of the myriad number of satellite and space craft launch
and tracking companies. A return to the past or perhaps more like a truly back
to the future scenario. However, it did lead to HPT viewing its NonStop program
as central to the company, renaming it Enduring Computing extending HPC, AI to
include EC.
“Forget about flying cars and private ownership in cars as that all went the
way of horses at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It may have taken a
hundred years of transformation to occur but cars are now solely in the hands
of entertainers. As for flying cars, the need to cover any distance has receded
as society returned to a village lifestyle. Who wants to go anywhere beyond the
village green?”
Remember the pioneering that began almost fifty years ago when in 2026, NASA
succeeded with controlled hibernation where those travelling in space had their
metabolism depressed in order to introduce a state of deep sleep utilizing
specifically designed chambers where the temperature hovered around 5 degrees
Celsius?
While primitive compared with what was
projected in popular science fiction movies, it proved a simple way to pass the
time in long journeys into deep space. The primitive extraterrestrial villages
that have now taken shape not only on the Moon and Mars but in the creation of
orbiting retreats that we now see circling the planet. You might say that the
art of the twentieth century predicted such outcomes but all the same, it took
very large commitments from determined individuals to become real.
All of this has come about as space
tourism truly took off and the presence now of these orbiting retreats are a
result of the investments made by private enterprise. And this is where the
work my grandfather had pursued has born the most fruit. For the past fifty
years, even as the reliability of technology improved out of sight, software in
general and the many frameworks that they support, became so complex that their
reliability suffered. This took the NonStop into new markets and saw a
resurgence of interest in all things related to NonStop.
And support of EC applications became
more visible and not just in space but closer to the ground. Clearly, there
became a growing reluctance to rely on systems other than NonStop when it came
to the chambers supporting space travelers placed in deep sleep. But that was
just one application. Where acceptance of NonStop within EC accelerated happened
much closer to home.
“Cities went vertical; communities
became self-contained and self-sufficient. A very different interpretation of
what it meant to be living in a village, but the outcome was similar to what
had been popular centuries ago,” said grandfather. “And the credits we all
depend upon today took hold just a decade or so ago whereby older forms of
currency have been retired.
Trust in each other returned and while
far from being a barter-system revisited, the arrival of a living wage changed
the dependencies on currency we once had. Now it is a concept managed by a
combination of AI coupled with certain biometrics from the gait of our walk to
the interaction with our own augmented intelligence.”
What grandfather considered vital to
the economy of the day, the flow of cash globally, presented many problems so
much so that countries became skeptical about the true value of cash and cash equivalents.
Central Bank Digital Currencies or CBCD had their moment in the sun but they
too eventually fell out of favor. Anything that was recorded in a computer
anywhere on the planet was subject to intrusion with funds disappearing
overnight. The early dabbling in BitCoin was one example where fortunes disappeared
simply because complex keys / passwords were lost or just simply forgotten.
“I have to admit, I like it the way it
is today,” said grandfather. “I was always concerned that all I had worked for
would somehow mysteriously disappear, without trace and without recourse. But
this proved to be an ideal problem for our NonStop team to address. There was
so much experience in handling currency across vast global networks we all knew
that there had to be something better. And it wasn’t a call to return to
collecting sea shells or passing of beads but rather, something vastly
different and more in keeping with the times.”
With that, the idea came about that digital
currencies, blockchain maintenance, smart contracts were so last century even
as they were still prone to compromise given the power of computers. But with
NonStop and its smart OS – the very name Guardian proved to be a highly
marketable attribute that was picked up by global financial institutions. “If
you had been watching the uptick in usage of bar codes, QR codes and more and
combine that with our own DNA you get the idea as to what came next,” said
Grandfather.
“And it took the world by surprise as
NonStop proved to be the safest platform to network today’s Familiar Code or
FamCo – a revisit and combination of what some think came out of family tree
and hereditary pursuits. But no, it was more precise and all it required was to
rethink what was happening at the edge. We finally saw the penny drop, so as to
say. People are the ultimate edge ‘product’ and as such, to participate in
society, they needed to have a NonStop function present that was a reflection
of themselves.”
What made it more secure was a
combination of AI and Quantum. Grandfather recalled a conversation during the
first weeks of his employment. Talking with the leader of what was then HP
Labs, he learnt of how, “NIST completed its
post-quantum algorithm recommendation work late-decade 2020 and then it became
the basis for FIPS regulation shortly thereafter; regulated enterprises were
required to switch to Post-Quantum Cryptography. Of course, this meant the
then-banking fees went up: The transactional enterprise of the day had to pay
to future proof themselves, but that was just a new cost of business, it
doesn't create new opportunities, it's just substitutional.”
That became a two-edged
sword that created new business opportunities for NonStop. Global realization
that having cash in circulation would continue to present problems so why
continue any dependence on traditional forms of payment? No cash, no central control, not
traditional passwords but just your presence as another edge entity. Perfect
application for NonStop. Having fallen out of love with open source and the
like that turned every enterprise into a software product company, NonStop
became a popular virtualized distribution that moved to the very center of
HPT’s product portfolio. No, back at the time NonStop celebrated its Anniversary #75, the presence of NonStop was almost everywhere you cared to turn.
Humanity became the edge so often
described in former publications we are now familiar with. As grandfather
described it, referring back to his framed collection of email exchanges, “About
the time of the true Diamond Anniversary of NonStop and the arrival of
augmented intelligence (allowing humanity to interact seamlessly with their
environment) having become the gateway to their means of living, no one wanted
to be plagued with the glitches and failures of the early twenty-first century.
We realized that redundancy by itself would only take you so far and was still
vulnerable to many forms of nondeterministic outages so NonStop stepped in and
quickly proved itself.”
Again, one more instance of not just
AI meeting Quantum at the edge but rather, a response to the commercial reality
that humanity was moving rapidly to where failures of any kind were considered
a flashback to the dark times of the former century. No longer was NonStop
considered legacy but rather it brought with it a viable model for all to
follow. And the new HPT held the keys to its ongoing success happily riding the
latent interest in a platform it had championed for many years.
None of this would have happened if
technology continued to depend on silicon. “We recognized that the possibility
of Moore’s law driving another 25 or even 50 years was a luxury that would be
holding us back,” as grandfather recalled exchanges with HP Labs. “At the time,
there was nothing more novel or challenging to
integrate than quantum. To integrate quantum with transactional computing
no longer was the exclusive realm of science and engineering. The union of
simulation / modelling PLUS massive data analytics (much supplied by the
transactional systems underpinning commerce or by the engagement systems that
drive us to transactions) PLUS AI / ML is now at the heart of the
hypercompetitive enterprise with which we interact daily.”
This integration of quantum with transactional accelerated the way it did as we moved from our dependency on silicon and copper to optics – light replacing copper but more importantly, there was a breakthrough in how best to use light to mirror what was previously done by transistors to deliver logic. We knew about the need to exploit light coherence even as we continued to look for something else to arrive on the scene – biological, perhaps? “But it was light that guided us, chuckled grandfather.
“There was a shift in thinking that led to a breakthrough
and ultimately, it wasn’t a surprise to any of us working on photonics. What
made many of us laugh was just how many governments poured vast sums into
developing their own fab plants just as we were working hard to leave silicon
behind us. Then again, governments always seem to back a horse when the race
has moved on to cars.”
Throughout the history
of technology, there have been “phase change events where the conventional
wisdom of how business conducts itself resists change until suddenly something
shifts just enough to precipitate change,” said grandfather reading from a
saved, half a century old, paper email that he framed and now hangs in his
office. “We should have been used to such occurrences but all the same, it
changes everything.”
For much of our history,
science indeed life has imitated art. Many of the movies and television shows
of the previous century led to incredible inventions for the times. From Star
Trek came doors that opened as we approached; personal communicators that led
to the first flip phone; MRI system development owes its inspiration to Star
Trek. And then there were the replicants in Blade Runner and even the warnings
that came with The Matrix.
But perhaps it was the
film 2001, A Space Odyssey, that triggered the continued interest in light and
optics and photons. Towards the end of the film, the main character began
disabling the computer, HAL. To our eyes, all that the character was doing was
removing what then looked like glass flash memories connected to a backplane
that was clearly light-centric. That was all it took to drive many of the
scientists of the early part of this century to look into the concepts and to
push ahead with the research.
“The power that was
ultimately released with computers that we freed from silicon, copper and the
predictions of Moore’s Law was all that was needed to fuel the acceleration in
AI and Quantum. We no longer talk about our robots as driven by AI but rather, we
already view them as Intelligent. Once they tapped into the world of knowledge,
digitized and accessed through ethical LLMs, they understood their surroundings
far better than we could ever hope to achieve.
The rub is that now it
is the robots that view humanity as AI being redefined as Augmented
Intelligence. A reference to the early work by Neuralink (now a subsidiary of
HPT) creating brain-computer implants that have become both necessary as the
pursuit of even greater processing power has become fashionable. “Who would
have guessed we would be as welcoming to something foreign implanted in our
bodies as happened midcentury,” said grandfather.
Even now without further
commentary from grandfather, rich, evocative AI mashup with 9G and the latest
iteration of WiFi where quantum filters out the noise to keep us entertained,
created new and unexpected experiences. These had to paid for and became so
critical that fault tolerance, scale and availability of their transactional
underpinnings became necessary.
Humanity as the edge
needing to network as a society proved to be best served by NonStop being
deployed everywhere. Humanity becoming AI needed to be maintained, updated,
supported and more, and failure in part or in full during any interaction
ultimately proved deadly without NonStop. Most of all, humanity needed
security.
Whether we talk about
space tourism, our own access to services and even our education and career
prospects, knowing that everything about us is now recorded up there – cloud
computing had become so ubiquitous that it no longer had a name other than “up there”
– humanity on the whole looked most of all to safety. And now, for a hundred
years, NonStop has provided the safety humanity needs to function today.
At first Quantum secured
us and made sure our interests were not parlayed into something unrecognizable.
At every step, it wasn’t just realization that NonStop contribution kept it all
working but rather, the principles of NonStop were now licensed universally to
all technology companies looking to support the enterprises we have today, 100
years after the first NonStop system was delivered to a bank.
“Throughout my fifty
years working at HPT and focused on NonStop it was the belief that in a world
that doesn’t stop, where the transactional world is tightly integrated with the
quantum mechanics and humanity has begun to move freely in space enjoying sights
we could only dream of in the last century,” said grandfather.
“It was realization that
nothing we interact with ever stops or worse, simply goes offline for goodness
knows what reason and where everything takes place at the speed of light,
NonStop systems emergence as the foundation for how the world works today shouldn’t
have come as a shock to anyone. And thankfully, those investments of the past
fifty years have truly delivered NonStop in miniature, in glass and photons and
yes, licensed to everyone where the world today we live in can arguably be
viewed as the old song goes, the planet that never sleeps!”
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