Memories of IT. Part 1

I finally got around to read Does IT Matter, the 2004 book by Nicholas Carr.  He used the phrase IT (Information Technology) in "its commonly understood sense today, as denoting all the technology, both hardware and software, used to store, process, and transport information in digital form."  He explained, "The meaning of "IT" does not encompass the information that flows through the technology or the talent of the people using the technology."

Carr argued that IT had become commonplace and standardized, just like an infrastructure such as railroads and power grids.  Such a commodity would no longer offer any competitive edge for individual organizations.  That is, IT doesn't matter.  I'll let you read the costumer reviews of the book on Amazon, and form your own opinion.

The book is only 180 pages.  Reading it reminded me of my own encounters with IT.  Mine have been about people and information, with the technology itself in the background, much like a piece of furniture, or indeed, an infrastructure.

I was born in 1963 in Xi'an, an ancient capital of China.  The city must have reached international renown over a thousand years ago, in the Tang Dynasty.  In the 1970s the city once again captured attention of the world when the Terracotta Army was discovered.

I grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).  My parents were lecturers at Xi'an Jiaotong University.  During the Cultural Revolution, the universities stopped enrolling students, and teachers were gathered to study Mao's little red book, day and night.  I wasn't at these gatherings, and can't tell you what they were like.  But we kids had our own gatherings.  Families of the teachers lived in apartment buildings adjacent to the campus.  When our parents went to the university to study the little red book, kids of neighboring families would play together in one of our homes. 

We listened to semiconductor radios, which must be my first memory of IT.  At 8:30 pm, when the news ended at the Central People's Broadcast, the radio would play the Internationale.  The song called for solidarity of the oppressed people.  We little children had the instruction from our parents that we should all go back to our own homes to sleep at 8:30 pm.  To this day, I have associated the Internationale with sadness of separation and leaving friends behind.  It didn't help that heroes in Chinese movies those years would sing the Internationale just before they died.  Now you can listen to the Internationale on YouTube.

In the living area the university set up loudspeakers, which would blast every morning at a fixed time.  Was it at 6:00 am or 6:30 am?  I don't remember now.  But I remember the song played when the loudspeakers started every day:  The East Is Red.  You can listen to the song and read the lyrics.  You can try to guess what the song might mean to a Chinese who listened to the song several times a day and every day for over a decade.  You might guess wrong, but that will be another subject.

The father of one of our neighbors was a lecturer of high-voltage technology.  He assembled a TV in the early 1970s.  That was a huge novelty!  Neighbors were invited to watch:  a roomful of people glued to a tiny screen.  A few years later, TVs became available to be shared in the apartment buildings.  We watched lots of ping-pong games and women's volleyball games.  The Chinese did extremely well in those games.

In 1976, Mao died, the Gang of Four fell, and the Cultural Revolution ended.  In the same year I entered high school.  Deng Xiaoping soon took over as the leader of China .   The universities started to enroll students again.  For us high school students, going to universities to major in engineering was the goal.  The country would be prosperous, and engineers would make it happen, as we were told. 

A friend of mine had an early start in his engineering pursuit.  His father was a lecturer of electronics.  With the help of his father, he learned to assemble a radio.  It was mesmerizing for the rest of us to watch a mess of coils and wires turn into a talking machine!

in 1981, I became a student of Xi'an Jiaotong University, the same university where my parents were teaching.  The computer was a novelty then.  We heard about the computer, but did not see one until later in college.  Another novelty was teachers who had just returned from the America after a period of study.  They recounted their foreign experience to admiring crowds.  One teacher talked about using a computer to search books in a library.  By then I had been a serious student in mechanics, and spent hours in the library, flipping through index cards, and looking at books that seemed to contain profound and mysterious meanings. 

One such book was Truesdell's Six Lectures on Modern Natural Philosophy, which I must have read with great fascination and confusion.  Later when Truesdell and his wife came to Xi'an, the Department head assigned me to show the couple around the city.  The great man had keen interest in the architecture of old buildings.  I had no camera, but they did.  I wish I had asked them for a photo.

I first used a computer in a course on Fortran and its elementary applications in mechanics.  I spent many days debugging a program to solve a set of linear algebraic equation by using Gaussian elimination.  It was such a powerful revelation that an algorithm, used by a computer, can go a long way to solve problems far beyond the capability human beings.  I was then troubled by a question for months.  The computer could solve a large number of equations, but setting up these equations also took a long time.  How could a computer know how to set up the equations?

The question was answered in a following course on structural mechanics.  The course focused on trusses, going from pencil-and-paper calculation to writing a program for trusses with many members.  There I learned how to make the computer assemble equations, or rather, assemble the stiffness matrix.  Again, the computer needed no insight; the computer just followed an algorithm set up by human beings.  How delightful!  I also took a follow-up course on the finite element method.

To graduate, each student had to write a thesis in the fourth year.  Mine was about writing a code to couple finite elements and boundary elements for 3D elasticity.  Professor Xing Ji was my advisor.  A graduate student had just completed a 3D boundary element code, and another graduate student had completed a code that coupled boundary elements and finite elements for 2D elasticity.  So my task required a lot of learning but little creativity.  The university had a computer center, which housed a mainframe and many terminals.  The computer center was guarded and air-conditioned.  The air-conditioning by itself was such a novelty to me.  I had not been in an air-conditioned room before.  The computer time was so precious that we undergraduate students often had to use the computer overnight.  I finally got my program to work, but for the computer resources allotted to me, I could only analyze a very simple problem:  a uniform extension of a bar, divided into two blocks, one block molded by a single finite element, and the other block modeled by 5 boundary elements.

Around the time, Alvin Toffler's book, The Third Wave, was translated into Chinese.  The book was about the Information Age, and generated a tsunami in China.  A professor in the university gave a speech, which made a lasting impression on me.  He talked about how information technology offered an opportunity to build a prosperous China.  Unlike food, he said, information could be shared by many people.  Sharing may even enhance the value of information.  And China had a lot of people.  China did not have to go through the old information technology, and could leap-frog and go directly to computers networked by fiber optics.  Instead of making shoes for the world, he said, China should be making fibers and computers and TVs. 

The time was mid-1980s.  My family didn't even own a TV.  And I was a student of mechanics, not computer science.