HISTORY OF TECH INNOVATION

Learn how this history of tech innovation during my 30-year IBM career shaped my perspectives as a retired technologist, market strategist, futurist, and founding editor of Modern Health Talk. We all have personal biases, and I want my audiences to know mine, because I often share insights of what I expect in the near or distant future. You should know where I’m coming from. This history reads like a BIO and includes three related videos at the end:

1. Finding Purpose — Why I founded Modern Health Talk and what I hoped to accomplish with it.
2. IBM Celebrates 100 Years of Innovation — Reflecting on past innovations help me envision and hopefully inspire new innovations.
3. 20 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Our World — This video expands on my own articles, starting with Moore’s Law and The FUTURE of Healthcare. But first, here’s my story:

Please share your own story as an email or comment at the end.

My path into Technology

• As an avid Boy Scout, I planned to become a forester or geologist, but then I took a high school course in Data Processing using punched card machines. That seemed like a promising career path and changed my plans.
• 1966 – I studied data processing at Northern Virginia Community College and learned how to wire punch card machines but quickly transferred to Florida Institute of Technology. FIT was one of just three universities with a Computer Science program. The others included MIT and CIT. I was there during the Apollo program and saw the first Saturn V rocket launch from Cape Kennedy, along with many other launches, and eventually landing a man on the moon.
• FIT was prestigious but expensive. Tuition increased each year, beyond what mom & dad could pay. So after two years, I had to come home and back to the junior college.
• 1969 – I started working full time as a punch card operator for IBM in Washington, D.C. to pay my own way through college while also carrying a full course load. Then as a computer operator on an IBM System/360 Model 30, my plan was to return to FIT and pay my way there too.
• I unfortunately lost my 2S student deferment and was drafted into the Army during the hight of the Vietnam War. By then the Army was desperate and also drafted young married men with kids.
• Luckily, I didn’t have to fight in Vietnam and instead was stationed at Ft. Hood, TX, thanks mostly to my IBM experience.
• IBM guaranteed me a job when I returned, supplemented my Army pay, and sent me my hometown newspaper and care packages each holiday as I served.
• I started as a computer operator in the Army, then a programmer, and finally computer operations supervisor. Ft. Hood hosts an armored division (tanks), and the soldiers were always going on maneuvers in the hot and dusty climate with just a few hours notice. But I worked in air conditioned vans that housed the different computer components.
• I advanced to Specialist 5 in just a year. That was unheard of for someone without combat experience, and I got out early when the war ended, because the Army was left with too many people.
• I returned to IBM as a computer operator – now on a System/370 Model 158 and returned to my old junior college. There, I pulled together just the right courses to earn three Associates degrees in just one semester.
• When I started at American University, I had way more college credits than a Bachelor’s degree required. But the school didn’t accept my credits. They wanted revenue. I earned a Bachelor’s degree, taking all graduate courses, because I had already taken all of the undergraduate computer courses.
• While working at IBM, I was taking a full-time graduate course load in the evenings and on weekends. I advanced to programmer, then systems programmer, and got an opportunity to move to San Antonio to become an IBM Systems Engineer (SE). That’s where I met and married my wife, Yvonne, in 1978.

My Health & Consumer Interests

• Yvonne was a registered nurse, first in pediatrics and eventually in travel consulting. She was my first exposure to healthcare.
• As an IBM SE, I initially had retail and banking accounts, where I installed some of the first grocery store scanners and automated teller machines. Then I had large hospital accounts, installing a major medical records system.
• As an IBM SE and End User Computing Specialist in 1981, I bought the original IBM PC for just over $5,000 (in 1981 dollars). With my employee discount, I was able to pay for it through monthly payroll deductions, so I got a “full blown” system:
  * Intel 8088 processor (8 bits at 4.77 MHz),
  * 64KB of Random Access Memory (it came with 16),
  * two 160KB 5.25″ floppy discs (rather than storing programs on a tape cassette player,
  * a monochrome screen (rather than connecting it to a TV),
  * a matrix printer, and
  * a 300 bps telephone modem (I could read the text faster than it was painted onto the screen).
  Add to that the IBM DOS operating system, VisiCalc spreadsheet, EasyWriter word processor, and communications software. The total cost today would be about $17,000, but that purchase gave me early experience that landed me in Dallas supporting PC marketing specialists across 10 states. The PC was a natural fit for me, and my interests shifted from enterprise solutions to personal computing while my skills shifted from engineering to marketing and strategy.
• My interest in people with disabilities started at a big PC show that IBM put on each year at Los Alamos National Labs. That’s where atomic research takes place. The lab director had an intense interest in re-purposing old computer products to serve special needs. He even redesigned IBM printers to print Braille and worked with an orthodontist to design a special mouthpiece for a quadriplegic artist. She could put her tongue over one air hole or another to open, close or rotate a bit that could hold her paintbrush.

Influence & Advocacy

• I was always drawn to new challenges and big issues, and I became interested in home automation as an application of IBM’s OS/2 operating system. I was looking for reasons to sell multitasking applications at home. With that experience, I introduced IBM to the emerging Digital Home (smart home) market, convened a multi-divisional team to set strategy, and influenced the design of products like IBM Home Director and residential gateways.
• I represented IBM on several home networking standards bodies and held leadership roles. I then became a Market Segment manager defining digital home strategy for IBM Microelectronics.
• Serving as Marketing Chairman of HomeRF Working Group, a wireless standards initiative, I attended conferences on applying technologies for people with disabilities and promoted Universal Design concepts. I’d also attend regular meetings of TechLunch, an Austin group sponsored by the Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities.
• While looking for innovative young companies, I discovered several with promise and worked toward forming strategic relationships. One was Intellon, which had developed home networking technology to communicate at Ethernet speeds over the 110v A/C power lines, using the same outlets that we plug lamps and toasters into. Another was Proxim, which developed wireless technology that was way ahead of Wi-Fi.

My Biggest Disappointment

• My biggest disappointment was with Merasoft, a start-up in Utah that approached the Smart Home idea with real smarts – i.e. neural networks, artificial intelligence, and learning agents. To complete their vision, they had to invent things that were outside of their core competency, which is one reason why I represented IBM on their advisory board, along with Bell Canada and Southern Company.
• I took a diverse IBM team to see the Merasoft demo, which included CMOS image sensors that could do facial recognition, notice that you’d often come home from work and sit at the same place on the sofa and then turn the TV onto the News. The system could converse in natural language and a human (not robot) sounding voice and ask if you’d like this (or that) to occur automatically in the future. They invented a microphone array and digital signal processing software to eliminate noise, echo and reverb and thus improve speech recognition, and they also modified IBM’s ViaVoice software to make it multiuser. The idea was that one person may want to speak to the home from the bedroom while another did the same from the kitchen, even during a party with other voices. Their vision in 1997 was decades ahead of anyone else, and the demo worked fine. As a marketing strategist, I even loved their go-to-market plan. I’ll save the rest of the story for another post, including why their product never made it to market.

After IBM

• 1999 – I retired from IBM after 30 years as the company began pulling away from consumer markets. By then my heart was with consumers and home use of technology, so I founded CAZITech, a Digital Home consulting firm.
• My consumer interests led me to political lobbying and caused me to co-found a nonprofit consumer advocacy group to protect people from abuse in the home building industry. We had great success against the state’s 2nd most powerful lobbying block, even though we had no funding of our own. Not only did we get new consumer protection laws passed, but we also got an abusive state agency abolished outright. In the process I learned a lot about the value of strategy, messaging, and the use of websites and social media to direct a community of home owners.
• I founded Modern Health Talk after reading John Vanston’s book, MiniTrends, and positioned my firm at the intersection of several trends that include using the web and social media to find solutions for safe and independent living at home.

• Research shows that boomer demographics exacerbate rising healthcare costs, especially institutional care, driving the critical need for healthcare reform. Corruption from extreme wealth in politics places an obstacle to the ability to save $2 trillion per year through healthcare reform. By simply replacing the need for long term institutional care with home healthcare for half of the patients, we could likely save $1 trillion. This can be done with home modifications for aging in place, combined with Wireless Broadband and cloud computing, mobile apps, telepresence, telemedicine, Digital sensors that monitor biomarkers and the environment, and other related technologies.
• As an altruistic retirement project and non-profit endeavor, I founded Modern Health Talk to help encourage cost-saving health reforms. I feel the time I spend sharing my rather unique perspectives are well justified if I can even make the smallest impact on such large expenditures.

Mom & Dad

• Building a community is key since each individual’s medical needs are different, and each living environment is different. That’s a lesson I learned from my own experience with mom and dad.
• I worried about dad’s will-to-live after his first heart attack. All bedrooms were upstairs and he was sequestered there like a prisoner. I knew it would take a toll, because he was an avid golfer and worked with his hands as an accomplished cabinet maker. I returned to San Antonio after visiting him in McLean and purchased the best whittling knife money could buy. My plan was to reintroduce him to wood carving since he taught me how to whittle neckerchief slides as a boy scout. But before I could give him the knife, he had a second heart attack and died.
• Mom’s story was better. She and dad were both chain smokers, and mom eventually developed emphysema and was forced to quit. But as scary as the disease was (she always had an oxygen tank nearby), her living arrangements were much better. After dad died, mom sold the big home in McLean and bought a nice little condo in Fairfax, even replacing furniture to better fit the smaller space. That worked fine for a few years, but as the disease progressed and she lost her ability to drive, she became lonely and needed more care.
• One of the best things mom did was to sell the condo and use the money to build an apartment attached to my brother’s home. He had enough space to do that, and it gave mom autonomy and a sense of security with family so close by. She was a happy there, as happy as she could be given her health problems, until she too finally passed away. Neither of them spent time in a nursing home or an assisted living facility. To them, an occasional stay at a hospital was bad enough.

VIDEOS RELATED TO THE HISTORY OF TECH INNOVATION

Finding PURPOSE in your life

PURPOSE was the topic of a talk I gave in 2015 at the LaunchPad job club. It’s one of the largest job clubs in the nation, and they posted this video of my talk. The first 15 minutes discussed my journey seeking purpose after IBM and leading to Modern Health Talk. The next 15 minutes was spent on my interest in sleep wellness, which generated 21 minutes of Q&A afterwards.

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IBM Celebrates 100 Years of Innovation

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20 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Our World

https://youtu.be/_TsonN7YIdA

INDEX:

• Exoskeletons (0:39)
• Hyper Trains (2:13)
• Living Robots (3:29)
• Deep Fakes (4:52)
• Quantum Computers (6:04)
• Self-Healing Concrete (7:43)
• Virtual Reality (9:01)
• Biometrics (10:35)
• 5G and the Internet of Things (11:59)
• Artificial Intelligence (13:17)
• Block Chain (14:39)
• Wearable Technology (15:59)
• Driverless Cars (17:08)
• Autonomous Robots (18:13)
• The Metaverse (19:47)
• StarLink Internet (20:45)
• Natural Language Processing (22:00)
• Genomics (23:22)
• Spin Launch (24:42)
• 3D Printing (26:07)