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The last 120 years or so have seen tons of change for Korea, but what does the future hold? Tom shares what one heir is doing with their legacy.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com for the theme music.

Thanks to Garrett Weinzierl for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, Jack_Shid, KAPT_Kipper, and scottierowland on the subreddit

Send us email to [email protected]

Episode transcript:

On the 5th of September 1905, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, US President Teddy Roosevelt successfully mediated peace between Russia and Japan. The two Empires had been waging war in Manchuria since February 1904, focusing on control of the warm-water port of Port Arthur.

As one of the many provisions of the “Treaty of Portsmouth” Russia recognized Korea as part of Japan’s sphere of influence.

This did not go down well with the Joseon dynasty that had ruled Korea since the 1300s. Korea’s Joseon empire had slowly embraced a pro-Russian stance in opposition to Japan and to supplement support from China. Emperor Gojong had even spent a year in the Russian Legation in 1896 after the murder of his wife by a pro-Japanese faction.

The Emperor did not give up.

In 1907, Roosevelt prevailed on the nations of the world to hold a second “Hague Convention” in the Netherlands. The first had resulted in new rules of war and avenues to avoid it. This second conference included representatives from nations from every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

Emperor Gojong saw this as the last chance for Korea. He prepared three emissaries to secretly travel to the convention without Japan’s knowledge. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II (yeah the one that would end his reign with the Bolshevik revolution) helped, by smuggling the emissaries into the conference hall without Japan’s knowledge.

But Japan found out. They objected to the emissaries entry on the basis that the treaty of 1905 gave them the right to represent Korea’s interests. The emissaries were turned away and did not get to plead their case in front of the countries of the world.

As a result, Japan deposed Emperor Gojong and installed his son, Sunjong as emperor and forced him to sign a succession of treaties that eventually resulted in the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910.

If Emperor Gojong had been able to protect his secrecy a little more, who’s to say if his emissaries were succeeded. If only he had the equivalent of a good VPN. Something to keep spies from seeing his traffic.

No. This isn’t. Ham-handed transition to a sponsor. But the descendant of Emperor Gojong, and heir to the throne, did create Private Internet Access, one of the most well-reviewed VPN’s on the planet. And then recreated the Joseon empire. With blockchain.

Let’s help you Know a Little More about Virtual Korea.

Andrew Lee was a geek. The Indianapolis native had studied at Purdue and the University of Buffalo, but like many tech entrepreneurs, focused on his own passions rather than getting a degree.

As a fan of IRC – Internet Relay Chat, Lee wanted a way to secure his conversations. IRC revealed IP addresses, which was something nefarious folks could use to track you. Especially if you traded in torrents. To protect yourself you needed a VPN, but there were a lot of untrustworthy VPNs out there. So, in 2009, Lee started London Trust Media with the aim of taking VPN mainstream. And in 2010 London Trust Media founded Private Internet Access, an open source VPN provider. PIA focused on privacy with a no logs policy, a kill switch and decent speeds. Deloitte audited PIA in 2022 and found its server configurations were not designed to identify users.

Lee’s activities after the founding of PIA mostly read like a typical tech entrepreneur. He got into Bitcoin in the early days. He started a bitcoin price tracker in 2013 called Mt. Gox Live, which was eventually sold to the ill-fated Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange. He acquired Freenode IRC in 2017.

And in 2018 he gained another title. Crown Prince.

Let’s go back to 1910. Emperor Sunjong has once again acquiesced to Japanese demands, and this time sealed the fate of Korea’s Joseon empire. Sunjong signed the Japan-Korea annexation treaty, making Korea part of Japan.

In thanks, Japan demoted Sunjong to King and he died in 1926. His powerless title passed to his brother Yi Un. Another brother Yi Kang had seniority, but had married a commoner and was passed over.

Eventually the allies defeated Japan in World War II. The liberation of Korea in 1945 brought about a republic in the south. The monarchy was not restored. While North Korea uses the word Joseon in its official name, it also does not recognise a royal family.

However the people still lived. There are many descendants of the royal court and more than one of them claim to be the legitimate heir to the throne. A few of them even lobby for the creation of a constitutional monarchy, similar to what exists in the United Kingdom. One of the claimants to the throne is Yi Kang’s son Yi Seok.

Yi Seok has a colorful history himself. He was born in Sarong palace in 1941 in the waning days of Japan’s occupation of Korea. With the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1945, the imperial family was sent out of the palace. Yi Seok struggled but eventually found success as a singer. The “singing prince,” Yi Seok, had a hit album called Pigeon House in 1967. He fought for Korea in the Vietnam War. He immigrated to the US for a time and worked as a landscaper, then returned to Korea in the 1990s. He eventually began working for the city of Jeonju’s tourism department and as a professor of history at Jeonju University.

Here’s the connection to our main story. In 2006, Yi Seok founded the Imperial Culture Foundation of Korea in order to lobby for a constitutional monarchy. Since the death of his cousin Yi Ku in 2005, Yi Seok considers himself the head of the house of Yi and crown prince and heir to the Joseon throne.

A moment to be clear. No one agrees who the legitimate heir to the throne is. There is no imminent possibility of the throne being restored by the Republic of Korea. Yi Seok’s claim is disputed.

But the man knows how to steal a headline.

As Andrew Lee, founder of PIA VPN tells it, he was playing Super Smash Brothers when a distant relative named Won Joon Lee interrupted him with a visit. Won Joon Lee’s grandfather is Yi Seok. After a conversation and a look at some family photos, Andrew Lee was convinced to fly Yi Seok to LA and take him to some golf tournaments and celebrity galas. They bonded over their shared love of music. And in the end, Yi Seok proposed adopting Andrew Lee as his heir.

On October 6, 2018, at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, Yi Seok declared Andrew Lee the crown prince of Korea and heir to the throne.

In an interview with Korea IT Times, Andrew Lee explained “The Great King Sejong never wished for the Great Korean People to have restricted access to the Internet,” and announced plans to create an imperial fund to invest in small businesses in Korea and teach coding. “The family intends to educate the Great Korean People with web and software development,” Lee said.

And while the imperial family doesn’t have its great stores of wealth any longer, Andrew Lee has made his own.

He has those early Bitcoin investments and in 2019, Israeli-company Kape Technologies bought PIA for $95.5 million. Lee didn’t get all of that but he got a chunk. Enough that in 2020, he moved into a $12.6 million house in Thousand Oaks, California.

Andrew Lee has also continued Yi Seok’s tradition of music. In 2023, Lee appeared under the name KingLee, rapping on J-Money’s album, “Dun It All.”

And most importantly, King Andrew Lee has restored the Joseon dynasty. In March 2022, Lee founded Joseon 2.0, a cloud-based blockchain-operated successor of the Joseon dynasty. Its digital charter makes clear it has no territorial aims- so South Korea has nothing to worry about- but it does consider itself a virtual successor of the imperial kingdom founded in 1392. To bolster its legitimacy, Joseon 2.0’s charter claims that treaties signed with the original kingdom are in full force. That’s based on the fact that Emperor Gojong never agreed to be deposed and the treaties Gojong signed were perpetual. So if Andrew Lee is the heir to Gojong, and the Republic of Korea has no ties to the imperial family, then, King Andrew Lee asserts, his virtual kingdom is the legitimate successor of Gojong’s.

Joseon 2.0 has also established bilateral relations with Antigua and Barbuda. Joseon 2.0 says this makes it the first cybernation to be recognized by a UN member.

And of course there is a cryptocurrency called the Joseon Mun or JSM which has about $5 million of trading value at around a penny US per coin.

Many organizations have tried and fallen short to become a virtual nation. But none to my knowledge have claimed the centuries long tradition that Joseon 2.0 does. We’ll leave you to judge the legitimacy of the various claims to that tradition.

As for me, I hope you know a little more about Joseon 2.0.

저는 당신이 조선2.0에 대해 조금 더 알기를 바랍니다

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

What’s really being celebrated on Black Friday and is it the biggest shopping day in the world?

Featuring Tom Merritt.

MP3

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible. Become a supporter at the Know A Little More Patreon page for exclusive content and ad-free episodes.

Thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com for the theme music.

Thanks to Garrett Weinzierl for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, Jack_Shid, KAPT_Kipper, and scottierowland on the subreddit

Send us email to [email protected]

Episode transcript:

At the end of the civil war the US government was deeply in debt, both from the cost of fighting and reconstruction. When General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president 1868 it had grown to $2.8 billion. That would be around 103.8billion in 2023.
To help pay for the war the government had begun issuing “greenback” dollars. These were not backed by gold or silver but promised an unspecified future payment. They had the effect fo driving up the price of gold.
So Grant’s administration pursued a policy of selling gold to buy up wartime bonds and by May 1869 the debt had been reduced to $12 million and the price of gold was suppressed.
All that cheap gold gaveJay Gould an idea. He was friends with Abel Corbin, who just happened to be married to Jennie Grant, the president’s sister. If they could prevail not he president to stop selling gold, the price would start going up. Knowing this in advance they could start buying up gold drilling up the price faster. Done right, they could corner the gold market and get unreasonably rich.
Gould enlisted one of his fellow directors at the Erie railroad, James Fisk into the plant.
On September 1, 1869 they started buying up large amounts of gold under other people’s names and driving up the price. Corbin planted the idea with Grant that selling gold would hurt western farmers and the plan should be suspended. But they got greedy. And when Grant’s personal secretary turned down an offer to open a gold account, they did it anyway. When he told the president about it Grant figured out what was happening. And on Friday September 24, 1869, the government resumed selling gold. Gold prices plummeted. And hundreds of people who were riding the gold wave along with Gould and Fisk, lost everything.
Stock prices plummeted 20 percent between that Friday and October 1st. Brokerage firms went bankrupt. Farmers really did get hurt this time with wheat and corn prices dropping by half. The economic turmoil lasted for months. Anti was all traced back to that one Friday. That Black Friday, in September 1869.
And it was that day that would, somewhat ironically, lend its name to what would become the biggest shopping day in the US.
Let’s help you Know a Little More about Black Friday.

Thanksgiving day was established by the US first constitutional president, George Washington in 1789. On the recommendation of Congress, President Washington proclaimed Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a Day of Public Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving days were proclaimed by subsequent presidents on a regular basis but the dates varied. It wasn’t until 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that Thanksgiving should be commemorated on the Last Thursday of November each year.
The regularity made it a nice signpost not he calendar. Retailers began promoting holiday shopping starting the day after Thanksgiving.
That lasted until another economic depression, the great one. In 1939, the economy was showing signs of recovery. But Thanksgiving that year would fall on the very last day of the month. That meant the shortest possible holiday shopping season, meaning the smallest boost to the economy So President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation that Thanksgiving would take place on the second to last Thursday of November, adding a week to the shopping calendar.
16 states refused to move the date and for two years, a third of the country celebrated Thanksgiving a week after the rest of the country.
So in October 1941, Congress passed a resolution declaring the fourth Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving. This kept it as the last Thursday most years, unless November happened to have 5 Thursdays. That kept the holiday shopping from getting too small without pushing it so far up the calendar.
Once that pattern was set, the Friday after Thanksgiving started to take on a character of its own. Workers began to call in sick on Friday in order to have a four day weekend. In 1951, the journal Factory Management and Maintenance began to refer to this phenomenon as Black Friday, referencing the panic of 1869. Friday also became a huge shopping day of course, and police in Philadelphia and Rochester began referring it to Black Friday as well because of the crowd management.
But the reference did not become common. The New York Times first called the Friday after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” in tis November 29, 1975 issue referring to the traffic in Philadelphia. But even as late as 1985, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that merchants Cincinnati and Los Angeles were unaware of the term.
Meanwhile merchants were trying to avoid the usages connotations of a panic and disasters. As early as November 28, 1981, the Philadelphia Inquirer picked up an explanation put out by merchants that it was being called Black Friday because it was when retailers got “in the black” – aka profitable.
But by the late 1980s the term had gained wide acceptance. Retailers across the US began advertising Black Friday sales. More companies began to just give in and give workers Friday off since they were going to call in sick anyway.
By the mid 2000s the day had inspired “Cyber Monday” when workers came into their offices with computers and high bandwidth and shopped for deals online. Giving Tuesday was a counter-celebration to encourage people to spend money on charities instead of products.
The lockdowns because of COVID caused a lot of people to shift to online shopping on all days and by 2021, the Black Friday sales were no longer limited to Friday.
The prevalence of US-based retailers have caused the promotion of Black Friday sales outside of the US, even though those countries do not have the November Thanksgiving holiday. Some countries even promote Black Week or Black Month sales.
The success of Black Friday sales may have inspired Alibaba to co-opt a dating holiday in China called Singles day – on November 11th – to be a big sales day which now has passed Black Friday as the largest shopping day in the world.
Steely Dan wrote a song called Black Friday, released in 1975 just as the New York Times was picking up on the phrase in its post-Thanksgiving context. Steely Dan was writing about the 1869 panic but its words could apply to both

When Black Friday comes
I’ll collect everything I’m owed
And before my friends find out
I’ll be on the road

I hope you appreciate the probably unintentional double meaning. And hope you know a little more about Black Friday.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

The backbone of nearly every network you use on a daily basis is based on a system designed to be cheap and easy to implement.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

MP3

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible. Become a supporter at the Know A Little More Patreon page for exclusive content and ad-free episodes.

Thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com for the theme music.

Thanks to Garrett Weinzierl for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, Jack_Shid, KAPT_Kipper, and scottierowland on the subreddit

Send us email to [email protected]

Episode transcript:

You know what an ethernet cable is don’t you? Even if you don’t think you do, I bet you do. It’s that cable you plug into a computer, or a router that delivers the internet. I know, so many people are doing WiFi these days so your laptop might not even have an ethernet port anymore. But I bet your modem does. Probably your game console does. Heck even your TV might have one.
For most of the internet’s history the ethernet cable has been the most reliable and fastest way to deliver internet traffic. And we owe it all to Hawaii.
Not what you were expecting me to say?
1968 was the year of the Mother of All Demos, but halfway across the Pacific Ocean one more piece of the future was taking shape on its own.
See, in 1968, the University of Hawaii was like a lot of other colleges. It had a big time-share computer. But the University of Hawaii had a unique issue. At Stanford, if you wanted to use the computer you walked over to the building where it was. In Hawaii, that wasn’t always practical. If you were studying on the island of Maui, it wasn’t a simple matter to walk over to the building on Oahau where the computer was.
Now even Stanford could have remote terminals in other buildings that connected to the main timeshare computer. That was also tough in Hawaii. It would be pretty expensive to run a cable through the ocean between Oahu and the Big Island or any other island.
That’s where Franklin Kuo comes in. Until recently, you wouldn’t recognise where he was born. But Wuhan, China has become famous for other reasons now. When Ku0 was 16 though he arrived in the United States and finished high school in New York City. He then got his bachelors, masters and doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He caught on at Bell Labs after graduation and worked there until 1966 when he made a fateful decision.
He flew halfway back to his birthplace to take a job at the University of Hawaii as a full professor. And there he met fellow electrical engineering professor Norman Abramson. Together they led a team that solved that problem of how to connect those University campuses on other islands to the timesharing computer on Oahu. And their solution ended up as the foundation of ethernet.
Let’s help you know a little more, about ALOHANet.

ALOHA net sort of stands for Additive Links On-line Hawaii Area. But that’s something of a contrived acronym. They just wanted to call it Aloha. The idea was to use low-cost, off the shelf radio equipment.
So they needed a system that didn’t rely on precision. In fact it had to be fault tolerant.
They decided to use packets of data, an idea borrowed from the ARPANET which was also under development at the same time. But this wasn’t about using the ARPANET, not yet. This was just sharing local data from the central computer to clients on other islands.
The hub was the central computer. It broadcast its packets out to everyone on the outbound channel. It wasn’t trying to target the receiver.
The clients on the other islands broadcast their packets on the inbound channel.
The outbound channel was pretty easy to manage. Everybody got everything and the local client would sort out which packets were meant for it and ignore the rest.
But the inbound packets could be a mess. What if two users on Maui and one on the Big Island all sent their packets at the same time. How would you handle that? The answer? Don’t!
Just acknowledge when you did get a packet. The hub would send an acknowledgement everytime it successfully received a packet from a client. If the client didn’t get that acknowledgement after a certain amount of time, it sent the packet again. Eventually every packet found a clear space in the transmissions and the packet made it through.
This was the main difference of ALOHANet from ARPANET. AROANET nodes could only talk to a single node at a time. So each node had to know if it was OK to talk or it would remain silent. ALOHANet didn’t need to handle giving clients permission to send data. Just keep sending data until it makes it through.
Since the nodes, the hub and the client, didn’t have to coordinate on when to talk to each other the protocol and the hardware could be much simpler. You just needed a separate frequency for outbound and inbound, that way the broadcasts and the acknowledgements from the hub weren’t competing with the incoming requests.
And the packets from the hub needed an address so the client would know if they were meant for them or not.
The first packet broadcasting unit went online in June 1971
That version, now called Pure ALOHA was incredibly simple. If you have data broadcast it. If there’s a collision re-send the data later. The determination of later relied on a lot of math involving where the clients and hub were and how far apart and how long it took them to create packets. That math determined the efficiency of the network. But it worked.
Slotted ALOHA was an improvement that increased the maximum throughput. Stations were given timeslots and could only start transmission at the beginning of the timeslot. You could still send data any time as there were lots of timeslots, but the arrangement reduced collision.
Reservation ALOHA improved efficiency more by reserving a slot for any client that successfully used it. Clients had to wait for an open slot and then reserve it by sending a pocket. Again there were enough slots this didn’t slow things down much and the reduction of collision speed things up.
The principles of ALOHANet went on to be used in satellites, mobile phone networks and WiFi.
But the first and arguably most well known of its uses was by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC in 1973.
Metcalfe was working at Xerox PARC and finishing his doctoral thesis about ARPANet. Harvard had rejected his first draft. He read a paper about ALOHA Net and figured out how to fix a few of its bugs. He then included his bug fixes in his thesis and was accepted by Harvard.
That stuck with him, so when he and David Boggs were figuring out a standard for connecting computers over short distances, Metcalfe included some of the ways ALOHA Net handled collisions as they traveled through the wires.
Two years after ALOHANet went live, ethernet first functioned on November 11, 1973.
It was one of many innovations to come out of Xerox PARC in the 1970s, many of them furthering the work of Douglas Engelbart, and many of them conducted by folks who had worked with Engelbart on the Mother of All Demos. We’ll get into Xerox PARC in the future. Stay tuned.
But let’s get back to the ALOHANet
In October 2020, the IEEE presented the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, the location of the ALOHANet hub, with a plaque commemorating the network as an official IEEE Milestone.
It notes that ALOHANet was the first to demonstrate that communication channels could be effectively and efficiently shared on a large scale using simple random access protocols. You didn’t need permission to send your data, just send it when you want.
Without the need to share computer resources between campuses on multiple islands there would be no need to build ALOHA Net. And without ALOHANet we don’t get wifi, cell networks, ethernet and more.
In other words, I hope you Know a Little More about ALOHANet.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

Video conferencing was a vital method of communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, but its roots go back much longer than you think.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

MP3

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible. Become a supporter at the Know A Little More Patreon page for exclusive content and ad-free episodes.

Thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com for the theme music.

Thanks to Garrett Weinzierl for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, Jack_Shid, KAPT_Kipper, and scottierowland on the subreddit

Send us email to [email protected]

Episode transcript:

Too soon? I know, but bear with me. Because among all the other unprecedented first time in history moments we experienced over the last few years, the boom in video conferencing was one of the biggest. Use of video conferencing to conduct meetings skyrocketed in 2020. With Zoom alone going from an estimated 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to 300 million by April 2020.
You’d almost think Zoom invented video conferencing. But of course we all know that Skype predated Zoom. And Webex and others predated those. In fact, the roots of video conferencing go pretty far back.
That’s Douglas Engelbart demonstrating his version of video conferencing in the Mother of All Demos in 1968. Pretty far back right? It was one of the many elements of that demo that became a real product. Maybe faster than you think. AT&T launched the first true video-conferencing system on June 30, 1970. Which means I’m two days older than video conferencing. Anyone could subscribe to AT&T’s service in their home or office. If you had the money.
But the roots of video conferencing go even farther back. As soon as the telephone was patented in 1876, people began imagining telephonoscopes and electroscopes, and video telephones. Reality lagged a little behind their imagination.
Ernest Hummel was able to transmit still images using his Telediagraph as early as 1895. It was limited to images that could be made in shellac on foil, but it was something. By 1913, Édouard Belin’s Bélinographe used a photocell and by 1921, Western Union had launched the Wirephoto service which could transmit photos over phone lines. These took more than a minute per image so no video.
One-way video came along as television. But it took until 1930 for AT&T to develop a “two-way television-telephone” system. The systems were not terribly practical though, transmitting low resolution black-and-white video over telephone lines. And they were basically a series of still images not video.
AT&T was trying to figure out how to do this over its copper phone lines. But you didn’t have to use phone lines.
Dr. Georg Schubert developed the first public video telephone service using coaxial cable, the cylindrical cables most people are familiar with from cable TV. It launched March 1, 1936 connecting two closed-circuit televisions by coaxial cable in post offices in Berlin and Leipzig, Germany, about 160 km apart. It had 150 lines of resolution at 25 frames per second. 150p! And it worked. By 1938, Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich each had two video telephone booths in their main post office. If two people wanted to video call each other, they would each visit one of the booths at their post office at the same time. There were plans to expand further but those ended with the start of the war in 1939, and the system was shut down in 1940 so it could be used for telegraph and broadcast TV considered more essential to the war effort. A similar post-office based system was built in France in the 1930s as well.
Meanwhile AT&T kept working on videophones over telephone lines. The Picturephone Mod I used a small oval case on a swivel stand to house the screen. AT&T demonstrated The Mod I at the New York world’s fair in 1964 by making a video call to Disneyland in California. AT&T opened its first public videophone booths later that year, with First Lady, Ladybird Johnson doing the inaugural honors. In New York, Washington DC and Chicago, each participant in a call could reserve a time and visit the booth to make their call. Calls cost $16 to $27 for three minutes. That would be $150-$260 in 2023. It was too expensive. And the booths closed in 1968, the same year Douglas Engelbart demonstrated his computer-based video conferencing in the mother of all demos.
AT&T took up that cue and launched Mod II in 1970. This was more like a videophone. Anyone could be connected to the system, you didn’t have to visit a dedicated booth. Pittsburgh Mayor Peter Flaherty made the first Mod II video call on June 30, 1970 to Alcoa CEO John Harper. Service launched the next day, July 1, 1970 with 38 picture phones located across 8 companies in Pittsburgh. A set cost $150 to install and $160 a month to use and additional sets could be added for $50 a month each. You got 30 minutes of calling per month with extra minutes costing 25 cents a minute. Resolution was 250 scan lines of black and white video. Customers for the service peaked at 453 in early 1973 and it was discontinued later that year.
Compression Labs is often seen as an AT&T competitor that picked up that baton but it was even more expensive. In 1982, it launched the CLI T1, the first commercial group video conferencing system. It cost $250,000 to install and each call was $1,000 an hour.
And that still wasn’t digital video conferencing. It was still just a phone call with video shoehorned in.
To do digital you needed digital video compression and to do digital video compression you need math.
Anil K. Jain was born in India in 1946, as the war that had shut down Germany’s big videophone experiment ended. Jain received a degree in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, in 1967 and a PHD from the University of Rochester in 1970, the year AT&T launched its videophone. Jain would develop the math that would mean you didn’t need these dedicated units. He worked on transform coding, image compression and block-based motion compensation for video compression. And video compression meant all you needed was a camera and the internet to do what these big expensive systems in Germany and at AT&T were trying to do.
By 1981, Jain was at the University of California at Davis and published a paper combining his block-based motion compensation with transform coding. That paper inspired two students at MIT, Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey G. Bernstein to work on a way to compress video so it could be used over the internet. By 1984 they, with their professor, David H. Staelin, they founded PicTel. Later renamed PictureTel to distinguish it from Pacific Telephone Company, aka PacTel. Its first product was a video codec, the C-2000, the first commercial implementation of a compressor/decompressor of its kind.
Building on Jain’s math, C-2000 analyzed the motion between frames meaning it could work with much less data than an algorithm that treated each frame of video independently. Remember all those slowly transmitted still images of the early 20th century? To oversimplify the C-2000 let you get by on fewer still images and make up what came between so it looked like smooth video motion. In practice that meant you could do video over a 128-bit-per-second ISDN line instead of needing fixed location lines.
Most video compression standards for two-way video are based on this motion compensation and transform coding way of doing things, including the pervasive H.264 codec. PictureTel marketed its codec and eventually used it in its own software, including LiveSharPlus for Windows 3.1 And PictureTel did well. In fact AT&T used it for an international video conference in 1989. Hinman went on to found a separate teleconferencing company called Polycom in 1990, and Polycom bought PictureTel in October 2001.
The next step for video conferencing was the camera. The pioneers in this were motivated by coffee.
Yes the British drink coffee. And at the Cambridge computer lab in 1991, the coffee machine was in a separate room. Many were the agonies of a computer lab user trudging all the way to the Trojan coffee room, only to find it empty.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky had a solution. They connected a video capture card to an Acorn Archimedes computer and a 128 x 128 greyscale camera and pointed it at the coffee pot so you could check if it was worth the trip. At first it was delivered to the local network but in 1993, web browsers gained the ability to display images, so the camera was connected to the internet to make it easier to access on any computer in the lab… and the world. Daniel Gordon and Martin Johnson made it available over HTTP, thus making it the first webcam.
But that was still not two-way video. So here we go again. Another technician in a college saves the day.
Tim Dorcey worked in IT at Cornell University and used the new video codec and Internet Protocol system to write CU-SeeMee for the Mac in 1992. You could put it on any machine and connect to any other machine that used it over the internet. That way you didn’t have to set up a server for your video. Just install the software and start calling! It only did video at first but added audio in 1994 thanks to Maven, a client developed at the University of Illinois.
A National Science Foundation project called Global Schoolhouse made CU-SeeMee available to the public on April 26, 1993. CU-SeeMe was used by WXYC radio in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to simulcast its radio broadcast on the internet, making it the first internet radio station.
ABC’s World News Now became the first TV program to stream live on the Internet on November 23, Thanksgiving morning, 1995.
And that’s really the last step. Some innovative math and a smart codec implementation meant you didn’t need huge specialized machines, just a server, a bit of coffee-motivated ingenuity meant you didn’t need a big expensive camera, and some clever software coding meant you didn’t even need the server. From here on video conferencing exploded.
Microsoft entered the game with NetMeeting and as bandwidth increased, the amount of video conferencing software from Skype to GoToMeeting and beyond, increased with it.
So much so, that Eric Yuan had a hard time getting funding for his startup Saasbee when he left Cisco in 2011. Not because of the name, but because everybody thought the market was saturated. Yuan eventually prevailed on a few folks and in May 2012, reportedly influenced by the children’s book Zoom City, he changed the company’s name to Zoom. It took a few years but things worked out for Yuan.
And now many of us work, using Zoom, or some other kind of video conferencing technology. I hope this gives you some of the historical perspective of how we got to this world of working from home and Zoom fatigue.
In other words, I hope you Know a Little More about Video Conferencing.

How did RISC-V grab the attention of nearly every major tech company and what was the need for yet another computer processor architecture? Tom walks you through the history and use case of RISC-V.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

We have an episode of Know a Little More about ARM. It’s the plucky alternative to Intel and AMD. Rough and raw and faster. That’s because Intel and AMD make chips based on the x86 Instruction Set Architecture or ISA. x86 is what is known as a Complete Instruction Set Computer or CISC. Arm is faster and more power efficient because it’s a Reduced Instruction Set Computer or RISC.
But there’s always a smaller more agile and younger fish about to eat your lunch. And for ARM that smaller younger fish is called RISC V.
Let’s help you Know a little more about RISC-V.

First let’s back up and get a little background on RISC itself.
As I mentioned, RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing
To properly explain RISC we’d have to explain how chips work entirely and that could end up making this an 8 hour episode.
So let’s make all the engineers cringe and skip a bunch of steps with the hopes that you’ll have a general understanding even if it’s not precise.
If you promise not to make too many inferences from these oversimplifications, I’ll promise to buy the chip engineers a drink anytime they see me at a bar or juice shop to make up for it. Just tell me “I know a LOT more about RISC” and I’ll know.
OK so with that in mind, let’s define the couple of things we need to know. A processor register, or usually just referred to as a register, is a place where the CPU can quickly store some data and perform a quick operation on it and then send the resulting data back to main memory. Registers are paired up with the instruction set aka the set of opcodes.
So registers. They are essential for processing the instructions
NEXT. A compiler is a program that translates code from one computer language to another. So like taking something written in C++ and making it machine code.
So the compiler translates the code.
Got it? Register and compiler.
OK now back to the story of RISC.
In 1975 the fastest mainframe was the IBM 370/168. It could process 3.5 million instructions per second.
John Cocke and team at IBM were trying to build a digital telephone switch that could handle 1 million calls per hour. And to do that the CPU would have to handle 12 million instructions per second. Just less than 4 times the speed of the fastest mainframe.
Moore’s law was Moore’s law so they were only going to get faster hardware at Moore’s law pace. But maybe there was something they could do in the software of the chip to speed things up.
Cocke’s team took advantage of two things IBM had learned from its customers.
One is that high-performance computers often ran out of processor registers. As you might have guessed, they figured adding more registers could improve performance.
Two, compilers generally ignored the majority of available instructions instead just picking the fastest versions.
That second was the key.
Cocke’s team removed instructions, which meant you had more available registers, which had the same effect as if you added registers, which sped up the CPU.
Success right? Well sort of. The telephone program was canceled in 1975 but it turned out the reduced instruction approach sped up almost any code, not just telephone switches.
The theory was implemented as the IBM 801 which was produced as the IBM ROMP in 1981. It was used mostly in peripherals though it showed up in the CPU of the IBM RT PC in 1986. Which was a flop.
But that’s kind of proto-RISC. There were two chip architectures considered the direct birth of RISC. And they didn’t come from IBM. They came from silicon valley’s top schools, Berkley and Stanford.
In 1978, computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum demonstrated that a 10,000 line program could be represented by a simplified instruction set architecture, coming to similar conclusions as the IBM team.
So between IBM’s work and Tanenbaum’s findings the ground was laid for MIPS and Berkeley-RISC, which would both go on to be successfully commercialized.
David Patterson’s Cal-Berkeley RISC project reduced the instructions, and added some circuitry to assist the compiler. It also used something called Register windows, which limited how many registers a program could use at once to make it faster.
At Stanford, John L. Hennessy led a team that developed MIPS for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages. It reduced instructions and actually added registers. This work was commercialized by the MIPS computer systems company founded in 1984 and now called MIPS Technologies Inc.
This time the idea caught on. The MIPS R2000 went on sale in January 1986, followed by the HP PA-RISC and the Sun Microsystems SPARC processor based on the Berkeley RISC-II system and of course eventually the PowerPC which Apple used for years.
One of the most successful RISC ventures was ARM which built its business on selling a license to its instruction set without having to make the chips itself. ARM makes its money by licensing as does MIPS.
Now whenever you have a company making money licensing software, you have a group trying to make an open source alternative. For every Windows there is a Linux.
Along the way several efforts were made to offer open source instruction sets that you would not need to pay a royalty to use. ARM’s first two versions in fact, had a public-domain instruction set still supported by the GNU Compiler Collection, aka GCC. OpenRISC has GCC and Linux support but not many commercial implementations.
So it was not seen as particularly unusual that Cal-Berkeley’s Krste Asanović decided to spend the summer of 2010 satisfying his research requirement for an open-source computer system. He was lucky enough to get David Patterson, the Berkeley-RISC innovator himself to help with the project. Since Patterson considered it the fifth time he had helped make a RISC architecture they called the project RISC-V, even though RISC-V bears no direct relationship to the previous 4 attempts.
They sourced the documents and designs under the BSD Licenses. But there was enough interest in RISC-V that in 2011 they published the Instruction Set Architecture, and later placed it under a Creative Commons license. The upshot is that unlike some open source licenses, this one lets companies change the code and they don’t have to contribute their changes back to the main project. They can make their versions proprietary derivative works. It’s because of this possibility that the RISC foundation considers RISC-V a royalty-free open standard not open source.
What is the RISC Foundation? Glad you asked.
Lots of companies were interested in RISC-V but worried about its stability. Would they build on RISC-V and then people lose interest in maintaining it? Maybe ARM was safer.
So in 2015 the authors and owners of RISC-V assigned their rights to the RISC-V foundation. In November 2019 it moved to Switzerland to avoid any controversy over US trade regulations. And in March 2020 was reorganized as a Swiss nonprofit business association called RISC-V International.
Anyone can freely use RISC-V designs and know that an organization exists to keep the project stable. Only members of RISC-V International can approve changes to the standard and only member organizations can use the trademarked compatibility logo.
There are more than 3,000 members including Intel, Qualcomm, AMD Xilinx, Arduino, Nvidia, NXP, Huawei, Meta, Google, Alibaba, Seagate, Tencent, Samsung, Siemens, Sony, … actually it’s probably faster to note that Apple and Microsoft are not members.
In its first ten years RISC-V has been used mostly in embedded applications and microcontrollers, but that is beginning to change.
The first RISC-V laptop, the Roma shipped from Alibaba in October 2022.
And in August 2023, RISC Foundation members Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Infineon and Robert Bosch set up a company in Germany to commercialize RISC-V-based products.
They’ll start with cars and Internet-of-things but don’t intend to limit themselves to those.
While most companies who want a RISC architecture will continue to rely on ARM, those who want the freedom to change the architecture, which ARM’s licenses generally don’t allow, may try RISC-V. And whether it’s the Qualcomm-driven company or someone else, there’s an appetite for a more affordable RISC-V based product to give companies an alternative to ARM when wanting the faster low-power RISC chips vs. the traditional x86 style chips.
In other words, I hope you know a little more about RISC-V.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.