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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.

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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.

With all the talk about banning TikTok in the United States, Tom dives in to explain who actually owns and controls its parent company, ByteDance, and why there’s so much discourse about security.

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:

There’s a lot of concern about TikTok these days. It’s banned in India. And many members of the US government would like to ban it there as well or at least force a sale. They assert that it is a threat to national security. Is it? That depends a lot on how you see its parent company ByteDance.

Let’s help you know a little more about ByteDance

Bytedance grew out of real estate search engine called 99fang that was started in 2009 by Zhang Yiming and Jiang Rubo. Those two and some 99fang employees started work in 2012 on an app that would use big data algorithms to classify news stories according to user preference. They founded ByteDance to make that app which later become Toutiao.

It is in fact ByteDance’s core product. You may have run into its video hosting service which is similar to YouTube in that users can upload their own video. Or sometimes, like YouTube, videos owned by somebody else. Like TV shows.

ByteDance has also operated many other news apps mostly in India and Southeast Asia.

Among its many efforts at apps was one called A.me, launched in China in September 2016 and later changed to be called Douyin. Within a year it had more than 100 million users in China.

As Chinese companies often do, ByteDance decided to market Doyin under a different name globally. It launched TikTok in September 2017 in India. In November of that year it acquired startup musical.ly which was also growing fast and in addition to its Shanghai office had a headquarters in Santa Monica. Doyin was only available in China and TikTok only in India but musical.ly was available worldwide. ByteDance decided to merge it into TikTok on August 2, 2018. After the merger, Douyin operated in China and TikTok operated everywhere else.

ByteDance has gone to great lengths to offshore itself as much as possible while still being able to operate in China. ByteDance itself is registered as a Cayman Islands company with a principle business address in China. TikTok Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary also a Cayman Islands company, which itself operates several LLCs which are registered in Singapore, the US, Australia and the United Kingdom.

So is it a Chinese company? Depends who’s asking and what you mean. It’s not a lie to say no, it’s a Cayman Islands company. It’s not a lie when you’re talking about the US version of TikTok, to say no, it’s a Delaware LLC. But in the end a lot of people who work on TikTok, work for ByteDance which has offices in Beijing.

So if you’re asking whether ByteDance or TikTok is a Chinese company, you’re asking the wrong question. The question is how much of what TikTok does happen in China?

For Douyin, all of it. For the other regional variants of TikTok, some. The main algorithm appears to be developed by ByteDance employees in Beijing. So it’s not impossible that someone in the Chinese Government could ask someone at ByteDance to give them some information or make certain tweaks in the algorithm. The way things work these days in China, it wouldn’t even have to be an order. An insinuation that people in power would be pleased if certain things happen would be enough.

So let’s look at each of those scenarios, both data access and algorithm tweaks.

There is no evidence of either happening. But let’s start with data access.

For the US in particular, US user data is stored on Oracle servers in Texas, as part of something called “Project Texas.” The data is handled by an independent company called USDS, which has member of the US Committee on Foreign Investment on its board. USDS acts as a contractor to The Delaware LLC, TikTok LLC in the US. Im practice ByteDance employees in Beijing have reportedly been copied on coding projects that included US user data. Those instances have all been incidental. An engineer needs help on something. Or a moderator needs help on something. So they share a screen or file that they technically shouldn’t. This wouldn’t necessarily deliver useful info into the hands of a ByteDance employee and therefore makes it less likely that this path is how the Chinese government would get data on people.

It would be easy for Oracle or CFIUS to catch any more widespread accessing or searching of US user data and there have been no reports of that. So we’re left with the possibility that maybe some of the US user data might have made its way into the hands of people in China. But it would be much less useful data than anyone in the world could buy from a data broker on the open market.

So an objective evaluation would seem to say that the exposure of US TikTok user data to Chinese authorities is not very high, and in fact more guarded from access by Chinese authorities than data stored with other internet companies.

Next would be the algorithm. Again in the US the algorithm is implemented by USDS and audited by Oracle. That said, it’s a complicated algorithm and it takes a long time to audit. It’s quite possible to miss certain effects of changes. Especially because even the engineers in Beijing creating the algorithm don’t always know exactly how it will act.

One suspicion is that China would order the algorithm to push out recommendations of divisive topics in order to foment unrest in the US. To do that engineers in Beijing would have to make tweaks and hope they are not noticed by engineers in Texas. An achievable goal if not done too often. However it would not be certain to succeed, since it could either be caught and altered by USDS employees, or just not work.

From the other side, the difference between China manipulating the algorithm, and humans just causing the algorithm to do what it does best is indistinguishable. Algorithms at YouTube, Facebook and elsewhere are known to push some people into extreme or divisive content. So the fact that the algorithm did that would not itself be evidence of anything.

However I think an objective evaluation would say that China putting its thumb on the scale of the algorithm is possible, while its effects would not be guaranteed. And the risk here is probably slightly greater than the risk to society from domestic algorithms from US companies.

All of this needs to be considered under the knowledge that if China got caught doing any of the things its government is suspected of doing, it might tank the value of TikTok and therefore ByteDance. That might be a risk China’s government would be willing to take, but what about ByteDance’s investors?

ByteDance is 20% owned by its founders and 20% owned by employees. China’s state-run Internet Investment Fund owns 1% of the Beijing subsidiary. So the government owns a small part of ByteDance but that in itself is not unique to ByteDance. It’s true of many Chinese companies that do not face the kind of scrutiny Bytedance has faced. 60% of ByteDance is owned by global investors. That includes Jeff Yass’ Susquehanna International Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group. Those groups are based in Dublin, New York, Tokyo, Menlo Park, California, New York and Singapore.

Suffice to say the only interest behind Bytedance is mostly American. The exception is Hillhouse Capital, which is Asian, run by a Yale graduate who was born in China.

Let’s take a look at the board of directors to see if we can detect any indication of more Chinese control than we see from the investment side.

The chairman is co-founder Rubo Jiang.
Then there’s Arthur Dantchik from Susquehanna. William E. Ford from General Atlantic. Philippe Laffont from a New York investment management company called Coatue. And finally Neil Shen, a Chinese-born investment manager who now lives in Singapore and runs Susquehanna’s Chinese investment arm.

The Chinese influence on the board appears to be the co-founder and an employee of a western company who no longer lives in China. Not nothing,. But not a smoking gun for Chinese influence on the board.

For comparison, 5 of the 8 board members for rival TenCent were born in China and 4 of them still live there. Of the three- non-Chinese board members, one is from Hong Kong, one from South African and the other Russian.

ByteDance appears to have a heavily western-influenced board of directors and slate of investors.

So let’s recap what have we found.

Technologically it is possible but not easy for the Chinese government to somehow make changes to the algorithm of TikTok. It would be hard to detect from background noise and difficult to predict how effective it might or might not be. It’s less likely that the Chinese government would use its rather inconsistent access to US user data in any useful manner when it has much better options.

And the motivations behind the company appear to be mostly western. While it has obfuscated its ownership with several paper companies, the trail leads back to western, and mostly American investors.

One name I haven’t mentioned in this entire explanation is Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok LLC. That’s the one that runs the other subsidiary LLCs in multiple regions. Chew is a Singaporean. Born in Singapore, schooled in London, and previously employed by Golden Sachs as well as Russian Yuri Milner’s DST Global.

I haven’t mentioned him because he’s somewhat immaterial to the deduction. He makes a nice face for TikTok in the US because he can credibly say he’s not Chinese. He’s not. But his ultimate boss is Liang Rubo, the CEO and Chairman of the board of ByteDance.

You are more likely to have heard of Zhang Yemin, who cofounded ByteDance and is the more colorful of the two. But Zhang resigned as CEO in May 2021 to focus on long-term strategy. Often code in tech companies for being bored with being a manager and wanting to do fun stuff. Like Larry and Sergei from Google did.

And to my way of thinking, that covers all the angles on ByteDance related to TikTok in the US. So what are we left with?

Concerns about TikTok’s treatment of user data and the effect of its algorithms on public opinion are well founded. However they do not seem to be particularly unique from similar concerns at all other tech companies who operate in the same space, such as Meta and Google. There are some areas where the risk might be less because of the strict oversight of US user data in Texas. There are areas where the concern may be more such as the influence on the algorithm by a non-US government.

But neither of those appear to be in any way extreme concerns or reassurances. It may be that strict rules on how to protect user data or a solid system for users to guard it themselves could solve many of these problems.

Preventing TikTok from operating in the US would certainly solve it for TikTok but likely with little effect on overall public safety. Forcing Bytedance to sell TikTok to a US owner would only change who might influence the algorithm or misuse private data. And would likely not be able to replicate the user experience.

In other words, I hope you know a little more about ByteDance.

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.

Douglas Engelbart demonstrated how two people connected over a network could work together editing a document at the same time in 1968. It took much longer to see a real product.

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:

Douglas Adams is a hero to computer geeks everywhere. His Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy right there with Monty Python in the Hall of Geek memes. Legend has it Adams was one of the first people in the UK to get a Macintosh computer. And on that Mac he used a program called FullWrite. We could probably do a whole episode on the rise and fall of FullWrite. It had one of the first true What You See is What You get interfaces, handled long documents particularly well and included an outliner. A true dream list of features for writers in 1988. Scientist and writer Douglas Hofstader was also a big fan. But it was also buggy and eventually it was crushed by Microsoft Word.
So why bring it up? Its lead engineer was a guy named Steve Newman. And in 1989, a young programmer named Steve Schillace joined as a programmer on FullWrite. Those two got to know each other, and later, with the help of a self-described party person, Claudia Carpenter, they would revolutionize how everyone works every day.
Let’s help you know a little more about Collaborative Editing.
That’s Douglas Engelbart in 1968, demonstrating how two people connected over a network could work together editing a document at the same time. It was one of the many impressive technological advancements Engelbart showed off- the mouse, hyperlinks, video conferencing and more. if you missed our episode on that, you definitely want to go back and take a listen.
One of the themes from that episode, that people who did listen already know, is that almost nothing came out of that demo directly. It was oddly too far ahead of its time. But Collaborative editing takes the cake on that point. It would be 35 years or so between Engelbart’s demo of collaborative editing in 1968 and the rise of mainstream use of that technology.
One of the *earliest* examples that had any significant use was Instant Update for the MacOS. And it didn’t arrive until 1991. Multiple users of Instant Update could edit a single document at the same time over a LAN – a local area network– so they had to be in the same location. And it needed a workgroup server to work. It didn’t catch on.
It wasn’t until the internet became widespread that real-time collaborative editing became common. One of the first successful efforts was from a student at Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland. Tom Dobrowolski created Multi-Editoro in 2003, later renamed MoonEdit. It used code from Ken Silverman’s BUILD video game Engine. Up to 14 users could edit at the same time, text from each person was highlighted a different color and it featured infinite undo and a time-slider so you could replay edits. It was available for Linux, Windows or FreeBSD, and it needed somebody to set up a server for it to work.
Then there was SubEthaEdit, named after the communication network in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide. Oddly it was originally named Hydra but had to change the name to SubEthaEdit for legal reasons. It was put together in early 2003 in an attempt to win an Apple Design award, which it did, at Apple’s WWDC 2003. It was mainly a word processor but you could turn on a collaborative mode that worked without configuration on a LAN or with a little set up, over the internet. It’s still developed and you can get it on GitHib.
But neither Moonedit or SubethaEdit used the Web. And we were fast moving into a world where people didn’t want to download an app if they didn’t have to. That was thanks to Ajax, a name for a collection of web development techniques that could send and receive data in the background on a web page. Without Ajax a web page usually had to reload to significantly update itself. It wasn’t even new in 2003. It had been around since 1999. It wasn’t a language, just a way of using HTML, CSS, and javascript. But in 2003 it exploded in popularity as part of the Web 2.0 movement. Everybody was scrambling to make more dynamic web pages like Google’s Gmail.
Among the folks playing with Ajax were Steve Newman and Steve Schillace. Since last we saw them working on the doomed FullWrite, they had worked together on Claris Home Page, a what you see is what you get HTML editor, and started a company called BitCraft that developed a JavaScript application engine. They sold Bitcraft to Macromedia in 2000 and by 2002 were consulting with Intuit to build a customer manager for QuickBooks.
In the usability lab there they met Claudia Carpenter.
That’s how Carpenter described her teen years to the Clickup podcast. But by 1980 she was studying computer science at Cal State Chico and regularly topping her class. Out of college she worked as software engineer for HP for 6 years before moving over to Intuit where she eventually found herself working on QuickBooks and one day, in a conference room with Newman and Schillace.
After Carpenter had her second child, she wanted to try something new and get out of the office. So she, Newman and Schillace left Intuit to try some stuff. They worked in Newman’s attic room above his garage. A classic Silicon Valley story.
They didn’t know exactly what they were going to do but Schillace later told The Verge they knew they wanted to work with Ajax. In fact they started by just trying to find a way to keep document locking from getting in the way of two people working on the same document and eventually that led to a basic word processor. They referred to it as Docster, but later changed the name to Writely. They bet that users would want speed and the convenience of always having the latest version of a document available, so they wrote a lean 10 pages of javascript that didn’t include more advanced functions like rich formatting, margins or pagination. It was a version of collaborative editing that would have looked familiar to Douglas Engelbart.
They didn’t even include a save button which was one of the earliest complaints from a generation of computer users trained to save regularly or face the peril of a lost document. Carpenter’s brother was an MBA professor and made one of his classes do their assignments in Writely. Students complained about the limited features and lack of save button, so much, so, that Carpenter said they tried to get the dean to overrule her brother.
That experience led them to add the only other employee their small company would ever have, Jennifer Mazzon, another Intuit colleague, who Carpenter convinced to work for them as a second job. Mazzon eventually left Intuit to work on Writely full time.
Writely officially launched in August 2005. How did it go? Again Carpenter talking to the Clickup podcast:
It was popular. And they knew they would need help somehow to keep it working.
The group had always thought that Google was a likely home for their product but they spent the better part of a year being told no by Google then saying no to Google themselves and so on.
Sam Schillace took the meetings with Google and they eventually did lead to Google acquiring Writely on March 9, 2006.
Writely became Google Docs.
And as you know it didn’t stand alone.
That same year, Google acquired 2Web Technologies which was working on a collaborative spreadsheet, and the next year made two acquisitions to create Google Slides.
The popularity of Writely continued as Google Docs. And eventually Microsoft, the titan of word processing, bowed to the pressure and introduced Office Web apps in 2010.
And now collaborative editing is the norm. People use Google Docs and Office for the Web, every day. It’s normal. But it took a while to get there.
And the heroes of our story?
Steve Newman worked for Google as an engineer until 2010, then left for online storage company Box in 2011 and after his stint there, founded a data service company called Scalyr which he left after acquisition in February 2023. He now says on his LinkedIn that he’s “Blogging on AI and Climate Change while I think about what to do next.”
Schillace pursued a lot of projects. Among them he went to Box with Newman in 2010, then came back to Google in 2016 to work on Google Maps. But in September 2021, he left Google again, this time to become a deputy CTO at Microsoft.
And Claudia Carpenter left Google in 2010 to work on her own projects as Restartle & Girl Power Software, then worked with Steve Newman again at Scalyr until February 2021.
On her LinkedIn she says she’s retired but also that she is “absolutely terrible at retiring.”
And that wraps up the last and latest of the innovations of the Mother of all demos to come into the mainstream. This episode was written in Docster, wait no Writely, no, Google Docs.
In other words, I hope you Know a Little More about collaborative editing.
CREDITS
Know A Little More is available without ads to direct supporters at patreon.com/knowalittlemore. It was 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.

You all know what a mouse is. It’s so common, that you probably don’t even think that much about why it’s called a mouse. But back in 1968, the man generally credited with the invention of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, had to apologize for what was certainly a silly name.

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Episode transcript:

You all know what a mouse is. It’s so common, that you probably don’t even think that much about why it’s called a mouse. But back in 1968, the man generally credited with the invention of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, had to apologize for what was certainly a silly name.
So how did we get here? Why do most people associate Steve Jobs and not Douglas Engelabrt with the mouse? And why did this form factor prevail over others?
Let’s help you know a little more about the computer mouse.

The closest relative to the mouse is probably the trackball. Heck, some of you probably prefer a trackball to a mouse. Maybe you’re using one right now.
The first trackball was developed in 1946 as an improvement for fire-control radar plotting systems. Military stuff. The Comprehensive Display System, or CDS, calculated the future position of target aircraft based on inputs provided by a user with a joystick. British Royal Navy Scientist Ralph Benjamin thought that the joystick was a bit clunky. Great for flying an airplane maybe but not so precise when plotting coordinates. So he whipped up a prototype of a metal ball rolling on two rubber coated wheels. The Royal Navy patented the device, and classified it as a military secret. But the prototype was the only one ever made.
In 1952, British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor created a similar input device for the Royal Canadian Navy’s Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving, or DATR. It used a Canadian five-pin bowling ball and four discs to pick up motion and send X and Y coordinates to a digital computer. Not exactly portable but it worked. That one wasn’t patented but it was classified as a military secret.
Both shared the idea of trying to make it easier to deliver x and y coordinates, but they were both fixed in place. It would take another decade for somebody to develop a movable pointing device.
Those of you who listened to our episode about the Mother of All Demos already know that Douglas Engelbart was inspired by Vanevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think” about the Memex, a machine that could process human information. And that Engelbart set about making Bush’s ideas real while at the Stanford Research Institute, where he established the Augmentation Research Center.
Engelbart and his team developed touch screens, video conference, hypertext, and… the mouse.
He was inspired by the planimeter a tool first developed in the 19th century to measure area by tracing its perimeter. It’s basically a big L shaped thing with two arms, one that stays put and the other that moves around so you can trace the perimeter of something, while a wheel or some other mechanism counts out the measurements.
Engelbart wondered if he could adapt some of the principles of the planimeter to input X and Y coordinates to a computer.
On November 14, 1963, Engerlbart jotted down some notes about something he called the “bug.” It would have a “drop point and two orthogonal wheels.” So basically a small little planimeter on wheels. It would be an improvement on a stylus because you could let go and it would stay at the point you left it.
But it wasn’t Engelbart alone that made it a real thing.
In 1964, fellow Navy alum, Bill English joined Englebart’s lab. He helped turn Englebart’s notes into a working prototype.
Those two wheels he mentioned were perpendicular to each other. One for the X axis and one for the Y. Each wheel was connected to what he called a potentiometer – a fancy name for a transistor that can vary its voltage output. The variance was tied to the rolling of the wheel which could be measured to estimate where the device was and translate that into a coordinate system on the display.
It was a boxy thing, but it did have the “tail”, the wire that connected it to the computer, originally coming out of the front, oddly. But it was that cord that led people to think it looked like a mouse. And for some reason the cursor on screen was referred to as CAT.
So it was too perfect. Not bug. Mouse.
But the mouse wasn’t the only input device Engerlbart, English and the ARC team were working on. In fact it wasn’t even their favorite. There was a joystick, a knee control and a touch screen called the Grafacon. But the darling of the team was the light pen. You pointed it at the screen! It was so easy to pick up and use. So intuitive. Almost everyone on the ARC team thought the Light Pen was the one most people would prefer.
As it happened, NASA’s Bob Taylor was working on flight control systems and was looking for new ways to make computers more useful. A light pen might be perfect. So he got funding authorized for Engerlbart’s team to prove the light pen was the best.
Bob English and Bonnie Huddart led the study. The team developed a series of tasks and timed volunteers doing various things like moving a cursor on a screen to random position.
And the light pen did well.
In fact, inexperienced computer users did best with the light pen and the knee control, since they were easy to understand just by using them. But for experienced users? The mouse outperformed all the other options. By a good amount.
And that test led to the first occurrence of the word “mouse” in print to refer to the input device.
English, Engelbart and Huddart co-authored a report on the experiments for NASA called “Computer-aided display control” that mentioned the mouse 26 times. The first reference (not in the table of contents) was on page 14. Here’s what it said. “Within comfortable reach of the user’s right hand is a device called the “mouse,” which we developed for evaluation (along with others, such as light pen, Grafacon, joystick, etc. ) as a means for selecting those displayed text entities upon which the commands are to operate.”
So the mouse was in use and it had been proven to be a superior way of controlling a computer. All that remained was to let the world know. But Engelbart wouldn’t show off his work to the general public until 1968. Which means he got scooped by a few months.
Unbeknownst to Engelbart, in 1966, engineers at Germany’s AEG-Telefunken began work on an input device that could send x and y coordinates to a display. It was shaped like half a sphere and used a 40-millimeter diameter ball with two mechanical transducers to detect positions. That’s right the familiar ball mouse wasn’t made by Engelbart. You can credit that to Rainer Mallebrin.
As we mentioned earlier, one of the problems with the early trackballs was they were big and had to be fixed in place. Telefunken made one for Germany’s Federal Air Traffic Control Mallebrein had the idea of reversing that trackball. Just turn it upside down. Then you could roll it around and make it movable so you didn’t have to worry about where to mount it.
On October 2, 1968, AEG-Telefunken published a brochure showing off an optional input device for the SIG 1000 vector graphics terminal, called Rollkugel Steuerung (German for “rolling ball control”). They were a little expensive. But they ended up at about twenty universities and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich.
Even so, Engelabrt still got to make a splash with his mouse in front of a crowd. And his team gets bragging rights for the name. This episode is not, after all, called About the Rollkugelsteuerung.
On December 9, 1968, Engelbart showed off his mouse during what would be known later as the Mother of All Demos.
Bob English was instrumental in helping Engelbart with the demo. He is credited with figuring out how to connect the SRI lab at Stanford with the Civic Auditorium up in San Francisco.
But again if you listened to the Mother of All Demos episode, you know. While it was impressive, it didn’t directly lead to anything.
So slowly after that high moment, members of the lab began to head off in pursuit of their own interests.
In 1971, Bill English left SRI. He didn’t go far. If he’d walked, it might have taken him about an hour. If you leave Stanford, and head down El Camino Real, take a right on Stanford Avenue, and left on Foothill Expressway, you’ll find yourself at the Palo Alto Research Center. These days it’s just called PARC and is in fact part of SRI International. So you would just be going from one part of the organization to the other.
But in 1971 it was better funded and it was called Xerox PARC.
English managed its Office Systems Research Group. And he borrowed that ball idea from Telefunken to create a mouse for Xerox.
It was part of the legendary Xerox Alto released in 1973. Alto was the first desktop computer to use a graphic user interface and a mouse.
Following the Alto, ETH Zurich shipped its Lilith computer with a version of a mouse as well.
But the one most computer folks of the time will remember was the mouse that came with the Xerox 8010 Star personal computer in 1981. If you had the $16,500 to buy one anyway. It became the best known computer with a mouse to that time, but it was still an obscure device. Jack Hawley manufactured the mouse for Xerox and pretty much had the market to himself.
Competition arrived slowly. Logitech, probably the top mouse brand in 2023, showed off its first mouse, the P4, at Comdex in 1982. Microsoft made Microsoft Word mouse-compatible that same year and shipped its own mouse a year later in 1983, the first product from Microsoft Hardware.
Apple’s ill-fated Lisa, its first attempt to replicate and modernize the Xerox Alto came out in 1983 with a mouse. But it’s a legendary flop.
It was January 30, 1984 that changed the course of the mouse.
Apple’s Macintosh did a lot of things right, including the mouse. Remember that study back in 1965 that found the mouse was best for experienced users.
The Mac wasn’t meant for experienced users. So they built in a guide to get you up to speed. It was so important, that Rony Sebak, the person who wrote the guide, was up on stage, with the engineers of RAM and circuit boards during the announcement!
That made the mouse mainstream.
Over time the mouse lost much of what made it mouse-like. Both Steven Kirsch and Richard F. Lyon independently created an optical mouse in 1980. First with LEDs and later with lasers, the optical mouse replaced the need for the ball to detect position. And eliminated the need to pull the ball out and clean it. Sometimes by inadvisedly popping it in your mouth.
The Mouse lost its tail too. The first wireless mouse came along in September 1984. Logitech made the infrared mouse for the Metaphor computer, made by former Xerox PARC employees David Liddle and Donald Massaro. Infrared needed line of sight though. But RF and later Bluetooth would make the wireless mouse mainstream.
And these days there’s a seemingly infinite variety. Pucks, force feedback, tower-like ergonomic forms and more.
Even the number of buttons has changed. Engelbart’s original prototype had one button. The one he demonstrated in 1968 had three. The Alto’s also had three. Microsoft’s had two. Apple went back to one. Today a mouse usually has one or two main buttons but also scroll wheels side buttons and more customizations.
But at base they all work the same way. Detect movement in two dimensions and then translate that into data a display can use to replicate that movement with a graphic on a screen.
Engelbart made $10,000 off the invention of the mouse, a lump sum paid by SRI for the patent. English didn’t get rich off the mouse and retire either. After leaving Xerox in 1989, he worked for Sun Microsystems for years.
And what about Bonnie Huddart? The other name on that report that first mentioned the mouse. She left SRI shortly after its publication and became the first director of the computer center at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
The only one that made much money off the mouse was SRI which held the patent. It was granted in 1970 and expired in 1987. But even SRI didn’t make much. Xerox, Microsoft and Apple all licensed it from SRI. The general belief is that Apple paid around $40,000 for its license, though there’s no definitive record. Suffice to say it wasn’t a lot of money considering how transformative the mouse would become.
But that’s not why Engelbart did any of this. He wasn’t trying to make a bundle of money, heck he wasn’t even trying to invent the mouse.
He was trying to make the world better.
In 2008 he spoke to a crowd at Google as part of a panel called ‘Inventing the Computer Mouse. He talked about how he got started developing technology like the mouse.
I’d argue that the mouse has played a pretty pivotal part in making the world better.
And I hope now you know a little more about the Computer Mouse.

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.