Invented just in time
By: William H. Calvin
Tags: Pandemic, Isolation, Software Development, Computer History, Zoom

Imagine the economy today if work-from-home via Zoom and such hadn’t been there to quickly expand in mid-March, with office phones redirected to ring on the home laptop.

Imagine, too, the pandemic stay-at-home without the smartphones that have taken over in the last dozen years, with all of the texting. Or the web; the boom in web servers began in 1993. Or the web browser invented in 1992, to deal with the physicists’ problem of seeing the illustrations in scientific preprints.

Or the email accounts, which spread out of academia in the 1980s. Or the first laptop in 1983 (I took one on a two-week float trip through the bottom of the Grand Canyon in 1984 while writing The River that Flows Uphill). Or the personal computers after 1976. Or the desktop terminals that began to replace teletype machines by the early 1970s.

Computer networking itself began in the mid-1960s, once “packets” served to break up messages into short fragments that were easily resent if a packet’s checksum didn’t match at the far end. That’s what solved the perennial problem of noise corrupting a message en route.

I saw it all happen, but none of it ever seemed like magic. Neuroscientists like me (Ph.D. in 1966) were always among the ‘bleeding edge’ users of the new technology and so each advance seemed like the next logical thing to try out. But to new users today, the antecedents are no longer there to see, either deeply buried, like those checksum packets, or superseded, like the teletype machines that served as terminals to a lab computer.

It is this half-century perspective that makes me marvel at how its recent developments have been just in time to help us weather the pandemic isolation. It’s not just Zoom conferencing. We now watch live ballet performances via YouTube, giving us a better view than even a front-and-center seat affords. It still doesn’t match going to a practice session in the rehearsal hall, where you can sit close enough to feel the breeze as the dancers go by. Friends that used to meet at halftime breaks can instead gather to watch the live performance from a living-room venue. Or on Zoom instead.

Putting up some performances on YouTube for free will attract a younger audience before they can afford a $50-$100 ticket. It’s only time until live event subscriptions include a digital-delayed option, one that you can slot into your own busy schedule, in the manner of reading the newspaper. Another season option will be digital delayed plus an admission ticket for a seat at one of the season’s offerings.

I think that sports events may be forced to adopt such subscription strategies because a yell by the guy seated in back of you is such a potent way of showering you with little droplets of saliva containing viruses, especially when yelling continues for several hours. The 6-foot rule was made for ordinary speech loudness; unblocked sneezes, yells, and loud singing can project viruses 25 feet ahead. Many fans will now stay home rather than exposing themselves to such risk, returning only when seeing the spectators clapping instead, with loud-mouthed violators caught on camera without the neighbors complaining and promptly evicted.

What enabled the popularity of Zoom, compared to conferencing competitors, was designing for easy entry. Anyone with an email account can participate for free, simply by clicking the link in the email invitation. There is no need to first establish an account, provide a credit card, then install software and debug everything — all steps that may keep the inexperienced from ever getting started. That’s very important in a pandemic because hand-holding by a techie is often unavailable.

Zoom does have accounts and downloads, but they are mostly needed if you want to admin a big conference. Then you can mute someone’s microphone when their phone keeps ringing. The more people in the gallery view, the higher the chance of two distant dogs barking at each other, as they defend their territory against an invader by barking back. One of Zoom’s admin options for larger groups is to mute everyone; to speak to everyone, one can hold down the space bar.

It’s only time before employers will be asked to pay rent on the home office, but that will be cheaper than renting whole floors in a tall building. To solve the problem of some people having to work from the dining table, some apartment buildings will convert a few of their apartments into cubicles and small offices, with large-screen displays that residents can plug into their laptop.

It’s becoming a new world. This transition resembles what, in biological evolution, we call punctuated equilibria, the tendency of fossils to stay the same for many million years and then suddenly change into new forms, usually because of a jolt delivered by changes in the environment. They open up new opportunities and doom some of the old narrow efficiencies. It happens for cultural change as well, and the pandemic is allowing us to participate in a new transition.