I have reactivated my twitter account (@Rticks)
https://twitter.com/RTicks/status/1570100064898490370?s=20&t=PrjFozwUAnjW5CnV15qFSA
htthttps://twitter.com/RTicks/status/1570100064898490370?s=https://twitter.com/RTicks/status/1570100064898490370?s=20&t=PrjFozwUAnjW5CnV15qFSA20&t=PrjFozwUAnjW5CnV15qFSAps://twitter.com/RTicks/status/1570100064898490370?shttps://twitter.com/RTicks/status/1570100064898490370?s=20&t=PrjFozwUAnjW5CnV15qFSA=20&t=PrjFozwUAnjW5CnV15qFSA
Fade In: Microsoft - The First Horseman
[Images of Bill Gates, and Microsoft]
Fade Out
VO: Microsoft was started in a garage in 1972. They are literally the first horsemen; the first start up and the model that set the pattern for the rest; Five Horseman, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon have come to totally dominate our world and economy today. Microsoft grew from two people to thousands and now has an annual income well north of a hundred billion dollars. They started small; little advances here and there like BASIC and ASCII, but their real break came with the creation of DOS, Disk Operating System. Now, allegedly, Microsoft copied this code from CP/M (allegedly) and then IBM gave Microsoft a sweet deal. In 1990, back when the federal government actually did things, it investigated microsoft for collusion with IBM, but by then the genie was out of the bottle and the company was worth billions upon billions of dollars.
[Images of Computers]
VO: There was a war, early on between Apple and Microsoft, but Microsoft opened its system to allow others to make hardware and software, whereas apple took the ‘walled garden’ path that is reflected in its war with Google today. But Microsoft started a lot of sketchy behavior right off the bat. Since Microsoft was in the majority of computers, if they decided that they wanted into a market; that was the end of things. The two most notorious examples of this were in word processing where Microsoft signed the death warrant of the highly popular Word Perfect, and the first (and highly valuable) browser Netscape with the kludgy and easy to hack Internet Explorer. Microsoft not only made it the default browser on every windows PC, they did all kinds of quiet things in the background to ensure that it didn't work as well as Internet Explorer.
[Images of Clinton and investigations]
VO: But Microsoft did this again and again; small start ups would come up with a product and microsoft would crush them by building something in the operating system, a competing process or doing something called Vaporwear, where they would release a hypothetical program that never actually got release, but the mere hint that they might do it caused competitors to run away screaming and investors to think twice. Eventually enough people got sick of this that Microsoft was taken to court by the FTC. There was a lot of back and forth, but Microsoft had very clever lawyers and kept dodging around laws and regulations (which set the pattern followed by all the tech companies) until their violations finally got so egregious that the Department of Justice and 18 states took them to court and got a consent decree forcing them to stop the nonsense of jamming their product down everyone’s throat.
[Images of bars and chains]
VO And it hit the tech world like a sledge hammer. For a while, a short while, tech companies started trying to obey the law. Google notoriously chose their first motto “Dont Be Evil” so that they would be everything Microsoft wasn’t (we’ll see how long that lasted later) but while every company wanted to be Microsoft in economic size, none of them wanted to be perceived as the bad guy so a number of very slick, very sophisticated advertising campaigns took place to clean up the valley’s image.
[Image of other companies passing microsoft by with phones and platforms]
VO Microsoft did what it always did; tried to move into new platforms, but when Bill Gates retired and with the consent decree, Microsoft became more conservative. They were the aging lion in the tech jungle, and they lost out in social media, they lost out in online sales, they lost out mobile devices (the windows phone was an unmitigated disaster) and the lesson that Microsoft learned from this was that they needed to be more aggressive, but also bide their time and see if the government isnt looking. From time to time, Microsoft has still rolled out features that are mandatory, like that ad and status screen you see pop up, or do little things in the Windows store like make decisions about whether open source is available. Recently, they formed an alliance with facebook to agree on standards for a new virtual universe (and we’ll get to that later) but the clear take away is that Microsoft is still this big, stable blue chip company like IBM and like IBM, they have allowed their past controversies to slide away mostly forgotten.
Half of the new chap book I am creating is going to be on several serialized outlets. It will be sold absolutely last on Amazon. I am releasing one at a time.
Here is the first.
A mysterious human disrupts daily life in an alien marketplace to benefit all of humanity and the local Warden is determined to find out why.
[Images of the Nuremberg trials]
VO: Historians unfamiliar with the topic are often astonished at the sheer breadth of the records kept by the Nazi party. Part of the records kept included punch cards used for every single concentration camp that helped them track their prisoners. But the contribution by IBM was more insidious than this; because the legitimate census by the Weimar Republic was used by the Nazi party to help determine who was qualified to be rounded up, put on a rail car and sent to the industrial death camps of the holocost. Other efforts in history have resulted in as much or more death, but nothing compares to the cold industrial slaughter of non combattants than the efforts of the Nazis during WWII..and IBM helped them.
[Images of German IBM]
VO: Note, that this is not a case of IBM having their corporate offices and equipment nationalized by the Nazis. Nor was it a case of mere questionable sympathizes like many rich wealthy Americans such as Ford who later whole heartedly helped the Allies in America. No, IBM had a corporate branch in Germany and that company completely helped the regime in every way possible. One can argue that the American company had no power to stop their German branch except…there are no records of them even trying. Indeed, the official company line is that there are not enough records or details at the time to know one way or another. Note, that this is a company that helped keep records in an industrial and mechanical fashion. The exact amount of money that IBM earned working with the Nazi government is not entirely clear, but the company has paid over seven billion in settlements without admitting guilt.
[Images of the 1950’s and 1960’s IBM]
VO: After the war, IBM went on to become the go to word for industrial computers. Before Microsoft, the very image of a cutting edge technology company was IBM. They grew in wealth, power, prestige and stability with important contracts with major companies and governments all over the world. While their efforts in WW2 with the germans didnt become widespread to the public until more than 50 years later; the company knew and the government knew and felt no need to reign the company in. How much then, must we wonder about what the modern day technology behemoths are actually up to? Despite the internet, despite lessons learned about watching these companies, is what we know of their sins only the tip of the iceberg?
The Muse is Dying, Silencing Dissenters, Avoid Tongs Discord Server, Zucker Suckers, Useful Idiots, One Big Happy Beiging Games, Lover's Kiss, The Turtling Glymer
[Images of More White Lab Coats, Clip Boards, Turn of the Century Science Marches On]
VO: The image we have of science was deliberately manufactured by the progressive movement to get people to have faith in the new ways of doing things. This was the first step into a philosophy and viewpoint of how we think about science and technology which is generally positive. As it should be, technology is after all, a benefit to our society. Indeed, life would be impossible without it.
[Images of WWI]
VO: But the horrors of the first world war turned people on to the dark side of technology. As the wonders meant to make our lives easier became mustard gas, tanks, machine guns and germ warfare. The trenches changed the innocence of science forever. But the world moved on.
[Images of the Five Horsemen]
VO: There are five companies known as ‘the Five Horsemen of Technology’ because they impact our world so much. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Each is worth billions of dollars and in some cases has more financial and even soft power to out match a medium sized country.
[Images of IBM]
VO: But before these, there was another company. One that was the horseman of its time and considered an American giant of industry, innovation and computing power. Before the PC, when someone thought of a PC, they thought of giant room sized computers, most of which were based on ENIAC and the diligent work of Alan Turning breaking codes of the Enigma machine in WWII. But there is another machine that had a major impact on the war, one that you dont hear about as much.
[More Imaes of IBM]
VO: The International Business Machines Corporation, IBM, was founded in 1911 in upper state New York. IBM was actually the beating heart of the new progressive moment and developed business practices and technologies that allowed these modern new wonders to be built to scale and for factories to keep track of all the information required to run the giant engines of industry. Before they became known for room sized computers, they built calculators and tabulation machines. These machines were invaluable to businesses and governments around the world for making clean and efficient record keeping possible. But just like the modern horsemen, IBM had a dark side…a cost of their technology.
