Not Your Father’s Data Center - Adventures in Technology with DCD’s Peter Judge (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

Peter Judge may have started his education journey with a degree in physics from Cambridge University, but most will know him from his work as a writer in the technology space. His current role is as the Global Editor for DataCenterDynamics, and he shared his experience and thoughts on technology and datacenters with Raymond Hawkins. Judge started his career in tech journalism back in the 80s at the beginning of the personal computer revolution. “Journalism, when I started, was about phoning people, going to meet them, typing up the notes on a manual typewriter, and sending it to someone else to typeset it,” Judge said. “These were a whole lot of core processes that no longer exist.” One of the first changes, Judge noted, was his company got a DEC rainbow PC, which they used to type and edit. And, from that point on, the advancements in technology kept moving forward. Judge recalled many of the advancements in computing, like the personal computer and the internet. “We thought that personal computers were kind of fun, useful, but we didn’t foresee how fast they would change things,” Judge said. The same holds for the internet, where no one could predict how important a role it would play in everyone’s lives. And, although Judge saw the potential for what the world wide web could do, he was wrong about one thing. “I remember thinking that, when information is free, easy, and sharable and lives in this new internet world, it’s going to be really hard for lies to get spread,” he said.

Welcome to Not Your Father's Data Center podcast, brought to you by Compass Data Centers. We build for what's next. Now here's your host, Raymond Hawkins. Well, thank you again for downloading and listening to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. Today, we are joined by one of the University of Cambridge's most distinguished alumnus, and we'll play a game with you for a bit and see if you can guess. It is not Prince Charles. It is not Emma Thompson or John Maynard Keynes, since he is no

longer with us, but it is Data Center Dynamics global editor, Peter judge, Peter, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. For those of you who don't know, Peter, uh, has a degree in physics from Cambridge. So, uh, unlike me who managed to barely get through university, um, Peter's actually the smarter one of the two of us on the call today. And not only is he smarter, he's also more well-rounded because he also has a degree in fine arts from St. Martin's College. So, Peter, we're going to let you carry the conversation today because you sound far more interesting than I do. Well, thanks for the intro. Thank you for having us. Folks, we are recording today on the 7th of August, and our planet continues to be

distracted and slowed in the global pandemic. And we'll talk a little bit about how that impacts the data center industry. But more than anything, we're going to learn about Peter and what he's been doing for a couple of decades writing in and around the technology business and what he's seen and changed and how it's impacted the data center. And how is it that a man with a degree in fine arts and physics ended up writing for a living? So we'll have that conversation. And we just ask that you sit down and listen with us and enjoy the conversation, learn about Peter and his insights into technology in the data center space. So Peter, let's go back to Cambridge and you're getting a degree in physics and let's talk through how you started there and ended up working in the early days with Ziff Davis.

How did that happen? Okay. Well, physics is just great. Physics explains the whole world to you. And so that's what I was there for, to understand the equations that make things run. Turns out you really have to be very, very smart to do well at physics where I was. And it also turned out that there were various other interesting options on the curriculum. So, I found as well as the study in the exams, I'd done a pretty hefty, big written dissertation on safety of nuclear power stations. The question was, can you make a nuclear power station really safe without it becoming really uneconomic, the trade-off?

And that got interesting, and that's what got me the highest marks in that exam. So I didn't really put that together till later. But now I look back on it, I kind of think, yep, that's technology journalism in a nutshell in a fairly deep way. And so by chance, having done that, I found I wound up in a job where I was doing more or less that on a day-to-day basis, looking into industrial processes, seeing how they worked and how the relationship between the business and the technology and the practicality of it all as it goes together. So how does a Cambridge educated physics graduate then decide, you know what, I think I might want to study fine arts. You've got to talk us through that switch. Physics explains the way the world works. Art

explains the way the world feels. It's self-expression. I got to a stage where I thought, if you're doing all this sort of heavy-duty maths to explain things. Where's the expression? Where's the feeling? I want to do something that is about self-expression. And so I headed off and I did this thing, which is really very much sort of self-expression. We didn't really learn a lot of painting technique at St. Martin's, but we learned a lot about sort of postmodern theory and that kind of thing. Turns out, you know, I did kind of fine at that. I can paint you a picture if you want. I can draw you a picture.

In fact, one of the things I've been doing in lockdown, when I find myself on a video call with people, I get out a pencil and encourage both ends of the conversation to draw each other. So if anybody listening to this finds themselves talking to me through Zoom or anything else, we can divert and do that while we're doing it. But anyway, once again, the dissertation, the writing was what scored me the most points. And I didn't really notice that. But then I just noticed that the jobs I got offers for when I started applying,

all happened to be about writing. It was a process of just steering into my natural niche, which started out in technology. Actually, it started out at the British technology paper, Computer Weekly, or a monthly offshoot of that, and then headed off after that to Ziff Davis and other places and various kind of freelance outlets. I just like writing and explaining things and understanding them. I have been lucky enough to find that people want me to do that for

them. I love that people will pay you to do something that you're good at and that you enjoy. So, I love the way you said it, Peter. You said physics is how the world works. It teaches us how the world works and with lovely equations and mathematics. And art teaches us how the world feels and how we can express ourselves through how the world feels and how the world looks. And I think that is, did I get both of those right, Peter? Yeah, indeed. I mean, they aren't that different, really. John Constable, the landscape artist, said that art is a branch of natural philosophy, which was the word for physics in his days. He thought that if you're painting things, all you need to do is understand how it looks to you. Awesome stuff. I love that. How the world works and how the world feels. And

I think they're both equally important, right? At the end of the day, understanding the world around you and how it works and what makes it tick is crucial for us to integrate into it. And then how the world and how the people in the world feel, I think might be as important, if not a little bit more, because I think we were designed to be in relationship with folks. So thank you so much for that. Peter, as we talk about the transition from your time in school into actually getting paid to writing, could you start how that transition happened?

Yeah. Well, tech journalism is about... What year was it that you started at Computer Weekly? It was back in the 80s. Okay. So let's see. The Mac Lisa comes out in 84. Yeah.

There were personal computers that were just starting to show up in the late 70s and early 80s. So we were just starting to understand this concept of microprocessors and computers and screens. The early computers, we plugged them into TVs and we were starting to get monitors. And so, you started in the tech writing about it in the 80s. I'm going to say what, where we were talking about 8088s or 8086 processors or 286s. Yeah. Okay. So, very beginning. So, yeah. Okay. So, journalism, when I started, was about phoning people, going to meet them, typing up what you've got on a manual typewriter and sending it to someone else to typeset it. A whole lot of processes, which were really cool, but which no longer exist.

And the very first start of the change there had just started to happen in that at the time I started because of, well, because it was a tech publication and we knew what was going to be happening, we'd convinced the company to get us a DEC rainbow PC. Yeah. The old digital Equipment Corporation. Uh-huh. Yeah. And we were realizing that typing and editing on that was a good thing. By the time, a couple of years later, when I went freelance, the price and availability of personal to dial up networks for email and that sort of thing, which changed the game for working as a freelance. You were suddenly able to work internationally, communicate freely and cheaply with everyone. And yeah, communications became easier. I mean, there was a weird moment. One of my early employers used to send copy to a separate house to be pasted up. And they used to send it by bike.

They used to send a courier to send this stuff, a few files. And it was obvious to me that we could do a whole lot in that company if we only had a modem and could actually use online services. And the only way I could justify this to them, because it wasn't replacing anything they were doing already, except this courier. All I had to do was work out that the cost of that courier per month was less than the cost of an online service and a modem. And that was enough to justify it. And then the benefits followed through after that. Something comes up that's new. You can't justify it unless you can relate it to something that exists already.

Hear, hear. Well, Peter, I remember the first time I submitted a story on my compact laptop via dial-up and didn't have to take copy down to the office and thought, I'm liberated. I can sit right here in front of my laptop and type and hit send. And it was a DOS-based operating system and a dial-up modem. And it was just a simple ASCII text file that we sent and it would take it eons to download, but it changed everything that all the texts came across electronically and there was no more running around and having somebody typeset it for me. Yeah. Cause you're selling yourself short. You have some pretty good journalist

credentials at that time when things are changing so fast. We are going way back into the late 80s and early 90s. People, I say to my kids, laptops, and they say, Daddy, why do we call them laptops? And I go, well, guys, when they first came out, they were so heavy, you couldn't hold them. You had to sit them on your lap. Early laptops weighed 8, 9, 10, 12 pounds. In the early iteration, we actually called them luggables. Your computer was luggable, and it came with a handle my kids think that's so funny so i'm going back a bit yeah so all right the luggable dial-up modem days when you could hear the modem um and you were sending in your stories you somebody sees this bright young man out of university with a fine arts and physics degree and says you're really good at writing and you understand technology why don't you write about technology?

And as they say now, the rest is history. So you've gotten to see an incredible span of technology. I'd love it if you would, just for our audience's sheer enjoyment, talk about some of the highlights of, as you've written about technology, things that you heard coming that turned out to be real and things that you heard were coming that turned out to be flops? Yes, the things that were coming that turned out to be real that I didn't quite meet, I didn't quite pick up on. I mean, the very first publication I was on was an offshoot of Computer Weekly for those companies like Digital that did mini computers and large systems. And we thought that personal computers were kind of fun, kind of useful. We didn't really foresee just how fast they would change things.

And the same really happened with the internet. You know, email was great. And, oh, the World Wide Web. I was at some of the early World Wide Web conferences. I put together an event in London, sometimes still in the very early 90s about internet business. And we got the co-inventor of the World Wide Web. So you were not able to secure Al Gore to speak, but you got his co-inventor? Yeah, that's right. Al Gore was kind of busy at that time.

Okay, yeah, the inventor, the creator of the World Wide Web. But after that, who did you get? I forgot about that. The Assistant Burns Lee guy. Oh, okay, yeah. No, but we didn't get him. We got someone who early on was actually got almost equivalent billing, a guy called Robert Cayo, who was one of his colleagues in CERN, who told us lots of useful things about the early days of the web and lots of things that were coming along that is going to be able to handle audio. And fairly soon, it's going to be able to handle video. And fairly soon, you may be able to get a trusted connection and do commerce.

These things were kind of – it was gone 1990, and I believe him, that the reason the World Wide Web is called the World Wide Web, it's because he was, I think, maybe a Belgian. But he and Tim Berners-Lee were working in Geneva in a largely French-speaking area. And they thought it would be pretty cool if they thought of a name for this thing they'd invented that would be that the French would find hard to pronounce. That's so good. Ask someone French to say, and it's quite painful. That's so great. Either he was having a really good laugh or that's the real story.

No one knows. How good is that? That is awesome that they wanted our friends at the French to have a tongue twister. That's good stuff. Peter, you made a comment that I thought I would highlight, especially occasionally. I think our vast audience includes my two children, and they talk a lot. They joke with me occasionally when I talk about the early days of computers. You mentioned DEC and that they ran what we would either call minis or mid-range or mainframe computing.

And I think it would be fair to say DEC was mostly in the mid-range space. And this idea of PCs was sort of a cute, quaint concept that no one in the early days grasped that this is what was going to fuel change and fuel just the explosion of technology on the planet. And I actually tell my kids, I said, when I first started selling computers, we used to have advertisements that would say, someday, there'll be a computer on every desk. And I love that you as a journalist who've been covering technology for three decades said, hey, we didn't see the personal computer coming. I'm putting some words in your mouth, but I think that's what you said when you said, hey, Dec, we thought those PCs were cute, but we didn't see them coming. Is that a fair summary of what you were saying there? Yeah. I mean, we got a rainbow because we saw that as being more tied into the systems that were developing fastest at the time. And also it was to hedge our bets because that computer not only had the Intel chip, it had the Zilog chip, which at that stage we thought might be just as successful.

Yeah, yeah. And, yes, similarly, we didn't know the IBM. We didn't really think the IBM PC was necessarily the one that was going to take off, just as we didn't think Microsoft was necessarily the word processor that was going to take off. We were spending a lot of time talking to a company called Digital Research. Yeah. So this is fascinating for me. I talked to my kids and folks that are in the tech business. So there was a great book about the early days of the tech business called Dealers of Lightning.

Are you familiar with it? That's one I've heard of, but I haven't read. Yeah. Okay. So Dealers of Lightning was about Xerox PARC, their research facility in Palo Alto. So I think PARC, it was P-A-R-C, Palo Alto Research Center. And it talks about the very early days, just what you just said. Hey, we didn't think this word processor would survive. And we didn't think that the IBM PC would be the foundational platform that it turned out to be. The things that they invented at Xerox PARC are just striking. They invented the graphical user interface.

They invented the mouse. They invented laser printing. I mean, the kinds of technology that came out of PARC and then the early days that all things today that we just take for granted as part of how we interface with a computer. So many of those innovations came out of the Palo Alto Research Center. Yeah. And Ethernet. And there was some- Ethernet. That's right. That's right. Ethernet came out of there too. Yeah. And there was at one point one mother of all tech demonstrations where they demonstrated

pretty much all those things. Yeah, with a famous wooden mouse. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, yeah. Unbelievable. So, yeah, the very early days of things that we now – I mean, and it's actually – I guess it's – even we've gotten so far that we've gotten past that. My kids think the fact that I carry a computer, I have a MacBook Air, they think that's hilarious. They're like, Dad, we just do everything on the phone. Why do you need a computer in it to think that we've gone so far that this little handheld computer has replaced your Deck Rainbow and my luggable laptop? A lot has changed in three decades. All right. So you didn't see the PC coming. Give us one more surprising technology thing in three decades that you say, wow, that one caught us by surprise. I'd have to say I got the internet fairly early.

Okay. Yeah. So, World Wide Web, you were on that one. Okay. I was on the World Wide Web and I did that conference. And then I went over to, I think around about 94, the Internet Society was having lots of really good conferences about sort of getting this technology out to the world. So things like the fact that in Africa at the time, you could only connect stuff to each other with dial-up bulletin boards. And was that the appropriate technology because they didn't have the telecoms networks, et cetera. There were lots of debates like that going on. And I remember in 94 actually seeing – I got to be on stage in a panel talking about tech journalism. So I've done that for some time.

Yeah. Along with a bunch of other guys. Vint Cerf was there. So that was an interesting one. But at that stage, I could really see how the Internet made so many things much easier and much clearer. There's a guy called Clifford Stoll who wrote this wonderful book called The Cuckoo's Egg, which is about how he more or less kind of discovered a whole lot of the security risks that were going on. And his employer at the time fixed them. And the reason he could do that was because he worked out that there were ways in which the internet provided beautiful shortcuts that made his day job so much easier that he

could do this other stuff. So there were lots of exciting things like that going on. And the thing that I'm thinking at the moment is I remember thinking that when information is free and easily shareable and, you know, issues of copyright get sort of updated to sort to live in this new world, then it's going to be really hard for lies to get spread, that the truth will automatically be there because many eyes will see it. You know, the sort of wikipedia and the and the truth gets established so that conspiracy theories can be stopped and run down by the truth which can catch them up you know it used to be that uh you know a lie could get around the world before the truth could get it get its boots on and now I thought maybe the truth can catch up. And, well, you know, I'm looking around me now and feeling a little sad.

So I want to make sure I got this one. Your, hey, Raymond, I may have gotten this one wrong. This free flow of information in the early 90s as the World Wide Web is starting to get established, you thought to yourself, wow, now everyone will be able to have the clear light of day and truth defining, shining on it, and we'll be able to root out mistruths or misspoken truths and lies and deceit, and that this clear free flow and exchange of information, truth will reign supreme. And I think it's fair to say, especially since you and I have talked before, that we both agree that, oh my goodness, that one went the exact opposite direction, didn't it? Didn't it just? And, you know, I mean, that's, you know, maybe too idealistic a view

for a journalist to ever have. But this was new stuff. And it looked to me like the truth could be out there much more easily than it could otherwise. Yeah. Well, Peter, I think this might say more about you than it will, it does about the World Wide Web is that you have a good heart and you assume the best in mankind that the more we get to talk and the more we get to communicate that we would just get to the truth. I think that speaks a great deal more about your heart and soul than it does about what has turned into what it looks to me like really a place for people to live out their greatest

inner demons in the Twitter sphere and in the anonymity of the World Wide Web. Okay. Yeah. And if this was a Zoom, you'd get me blushing at the moment. Well, good. Fortunately for you and I both, we get to do this via audio only. I told the producer earlier today, I said, it's a good thing we don't do a video podcast because I have a face for radio.

So we're both safe. I will say, and I know we're sort of bouncing around here, I will say that that might be for me the greatest disappointment in what the technology revolution that I've gotten to professionally witness in my life has produced. bullying that we see, and I'm not picking on Twitter itself, but I just think the Twittersphere speaking for all sort of electronic communication has allowed that age-old practice of the paper tiger, someone who will smile and be kind to your face, but in writing, when they're now separated with a pen and get to drop a note in the mail that they are vicious and mean and cruel, I think the internet has brought the worst of that out in mankind. And there are great things that happen there.

But that, to me, might be my greatest disappointment as a guy who's helped witness the technology revolution, that it's caused so much division between humans when I think our real calling is to be reconciled and close to each other. Yeah, it's removed the delay from paper tigers and poison pens. Yes, yes, that's right. And installed a kind of feedback loop that amplifies them. I mean, there's a lot of thought that's been going into the psychology of humans and the

way in which we gravitate towards information that agrees with what we think we have or that amplifies our emotions. And if you set up a system where like a social media system, where the system itself gets more rewards for the more clicks, for the more emotion, then that is like the opposite part of that system. It, you know, a successful social media platform automatically by definition will have to be one that amplifies emotion and makes, and pushes us to more reaction and more clicking. So it's almost like we can be angry at the people that have made this happen the way it has. But the fact that it's happened is almost inevitable. Whoever

built Facebook, if someone else had built it, it might well have gone exactly the same way. Well, and yeah, I don't think we can push the blame, I think also what you're saying, to just the creators, right? Our eyeballs and our desire to watch has fueled this and our reading and our observing has fueled this growth. I love something you said. You said it's removed the delay of the poison pen and the paper tiger. You know something else, Peter? But it's also by being able to type out 140 characters and hit send, it's kept people from being introspective about what they're going to say before they say it. I find that I do better the longer I think about what I'm going to say.

The shorter the distance is between my thinking it and saying it is usually bad and the longer is usually good. And I think that the instant feedback loop of the internet has caused people not to be nearly as introspective about how they say, what they say, what they accuse people of, how they attack people. And I think we're worse off for it. Yeah. I want to say something good though. So let's- Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're down on it and there's lots of goodness. So that's a good transition, Peter. Let's talk about all the incredible things that have happened because of our interconnection. Awareness of what's going on around us is not always going to be absolutely truthful, but think how long it took for things like pictures of famine to reach us 30, 40 years ago, how unaware we could be of what was going on in the world.

That's no longer the case. I mean, and our responses can be manipulated, but the availability of what's going on, the visibility of what's going on is much, you know, when it's done properly. If the curators and the, if the channels that we're seeing are as truthful as possible, we can know much more than we ever did. Yeah, Peter, let's take a current event and run it through that lens you just offered us.

Let's take, although not an issue like famine, which can be long running, let's take Beirut in 1983, when the barracks there, the Marine barracks were bombed there. It's a day, day and a half, maybe two days before the West gets still pictures of that. And then let's take the explosion that was, so we're recording August 7th. So I think the explosion was Tuesday or Wednesday of this week, I want to say within an hour on my Instagram feed was live video of the explosion there in Lebanon this week. And the ability to know what happened, to be able to see it, to be able to get security pictures and video. I mean, to me, that's a great

example of, although a particular single event like an explosion, how different the world is 37 years apart. Yeah. And we get to hear about it. We get to see people like that woman having her bridal photos taken. Yes. Everyone's seen that video. So, yeah. And now that then leads to this sort of activism as people, they're saying, you know, hold the government to account, which it reminds me of the expectations we had about the Arab Spring a few years ago, when that was really the first time that sort of Facebook and other social media outlets, we still thought Facebook was a good thing. And we saw people organizing with it to overthrow and object to bad-hearted governments in the Middle East. And very, very mixed result to that. There was a sort of technocratic look over in the West where we thought, these people, they're going to overthrow the government. Let's lead them to it. And we left them to it and some of those people just got crushed yeah and and we had whole sort of internet fueled and enabled muslim islamic terrorists in in isis they were sort of

that was a whole sort of uh yeah i don't know where i'm going with that one but yeah you're right i mean recruiting via the internet or, to your point, sharing information. I remember when Egypt was first in crisis in 2010, the groups were communicating with each other and saying, hey, here's where we're going to go protest today. And here's where we're going to protest. And here's what to bring. this sort of grassroots communication tool that offered an incredible, not only visual images and insight, but communication and collaboration. I'm a military veteran. I think of the term command and control. It offered a level.

The Internet offered a level of command and control to these what would otherwise have been a pretty fractured group of protesters, and they were able to organize and communicate. So there's no question. It's an incredible tool and can be used for good and can be used for evil, no question. But that's a good one. The Arab Spring one's a good one to think about how it was used on both sides. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we have a lot of demonstrations or one might, they call themselves maybe uprisings in the States and some of it over here for Black Lives Matter. Right, right. Whatever's going on there, I mean, I know because my colleagues will tell me. They know how to deal with a smoke grenade using a leaf blower and a traffic cone now.

Right, yeah. The practicalities of these things are all out there. Hear, hear. As is, yeah. Well, it's fascinating having been born in a world that didn't have computers and they'd been invented, but they weren't commercially viable. And then I took my first computer class in the fourth grade and was programming in BASIC, which is kind of funny. And having gotten to live through, the way I summarize it for my kids is I stumbled into the technology business in the late 80s and started brokering used computer equipment for corporations and got to see the advent of the personal computer, because that wasn't

a thing when I started working. Then the advent of client server computing. Then who can remember the much ballyhooed Y2K. And then the dot-com explosion in the early 2000s. Then the dot-com implosion soon thereafter. And then the financial crisis and global recession of 08, 09. And then what I would consider now the explosion of the Internet age post the economic crisis and what we see today with Facebook and Microsoft and AWS delivering cloud services to customers and technology perspective and seeing how that has changed our world. this great conversation back to the data center business, which to me today is leading the technology revolution. And even in the context of COVID, Peter, I heard someone say the other day that we've seen three years of technology transformation in three months due to COVID.

And I think that's so true. Yeah, that's true. Yes. I mean, at DCD, it was really quite extreme in that my part of the company 2000, I stopped doing print journalism because everything went online around about then. I've only been at DCD five years and it was like, I'm back doing a print magazine and I'm loving it. It's the first time I've done print this century. Yeah. How about that? So the print business, and I don't want to give away trade secrets or anything, but what's the circulation? What's the readership?

I, for me, and I know because I'm a dinosaur, I like holding my reading. I like putting it in my hand. Does the magazine still enjoy a significant readership? Yeah. I mean, we have like about 10,000 people who want to have a copy, who want to read it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And we could easily get more than that. There's a sort of, you know, I mean, especially during this pandemic when people are having more time stuck at home, time to read. Certainly, it's done interesting and from our point of view, generally good things to the traffic on the website. And we're getting as much or more feedback about the physical magazine as we ever did. However, some of that is about the difficulty of getting hold of it. Because I expect a lot of those magazines that have been printed may well be sort of stacking up on desks in offices that aren't being visited at the moment. So we probably had a policy. I'm sure we would have preferred addresses that sound like offices in the past.

So there's an obvious thing that we need to do now, which would be to go back to our subscriber list, update the addresses, and given that people will be working from home more than offices for the foreseeable future, to start prioritizing delivery to homes. That's going to do interesting things. And a lot of other sort of magazines and publications have had to do different things like that. I mean, in terms of hard copy, the ones I feel sorry for are the newsstand magazines, because people simply, for a few months, just didn't get to the shops in the same way they used to. So picking up a newspaper was not something that people would do. Like so many other things in the COVID crisis, that was accelerating something that was well underway before.

But it's added and accelerated that crisis in local papers and local journalism. Peter, thank you so much for that. Now is probably a good time for us to give our listeners a break and ask them to tune in next time as we finish our conversation with DCD's Peter Judge. Thank you.