Bootstrapping for journalism

“Bootstrapping, a computer concept – also applies to journalism.”

Dave discusses the concept of “bootstrapping” in the context of the evolution of technology and journalism. He recounts his personal experiences with the rise of personal computers, networking, and software development, and argues that the replacement for the current journalism system will emerge through a similar bootstrapping process - a gradual synthesis of various experiments and false starts, rather than a single “big bang” solution. Dave believes the great thinkers in the news industry should be more actively experimenting and iterating on new models, rather than just critiquing the current state of affairs. He suggests platforms like Twitter could be a key part of the future of news distribution, if leveraged properly by media companies.

Good morning everybody it’s Dave Winer here and this is a morning coffee notes podcast.
I want to talk a little bit about a subject that is maybe a little bit complicated.
I started to write a post about it and the post either was going to be very long or not very convincing.
It was one of these things where I need to ramble a little bit and so I know that probably nowhere near as many people will listen to the podcast as would skim the blog post.
But for those few people I wanted to try to get the point across in a sort of more convincing way.
The subject is bootstrapping and bootstrapping is something that after you’ve been in technology for some period of time you become familiar with this because it’s how innovation actually takes place.
And I think that in the discussion that we’re having about the evolution of journalism I think that it’s time to introduce the concept of bootst rap to that process because I’m not sure that a lot of people that practice and study journalism are familiar with the idea.
But because there’s the convergence now between technology and not to say this is a new thing because technology and everything have always been converging.
There was a time when the printing press was leading edge .
Just like today the internet is not maybe quite as leading edge as it was a few years ago but it still is the leading edge.
And they thought of that as the printing press has technology and I’m sure they were lots of discussions similar to the ones we’re having now.
Every time that new technology comes along there are those people whose professional careers are disrupted by it who react in a kind of predictable way.
But all that reaction doesn’t do anything to stop the flow of new technology and new people coming in.
That of course we all understand that is inexorable.
There are always new people coming in.
Probably the first time I experienced this and really understood what was going on was in 1980 at the National Computer Conference in Anaheim.
They don’t have the National Computer Conference anymore.
They stopped having it just a short time after that.
But it was the big computer industry event and the main hall of that event was filled with the big companies of the day.
IBM, Burroughs, Sperry Univac, Control Data and then the software companies.
I don’t even remember the names of most of them.
They’re all gone now.
If any of these companies still exist they aren’t doing what they were doing in 1979.
IBM of course was the biggest computer company and IBM really isn’t a computer company anymore.
I don’t know exactly what they are.
They’re big but I don’t think their business is making computers anymore.
It’s computer related, technology related.
They’re more of a consulting company as I understand it.
I don’t really follow them anymore.
There was a time when IBM dominated the computer industry the way Google does now but even that wouldn’t begin to capture it.
Google doesn’t really dominate our industry.
Nothing like what IBM used to do, the way they used to be perceived and the way they felt about themselves.
I was at this conference but not on the main floor.
We were in what they called the personal computer pavilion.
It was a place where we went over to visit the main hall and we would talk to people about what we were doing.
They would laugh at people who were maybe just 10 years, 15 years older than me which means they were like 35, maybe 40 years old, far younger than I am now.
They said our computers do that and they do this and they do all the things that yours will never do because small computers are not the way of the future.
They’re Mickey Mouse, they’re toys.
They had all these reasons to not pay attention.
That’s the way I looked at it.
I said you guys are missing the really big thing that’s going on here which is I can have my own computer.
That’s what I felt was so incredible about this.
I had a good education in computer science at that point and my first four or five years of using computers, I used other people’s computers because nobody could afford to buy their own computer until very recently at this point in 1980.
I bought my first computer in 1978 and I was really early but I was fortunate that I had the money to do it.
I was also driven because I thought this was what an incredible idea this was that I could have all of my computing power sitting in my hands and I would own it.
I know it must be very hard to understand because today this is something everybody takes for granted.
You’d absolutely take for granted.
If you could go back in time travel and go back to that day and say everybody someday is going to have their own computer, I know that people would laugh at you because I used to say stuff like this.
They would say, “Oh, come on Dave, we know you love computers but not everybody is and fill in the blank because they would have all these negative adjectives. " The same kind of stuff that professional reporters say about bloggers today, curiously .
It’s very, very similar.
You’ll never be able to do that .
We have all the experience.
We have the newspapers like a mainframe and a blogger is like a personal computer.
Analogy is very similar.
The language that people use is virtually identical and I may be in anachronism in that I’m one of the very few people probably who remembers the way people used to talk about PCs.
I’m not the only person by any means that remembers that.
But also has been on the other side of this one too.
I’ve always been on the other side.
I’ve never not been on the side that I’m on now.
So I’ve seen this over and over and over and over again.
I saw it happen in desktop publishing.
And I saw it happen with laser printers and newsletters and the same stuff.
You’re going to need all the things that we have.
Well, it turns out, well, not we.
I didn’t actually do that one.
The people who did the newslet ters and use the laser printers, they developed programs like All This PageMaker and QuarkX Press, Adobe Photoshop.
Products that they replaced cost, I don’t know, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and required consultants to set up.
They were publishing environments, not software tools.
It was a different philosophy.
But again, it was the personal computer versus the mainframe.
It was that whole thing.
So, you know, I want to just follow one thread in this technology.
And that would be starting in, let’s say, I guess it was 1978 when I bought a Kramenko Z2D computer.
It was a big black box.
When I say big, it was probably a foot and a half by a foot and a half, 18 inches by 18 inches.
I’ll picture that.
It’s a fairly big sized box.
It weighed, it was heavy.
It weighed probably 100 pounds.
It had a big rack inside of it that you could put cards into.
And one of the cards had 64K of memory on it.
Actually, I think each card had 16K of memory if you want to.
And these were big cards.
But in total, it had 64K of memory and it had two 8-inch floppy drives.
I don’t really remember how much they stored, but I know it was less than a megabyte.
It was probably 512K each.
And it was very low-tech stuff.
So, what you actually stored on the disk was an image of the memory of the computer.
If it was 512K, I guess you were storing a Terrible to Math 128256.
Eight memory images.
I guess that’s about right.
Eight snapshots of the memory of the computer could fit on a floppy disk.
Then later, the disks became managed.
I ran CPM on the computer.
And then on top of that, I put the UCSDP system.
And then that’s what I developed on.
Because I liked Pascal.
I had also programmed in C before then.
So, I would have liked C just as much.
But Pascal was available first, so that’s what I developed in.
And then a year later, I moved to the Apple II.
And that had two 5-inch floppy drives.
I remember how much those could store.
They were 140K apiece.
And that wasn’t enough, so I ended up buying a 10 megabyte.
Not 10 gigabytes.
Think about that.
That’s the size of a couple of MP3s.
And that cost $10,000.
And with that, and it was the size of a bread box.
So, it was probably about two feet long and a foot wide.
And probably eight inches tall.
And heavy.
It was very heavy.
Maybe 40 pounds.
Maybe 50.
No, probably, I would guess 35- 40 pounds.
Somewhere in there.
And that, I wrote a lot of software on that setup.
I stayed with that for a fair number of years.
Then in 1981, well, maybe not a fair number of years.
Time ran a lot slower then.
I had an Apple III in between there.
I got an Apple II, Apple IIe, then Apple III, and then an IBM PC.
Then a Compaq.
Then I got a DG-1, which was the first laptop.
I was already a software developer at that point.
I had started my own company.
So, we had developer relations with these companies.
So, Data General gave us their first laptop.
And at the same time, we got seated, thanks to Guy Kausaki and Mike Wojc at Apple.
We got seated with a Macintosh in late 1983.
And so, we started developing for that.
I didn’t actually get to start using the Mac on a day-to-day basis until 1984.
And even then, it couldn’t replace the PC because it was more capable than the Apple II was.
It had 128K memory, so it had about twice the memory of the Apple II.
It had two floppy drives.
I don’t remember how much they had, but it was certainly more than 140K per.
But the problem there was that the computer operating system now was using so much more of the resources of the computer that with those two floppy drives, you just couldn’t get any that certainly couldn’t do the software development.
In fact, you literally couldn’t do software development on it.
You needed to have a lease it to do that.
And so, that became something that other people in my company were doing.
They were doing the programming , and I was being a CEO.
Which was now, we had moved away from the oh, man, I get to own this thing and create for it in a whole nine yards.
It’s now we’re beginning to creep into the mainframe until 1986 when the Mac Plus came out .
And now, it had a thing called the SCSI port on the back of it .
So, you could connect in an external hard drive, and that developers could create products, could create new hard drives.
And all of a sudden, everything opened up, and you could add more memory to it, and then I switched.
I never went back to the PC, not for quite a few years, maybe a decade, until I went back to the PC, because now the Mac was what I I saw it as sort of wide open space, a big blank machine .
It had a linear address space, which meant you could nobody knew what the limit to the amount of memory you could put on these things.
And back in those days, a meg abyte of memory was an unthink ably huge amount of memory.
It was really a lot, but you didn’t have to stop at one.
You could put two, three, four, five, ten nobody knew where the limit was.
And so, this was a big sort of space for us to expand out into , and we did.
And all this is just one sort of axis of evolution.
Because at the same time, networking was developing.
If you went back to I think when I first got to Chromimco in ‘78, pretty sure I didn’t have any networking.
Pretty sure that computer was a standalone thing, and just simply did not connect to the outside world.
If I wanted to load new software in it, I got the disks in the mail, basically, if you can believe that.
Or I went down we actually had a computer store. I was in Madison.
I’d go down to the computer store and pick up software, but it just didn’t happen very often.
More or less, I wrote my own software. That’s pretty much what everybody was doing back then.
But starting with the Apple II, I had Compusers, and I fell in love with CB Radio.
My handle was Mastodon.
I’m sure some people are still around out there that know me by that name, although it’s very, very old.
Of course, Mastodon is very old , too.
And then came MCI Mail, and I wrote my own bulletin board system in 1981, ‘82, ‘83, somewhere in there.
Yeah, it’s called Living Bullet in Board System, LBBS, and I don ’t want to go into all the details.
But networking was a whole other axis here, and as the computers became more powerful, networking also became more integrated with what we were doing.
My company had its own network, so we could exchange.
One of the reasons I could use both a PC and a Mac was that they were on the same network, so that I could easily email files between the two computers , a technique that I still use to get stuff between computers today.
Sometimes it’s just easier to email something as an attachment.
If you can open a browser on both machines, you can email an attachment, and sometimes that’s still a lot easier than any other way.
So some of these ideas start and then continue and develop, but they maybe don’t evolve so much.
Some ideas really evolve.
Some things turn into complete dead ends, because in the mid to late ’80s, there were a lot of people working on hypertext.
And then it turns out that a really lightweight, low-tech approach to it was the one that took off from Timbersley, and that was the web.
And very different from what people were designing.
So now there’s got to be a point to all this, right? I’m not just telling the story, I’m telling stories as much as the next guy, but there is actually a point to this.
So when people talk about what the next step in news is, they’re not talking about the next step.
They’re talking about they want to know what the solution is.
So they write a lot of stories that explain why this isn’t the solution, and this isn’t the solution.
So much space, because of course it’s reporters writing about what’s on their mind.
So of course that gets a lot of space.
This is by another side, by the way.
I sold writing tools, and I had unfair advantage over the people that sold the financial tools in my day, because reporters understood my products.
Whereas they didn’t necessarily understand the graphic products , the photo shops and the quarks and all these page makers and stuff.
And they didn’t necessarily understand the spreadsheets and their competitors.
So that was Lotus and Excel.
There was a product called Ja velin, which was a big deal at one point.
It was supposed to be the revolution, the next big thing in spreadsheets.
It never was really the next big thing.
It kind of reminds me of some of the stuff that’s going on.
I’ve been going to be the next big thing in the web for ten years, and it never seems to be the next big thing.
There’s always certain cast of characters here, and the names change.
But there’s always, this is, it must have something to do with the way the human vision works, as collective, our collective vision.
There are just these elements that just seem to always be there in one form or another.
Well, the point is, first of all, I have no doubts at all that there will be a replacement for the current journalism system.
And this belief of mine has made me the villain for a lot of reporters.
Just because I believe that this is not the end of the human species exchanging news.
And I think if they stopped and thought about it and really took a deep breath and tried to separate out their own interests from what they have observed in their lifetimes of how these things work, there’s this phrase, “nature abhors a vacuum . " It’s true. Something is going to rise to replace what is missing, unless all of a sudden people don’t want to know what’s new.
And, you know, I think there’s, of course, being a scientist, I’ve got to say there’s a possibility that that’s going to happen.
I know that I haven’t been watching the news at all in 2000.
Ever since the inauguration, I stopped watching the news in the inauguration.
I had a big stake in getting Obama elected, and after that, I don’t trust any of it.
I didn’t trust any of it before either.
I thought for sure that they were going to screw it up for us and we’d end up with McCain as president, and then that would be the end of everything.
So once I saw that that didn’t happen, it’s nothing on the news.
I’ve tried. I’ve tuned in a few times, tried.
I can’t watch Wolf Blitzer for more than a minute, because I think the guy is a fucking idiot.
I mean, he really is. I just don’t understand either that he acts like an idiot, because somebody told him you have to act like an idiot, because everybody watching your show is an idiot, and if you act smart, they’re going to switch the station.
Well, I mean, the things that that guy says and the questions that he asks are the questions that an idiot would ask.
Well, they’re not that stupid, okay? And the same thing with Ober mann.
I mean, you know, Obermann, you had to wonder what is Obermann going to do once Bush is out of office, and I guess I found out the answer.
He doesn’t have anything to do.
That guy had one story to tell, basically.
I don’t like what Bush is doing .
And when Bush is president, and we all had the same problem, or at least many of us felt that this was our problem, then, of course, watching Ober mann was somewhat satisfying, because here was somebody who expressed our inner rage, but, well, I don’t feel that rage anymore.
Bush is thankfully keeping his mouth shut, and Carl Rove is marginalized and irrelevant, who cares what Carl Rove thinks , and whatever.
I think I’ve digressed enough here.
No, it’s possible that people don’t want news anymore, but I don’t think so.
I find myself now searching for news on the Internet, and I put a lot of time into that, because I’m not just searching for what’s new.
I’m also searching for how we ’re going to get the news, because I don’t find any of the ways that we have today satisfying.
I don’t find that they give me

actually, let me take that back .
There are some ways that I do find satisfying.
I’ve really started watching PBS documentaries a lot more.
I’ve been renting I’ve been getting them from Netflix, and watching them on the I’ve been watching a lot of Frontline, and a lot of Nova, and a lot of American Experience.
And I don’t know, I hadn’t really thought about that as news, but it kind of I think I have to add that to the list of things that I’m intrigued by right now .
I want deep background, you know.
I want to learn in depth about subjects.
I don’t like the superficial treatment that I’m getting that you generally get on the news.
I also listen to NPR in the morning.
I have a radio in the kitchen that while I’m drinking coffee, and sort of making my first pass around the net in the morning, I listen to NPR, and all things considered.
Of course, Terry Gross, even though there was that one interview she did that I really, really did not like, I have since forgiven her, and I listen to her regularly.
I think she does a fantastic job.
That’s another subject for another day.
I think Terry Gross is part of the answer of what does journalism look like in the future.
Both Terry Gross specifically and that style of interview is non-confrontational.
All I want to do is draw your story out, and I will trust the listener to be the bullshit detector.
In other words, this idea that the reporter is the gatekeeper because the listener has no bullshit detector is bankrupt.
We all have great detectors.
We all have to develop that because so much of what we get is BS.
You have to be circumspect with everything.
I don’t really need the reporter to do that for me.
I’m perfectly capable.
I often find myself screaming at the radio or the TV set, or I guess the radio or the TV set, and saying, “Why don’t you just let the guy speak?” Let him say what he wants to say.
I will figure out whether or not the guy is lying.
You don’t need to do that.
In fact, probably whatever.
I guess I’m finally going to get to the point now is that when we look back, I really believe we will look back on this and see this period as a period of incredible transition when things were really changing very quickly.
When we look back, we’ll see that there were a lot of steps and there were a lot of false starts and there were elements of the future system that worked, and then there were parts of it that didn’t work.
In the computer analogy, there were the 140K drives and the 128K memories.
We’ll forget it. That’s no good .
There was the limited address space.
We can’t have that either. It’s got to be unlimited.
Or we have to get to a point where we don’t see the limits because in technology, of course, there’s a limit.
But if you can’t see it, that’s just as good as there being no limit.
Almost as good.
When we look back, we’ll see that there were a lot of things , a lot of things tried.
Some worked, some didn’t work, and there was a synthesis process.
This is what we call in computers, we call this a boot strap.
Bootstrap is one of the core concepts of computers and it exists elsewhere.
I remember when I first really started to understand bootstrap , I saw my uncle and I tried to explain it to him.
My uncle who was at best the d abbler in computers.
He was a little too old to be immersed in them the way I was.
He said, “Well, that’s nothing new. " I said, “You could use a computer to make a computer. " Or I guess the example I used was when I was writing compil ers at the time or interpreters for programming languages.
And I said, “You use a compiler to compile the compiler. " And I always thought, “That is really something. " It’s like I’m using a tool that didn’t exist to create itself.
And he said, “There’s nothing unusual about that.
I could use a hammer to make a hammer. " And I said, “Interesting. " But I said to him, “And I don’t think he got this. " “But could you use the same hammer to make itself?” And I don’t think he got that.
That may be something that’s unique to computers, is that in the analogy, you can make a hammer with itself.
Ask a computer guy about that someday.
If he knows about this, maybe some of them don’t know about it.
But it’s really one of the coolest things about computers.
So a bootstrap is where you do that.
Where you need to have an email system to design the next generation email system because the people that are working on it need to email with each other.
And until you have the email, you can’t even think about what comes after email.
A good example of that was podcasting.
Podcasting took off much faster than blogging did.
And at first it was kind of a puzzle.
I mean, it took three or four years before we found the magic ingredient that would get people to understand what it was.
And probably had something to do with waiting for them to be ready for it.
You know, for it to be the next thing in the queue.
Who knows? But it didn’t happen until 2004 , until the summer of 2004.
And then between the summer of 2004 and early 2005, it went from the first there being like two or three podcas ters to being thousands of them all in the space of like six months .
And blogging similarly took three or four years to do that kind of growth.
We had blogging to talk about our podcasts.
So, you know, there was no barrier to entry.
People who were becoming podcas ters already had blogs.
Or they certainly knew somebody who had a blog that they could get the word out from.
So that’s an example of a boot strap.
The idea of the term comes from pulling yourself up by your bootstrap.
So if you can imagine you’re wearing shoes that have straps on them and you decide, okay, well, I want to like go up.
And so you reach down and you pull up.
Well, you don’t, of course, it doesn’t work.
But it’s still, but it doesn’t work in the physical world, but it does actually work in computers.
And so when a computer boots up , first what it does is it launches into something called the BIOS, the basic input output system, which looks in a specific place for the next piece of software that it’s going to run.
It doesn’t have a clue what that software is going to do.
It just runs it.
Okay.
And so whatever that is, that might be a bootstrap loader.
I think that that is the name of one of the components.
And then it goes and looks in a directory of things for something named os. exe.
And it runs that.
And that could be MS-DOS.
And then it goes out and looks, MS-DOS looks for a file called in a directory.
Because now this one understands directories.
And eventually you get up to Windows XP or Windows, God forbid, VISTA.
Same stuff’s going on in the Mac.
There’s an OS in there underneath the OS under the OS.
You never see them.
Well, there is.
We know about some of them.
One of them is called FreeBSD.
And then on top of that, there ’s probably something called Darwin.
And then after that, you get to the user shell, you know, the thing that has the equivalent of the GDI, the Graphic Device Interface.
And can do the menus and can do the Windows and handles the keyboard and all that stuff.
And then you get the Finder.
And then you start getting some applications.
And all of a sudden you’re off.
And that’s where the user comes in, right? So it’s like layers of stuff.
Each one builds on the one before.
The term Bootstrap applied to the process for the first time, I think, was Doug Engelbar, a guy who invented a lot of the stuff that we use today.
A lot of the stuff that I thought I invented, we actually had been invented by Doug Engel bar, a brilliant, brilliant man, and a great thinker.
Because he understood, of course, he not only understood the tools and the products that we would use, but he understood the process because that’s what you have to understand first.
First you understand the process and then you can see what the products are.
That’s what we call seeing the you can see the roadmap.
You can see how all these roads fit together.
Can you figure out whether or not there should be a town at this place or a road between these two? I can see there’s a road because I can look at the map.
Let’s see there.
So he came up with this idea of applying to the process of innovation and that you need to have the tools in place to use those tools to create the next level of tools.
Well, that, like it or not, is what is going to have to happen with journalism.
There will be no big bang.
There will be no one moment where you say, “Aha, now I see the business model. " So that’s why conferences where you get all the greatest minds together to figure out new business models for news never actually do find new business models for news because that’s not how new business models for news that’s not how new anything comes about.
You can’t just throw the minds together and say, “Solve the problem because they never do. " They don’t.
That’s not how it works.
What happens is you watch to see.
You wait for something to catch on and then you try to figure out, “What is it about this that people like?” And then that requires trial and error.
You try taking out this piece and replacing it with another.
Did they like that? Interesting.
And then you always have to be questioning because the thing they didn’t like in 2001, they might actually like it in 2004.
But when you see something shoot from the ground level to the moon in two years like Twitter has, you’ve got to stop and pay attention because there’s something going on there.
There’s something going on there and I think maybe that ’s a subject for another podcast .
Let me just give you a little hint.
I think that is a key part of the new system of the future.
And that is the great thinkers of the news industry, if there are any, out there because God knows we’re not hearing from them.
These guys, if they exist, are pretty much keeping their ideas , their thoughts themselves, which makes me begin to believe that they’re not out there.
Because if they were, they would have a competitor Twitter out on the market a year ago and they would be using it to distribute news.
And they would be tweaking it up to make it great for doing news, unlike Twitter, which is, I think, wholly inadequate for doing news.
It’s like capitalism.
It’s the worst system except for everything else.
Well, Twitter is the worst Twitter except for there aren’t any others.
So you’ve got to use it.
What can I do? I just keep waiting for one of these great capitalists, the R upert Murdoch or the Salzburgers or, I don’t know who else is out there, pick a network.
Why doesn’t NBC have their own Twitter? They will have their own Tw itters, everybody.
You’ve got to know that they’re going to have their own Tw itters.
They absolutely will.
The way Twitter is going is guaranteeing that they will have their own because at some point they’ll want something from Twitter.
CBS will want something, NBC, ABC, HBO, CNN, MSNBC.
They’re all going to want something from Twitter and Twitter is not going to be able to give them all what they want.
So when they can’t get what they want, they’re going to go start their own.
It’s just the way it works.
So you can extrapolate out from that.
There will be more than one Twitter, for sure.
But what’s taking them so long? Why not now? And why can’t we see the longer we wait to start the next level of experimentation, the longer the bootstrap is going to take, the more suffering there’s going to be.
So those are my eight cents, maybe more than two cents for today.
And I think we’ll just let it sit right there.
So I’m Dave Winer, d-a-v-e-w-i -n-e-r on Twitter and my blog is scripting. com.
And hey, if you made it this far, I got to say thanks for listening.
It’s really, I mean, it’s amazing that anybody would make it this far.
I wouldn’t.
Anyway, hope you all have a great day.
Let’s talk to you soon.
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