In the 1970’s an MIT researcher by the name of Richard Stallman was fed up with computer companies. This was long before calling tech support and getting routed to India, Stallman was an academic who couldn’t get the computer to do what he wanted to do, which actually sounds much like my mother’s current dilemma. Working on artificial intelligence, Stallman needed to seriously modify the operating system in order to get it to handle his desired tasks. Consequently, the folks’ at MIT developed a variation of their own operating system. Nowadays, we have Operating Systems (OS), like Windows Vista, but in the 1970s, computers ran on Unix, which was pretty much a terminal prompt that you had to program to do whatever you needed. Forget the mouse, colorful buttons, and cool screen animations, Unix required a high degree of skill to effectively run. The issue with Unix, although the industry standard, was that it was produced by AT&T and Bell Labs and consequently considered proprietary intellectual property. This was problematic for Stallman, and countless other researchers, because the only way to modify Unix was to pay Bell Labs to do it. There was no way that they could get the source code and modify it to their needs. At about the same time, people were making copies of the software, namely the Microsoft BASIC compiler, and distributing it freely. Today, we call this pirating software, because you get and use the product, yet you don’t pay the people who developed it. In 1976, Bill Gates wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists:

“Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free? The fact is, no one besides [Microsoft] has invested a lot of money in hobby software.”

This letter, was seen as a direct challenge to users. Later in the year, the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed into law, making the redistribution of commercial software against the law.

Years passed and the hardcore computer users became very fed up, so in 1983, Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project, which was the first mass-computer collaboration to create a robust, scalable, free operating system. The GNU Project, which basically meant Not Unix, operated on the notion that if you made the users co-developers, much better software would be produced. In other words, if you had 100,000 users of software, you would effectively have 100,000 programmers who would be able to fix problems and make contributions. And so it began, Richard Stallman’s free software movement was a bottom-up approach to combat the top-down software monarchy. In order for the effort to be successful, a lot of work needed to be done by many different people. People don’t actually use an operating system, we use programs, which are translated into processes and requests by the operating systems components. This is much like a city with neighborhoods and communities, all of which are satellite functions of the overall city, but are dependent in the overall order. What the free software movement did was get the computer users to help out and develop the programs. This went relatively well and users contributed greatly, but there was one key hole that needed to be filled: the kernel.

The kernel is the command center of an operating system; all tasks and processes first report to the the kernel; it’s the brain of the operation system. In 1992, a finnish programmer plugged the final hole for the GNU project when the Linux kernel was released. This changed the game and proved Richard Stallman’s theory on giving the power to the crowds correct.

Cities have been around forever; computers have been around for about as long as the Rolling Stones, which is also forever. On January 24, 1984, Apple Computers introduced a product that would forever change the world: the personal computer. The introductory commercial, featured a woman  breaking through security and throwing a major hammer through a screen that featured a robotic leader commanding a large audience. The symbolism was evident, Apple Computers was the hammer “breaking through” with an epic product. The last line  the robotic figure on the screen delivers before being destroyed is “we shall prevail.” Twenty six years later, this is still very creepy. Was it that obvious to the people at Apple and their advertising firm Chiat/Day that the personal computer would truly prevail? Today, the personal computer is the guy on the screen and we, the people are the  lady with the hammer fighting our ways through. If you find this hard to believe, try to hold a conversation with anyone under the age of 25 without being interrupted by a flashing light an annoying jingle.

In 1970, Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore coined the term “Moore’s Law,” which basically states that about every two years, the number of transistors on a computer chip will double. Basically, computers, and all the devices that use processor chips, will be twice as strong every two years. Incredibly, Moore was correct in his calculations,  in fact he greatly underestimated them, which has allowed my $27 finance calculator to be  three times more powerful than the main-frame computer that put the astronauts on the moon. This begs the question, if technology can improve every two years, why can’t cities?

In 1996, a top of the line computer was a Pentium 6 with 200 MegaHertz and 4 Mega-Bytes of memory. There was a plug in the back of the computer that went to your phone line and would connect to something called the internet. This component, called a modem, emitted perhaps the worst noise ever heard; however, it gave us access to a wide-world-web... literally! To put this into perspective, this work is being written on an Apple MacBook with two processors that are each over ten times as strong, and 8 Giga-Bytes of memory, which is over 2,000 times more than the 1996 Hewlett Packards.

To say the least, computers were much simpler back then, a web page took a few minutes to load, and forget about sending a picture or watching a video, that would take forever. Nonetheless, the internet was an absolute game changer in every possible way imaginable, however, primarily in the way businesses operate. For businesses, the internet was now capable of providing instant access to everything -- from foreign currency markets to purchasing shirts for conjoined twins, anything and everything was accessible. It was this, the adaptation by the business world that truly spread the internet. In cities, the spread of the internet was a devastating blow, although unbeknownst to them, because the older buildings in the central cities were aging and very expensive to retrofit for internet cables. Because of this, many companies turned outwards and nestled into sprawling office complexes that were much easier to wire and considerably cheaper. The shining example of this in Cincinnati, Ohio would be the City of Blue Ash, which is pretty much in the middle of Downtown Cincinnati and the most populated suburbs. There are countless other examples of these suburban office-plexes across the country, and with the go-anywhere-be-anywhere mindset of the internet, they have all contributed to the decline of the central city.

From my observations on cities, I feel that as computing strength increases, cities decrease in quality. Technology is only one of a laundry list of factors for the decline of cities, but as the highway stretched the city boundaries, the internet removed the city boundaries, something which has resulted in a global marketplace accessible to absolutely everyone who is on the internet.

In 2010, everything is on the internet. Forget about applying for a job and telling the employer you were once a backup shortstop for the Yankees, one quick search on the internet and your whole life can be revealed.  And that, in my opinion, is what cities are competing with -- the ubiquity that comes when people are removed from the equation and instead are just one variable. Computers remove the personal factor of the equation -- there is no human element. This has transposed itself onto society in a very crude way. Instead of firing George, Larry, Beth, and Katie, you are simply downsizing your payroll spreadsheet by four. It also works the opposite way. Forget how Larry is going to pay for his home, or Beth for her student loans, they will simply be deleted and forgotten because computers have no emotions. Conversely, a computer hacker may steal a database of credit cards; however, there is an element of social justice because they steal everyone’s card, from Brian the farmer to Tiger Woods the slayer.

When you operate behind a computer it is possible to be anyone you want, to do, and say whatever you want because essentially you are just a string of numbers known as an IP address. Good luck finding any type of source to confirm this, but I feel that internet has changed the way children grow up since they are able to almost vicariously live their adolescence. The internet revolution has morphed the urban landscape in ways most people would never consider, both to the benefit and detriment.