An ExoTech Success
So many thoughts. So many realizations. So many frustrations. So much excitement. And I am just beginning to learn about the ExoBrain.
As I delve further into this miracle called ExoBrain I find myself looking at the world around me and I get caught in a dichotomy. On the one hand, I almost laugh at the primitive capabilities, the very nature of modern computing.
That makes me think back to the fact that I was born in the same year that the first transistor was fabricated (1947). My mind moves forward through my early, teen and the young adult years. Surely, there were technological advances during those years. But the state of technology, at least consumer technology, remained fairly primitive.
I recall an assignment that I had as a young First Lieutenant in the US Army. The mid-Atlantic and northeast states drowned by Tropical Storm Agnes in June 1972. My branch, the Corps of Engineers, was tasked to produce a documentary of the response to the devastation created by the storm. Particularly horribly affected were Pennsylvania and where I was stationed – Virginia. My assignment was to provide a soundtrack to the slide show that the PR folks were producing. It involved a narration (by me!) and a music track. I chose Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (F Major). Well, I can tell you that, as easy as it would be to put something like that together today, it was a monstrous task then. But I figured out how to take a professional Ampex tape recorder, lay down the narration track, and then overdub, sound-on-sound, the music track. Today that would be a no-brainer.
But I digress.
I look at the “primitive” state of modern computer technology and, despite the things that it doesn’t do I conclude that we should not denigrate it. Far from it. We should celebrate it. It is the foundation upon which ExoTech was begun and upon which it is being built as I write this. I would not presume considering the probability of the emergence of ExoTech if it were not for that foundation.
The pioneers, the Faradays, the Amperes, the Voltas and Deforests. The Edisons and Oppenheimer’s. The Vint Cerf (the “father” of the Internet). All the scientists and engineers, the free thinkers who gave life to technology, who made it real, who dreamed the dream and then saw it through to reality. I believe that we owe them homage, we owe our thanks and our gratefulness and respect for taking us as far as they have. But they have taken us as far as they can. Someone else had to emerge to continue the forward march of the technology universe.
Obviously, we have not come far enough. Obviously, we have not come nearly as far as we can and will come. I believe that, in the future, the students of then modern technology and the consumers of the myriad universe of products that do not yet, in this time and place, exist, will honor the name of Peter D. Warren right along with the other great thinkers who came before.
How can one fail to be immensely proud of having been presented with the opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder with this group of pioneers? I mean that in the broadest sense, for without every single person in every single place in the ExoTech organization, without every function which now exists and will come to exist as the future of this effort unfolds, the outcome, the birth and growth of this thing called ExoBrain, it seems unlikely that it would come to exist.
One man conceives of something. One man is the source of the technology. One man possessed and possesses the vision. But one man, standing alone on this vast plain of development, would be hard-pressed to complete the task. In a real sense, one man is the capsule, the payload strapped to the top of the rocket that will propel him, and the world, into the future.
We, the members of ExoTech, every member, whether paid staff or volunteer, are essential to the task’s success. If we are to take the world of computing, it is our happy task to make it possible for that one man to perform his task. Every member of this microcosm of society is a vital component of that success, and I could not be more honored to have been given the opportunity to be one of this genuinely spectacular group.
Let us resolve, individually, and as a group, to see this thing through to its ultimate success. But we should also realize that success is not the ultimate destination. This success, for which we strive every day, is a waystation to further success, and further success. And….
I borrow a section of the Christian Doxology, as I believe it applies in this absolutely secular sense:
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in secula seculorum!
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end!
We should all understand the magnitude of what we are doing. We stand on the threshold of a new world – a world that will come to be only with the technology that ExoTech is creating.
And won’t it be a phenomenally exciting world?
– Mike Kobrin