Michael’s memorial service was held on August 21, 2016 at the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa. Michael’s wife, Irene Stratton, shares the video here in two parts:

Memorial Program

A PDF of the program can be viewed or downloaded here.

Transcript of Irene’s memorial talk during the service (PDF)

Transcript of Patti Stratton Jordan’s memorial talk during the service (PDF)

Michael’s life story as shared by Richard Mains during the service (PDF)

PostScript from Irene

In response to some expressions of concern for me, here is a bit about life after Michael.  Although it has been devastating to lose my beloved, and the grief process is ongoing, I want to reassure people that I’ll be OK.  We shared so much, but I have always had parts of my life that were separate from our couple-ness.  Singing in the choir, spending time with my wonderful friends, keeping involved with our kids’ lives, and pursuing interests that Michael didn’t share have now become the center of my life, instead of just part of it.  The gifts of music, nature, friends, and family nurture me and uplift me.  I’m not there yet, but I believe that eventually all of these will allow me to fully embrace this new phase of my life.

Obituary

Michael’s obituary, written by Irene, can be viewed or downloaded here. (PDF)

Tributes In Industry Publications

A memorial written by Linley Gwennap in Microprocessor Report, which Michael founded. (PDF)

EE Journal article by Jim Turley (PDF)

EE Times article by Rick Merritt (PDF)

Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA
Oral History Project, May 16, 2016

Video

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738140

Interview Transcript

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738141

Presentations by Michael

Published on Apr 19, 2012 by Webvanta

Michael Slater, CEO of Webvanta (www.webvanta.com), gives a five-minute whirlwind history of computer technology

Talk for the Analy High School AP Computer Science Class

Comments from Friends and Colleagues

Search Facebook for Michael Slater, Sebastopol for many comments

Check out Michael’s Blog for April 4th, where you can hear Michael and friend Mark reminisce and hear his delightful laugh.

From Brian Berg:

Michael Slater: An Untold Story

Much of Michael’s newsletter inspiration, and many of his earliest writers, came from the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop (AMW). I rode down to my first AMW with Michael and another friend in 1987, and I remember him talking about a newsletter he was planning to start later that year.  The rest is history. I am so very pleased that David Laws and others at the Computer History Museum (CHM) created an Oral History of Michael.  Anyone with a love of history should check out the rich archives of Oral Histories on the CHM website. May Michael’s name be remembered!

From Deena Monchick in response to obituary:

Our world is a better place because of Michael. From his innovative work that touched countless people to his impact on individuals he personally inspired. He & Irene were my first mentors. He taught me as much as I could consume, inspired a fascination w/ technology & helped me become the person I am today. Thank you, Michael. I will forever be grateful for you and your life.

From Nancy Pressel Alpert (comment on PT post):

Don and I have you in our thoughts and prayers. You are a blessing to many people. It has been hard reading your blog. Sometimes I think the most important thing we can do with our lives is to share our pain to help others. This is exactly what you are doing through this blog. You have taken something so raw and turned it into something beautiful. Thank you.
Sending lots of love, Nancy

The post In Memoriam – Michael Slater 11/15/55 – 6/19/16 appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

The post Share Memories of Michael appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

He did get his 2 units of blood on Friday 6/10, and that did seem to make him somewhat stronger, but when they tested his hemoglobin after the transfusion, it had brought it up to 7.5, which is still very low.  It was clear that he needed more.

Sunday 6/12 Michael’s dear friend Mark, whom he has known since 7th grade, came to visit with his wife Pattie.  We had a wonderful time with them.  Because Michael has been so candid in his posts, I will share this: Saturday and Sunday brought another development that was pretty disturbing to see, Michael’s amazing brain was now really compromised.  He tried to complete some work for Webvanta that normally would have taken him an hour or two to accomplish.  I watched him struggle for hours and finally was able to talk him into allowing someone else to complete the task.  It was very, very hard for him to admit defeat, and very hard for me to insist.

Hospice agreed to pay for another blood transfusion and they scheduled it for Wednesday 6/15. Monday and Tuesday he was very weak, and sleeping a lot, but still able to talk and think, with a little help to keep his thoughts on track. We were so hopeful that more blood would bring his energy level back up. During this period of time Michael was still counting on having a big Garden Party to which many people from his Microprocessor Report days were invited, as well as local friends and family. His family and I were becoming more and more certain that he wouldn’t be well enough for such a thing.  On Thursday, it became apparent that the transfusion had not helped. His body was beginning to shut down.

We decided to cancel the big party, and just invite friends and family to come. By Thursday afternoon Michael was sleeping most of the time, with brief moments of wakefulness and clarity of thought. Friday was much the same, and by Saturday it was clear that he had few days left.  The gathering on 6/18 was lovely. Many close friends and family came by and took turns being with Michael to say goodbye and tell him of their love and appreciation of him.  We’re hopeful that he was able to hear and take in the words and love he was given. It was a great opportunity for people who were close to Michael to connect with each other, again, or for the first time.  I was able to just dip in and out of the party, taking breaks to cry or sit quietly, while others kept food and drink flowing.

In the early hours of Sunday, 6/19/16, Father’s Day, Michael passed away in his sleep. A great mind and generous heart has passed from this world.  Though his last week saw a precipitous slide in his condition, I am aware that it could have been so much worse for him.  Michael faced this cancer journey with such grace and courage, but his biggest fear was what he called “the End Game”.  He was worried that he would be in great pain and would linger long in that state. Thankfully, his pain was easily controlled by his meds, and his last days were mostly peaceful.

RIP, my love,  Irene

The post The End Game…. appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

For my guest talk, each year I’ve improvised the presentation, feeling around for what was of interest. This year, I gave a three-part talk:

• A brief history of computing
• Programming on the web
• Computer science as a career

Caitlin Baker from the Analy film class was kind enough to record my talk and post the video:

I really enjoy connecting a bit with the students and sharing my perspective from 40 years in the industry. I have, alas, found it frustratingly difficult to get most of them to engage by asking or responding to questions during the class.

I’ve had the opportunity to get to know two of the students a little better: Luc Street and Izzy Ehnes both joined Webvanta as interns after my talks in previous years. It’s been great to have them be part of our little company.

The post Talk for the Analy High School AP Computer Science Class appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

So I was excited to see these images from photographer Sean Gallup, who works for Getty Images. (These images belong to Getty, so they are costly to license: $175 to $575 each, depending on size.)

Here’s a few examples; at the end is a link to a gallery with more of them.

Here’s a gallery with more images from this series.

The post Combining Historic and Modern Images appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

One thing they found was 13 videos from the 50s and 60s. These are silent, 8mm videos that are about 3 minutes each.

I’ve had them scanned, and you can view them below. In time, we hope to get some captioning added.

The 13 videos are set up as a YouTube playlist, so they will play one after another (though the order is random at this point). You can also click on the playlist icon in the upper left corner of the video player to jump directly to one of the videos.

The post Stratton Family Videos from the 50s and 60s appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

A couple months ago, we stumbled across the same collection of cottages that we stayed in back then. Previously the Inverness Valley Inn, it is now the Cottages at Pt. Reyes Seashore. The current owners, who bought the Inn in 2013, have done a lot of renovation.

Irene and I returned there last week for a second visit, 37 years later!

It is wondrous to think of the span of time between these two visits, so many years apart, and how Irene and I have loved each other and raised a family and done all sorts of things together. Despite all of the challenges we have faced — or perhaps because of them — we are closer now than we have ever been.

Thinking back to our earlier visit here, I get a glimpse of how it felt in the early days of our relationship, with the excitement and the trepidation. It was probably our first trip away together, and one of only a few overnight trips I had done with a girlfriend.

Our return trip last week was extra special because it is the first overnight trip, other than to a hospital, that Irene and I have taken in almost six months — since November 2015, when I was diagnosed with cancer. While I was undergoing chemo, traveling was out of the question; my health was too fragile. I was less fragile under radiation, but I had to be here every day.

Now I’m feeling well enough to travel short distances, which is delightful. We really enjoyed our trip to Pt. Reyes and have planned a trip to Portland and the Columbia River for our 35th wedding anniversary later this month.

If you aren’t clear on exactly where the Pt. Reyes National Seashore is, the map below should clarify things. It is due west of Novato and encloses the long, narrow Tomales Bay to the north, faces Drake’s Bay to the south-west, and wraps the Bolinas Lagoon to the south-east.

Anchored by Rhododendrons

Curiously, our memory of a plant anchors this first visit at a specific point in time. All over the Inn’s grounds, 10-foot-tall bushes were covered in spectacular, brightly colored flowers. These were rhododendrons, which we must have seen previously but did not know by name. We were overawed by them, and we’ve grown them ever since.

As Irene and I were trying to figure out what year our first visit was, we recalled the rhododendron incident and realized that it must have been before we moved to our house in Palo Alto, where we had rhododendrons from the start.

Rio on Vacation

There are four units that are dog-friendly, and it was great to have Rio with us. It was our first vacation with a dog. A house, hotel room, or even an office always feels better to me with a dog around. It is limiting, but for this trip it was worth it. (I still can’t imagine dealing with Rio at a city hotel, however, though some very nice ones are now dog-friendly.)

While our cottage was dog-friendly, not much of the Pt. Reyes National Seashore is. A few of the ocean-facing beaches allow dogs, but the surf was rough and wind too strong for us to want to venture far on them. Very few trails allow dogs.

We drove up to the top of Mt. Vision, where an enormous fire burned more than 12,000 acres in 1995. The mountain has recovered tremendously.

The half-mile trail from the parking lot was also marked as prohibiting pets, but the place was deserted and the trail was really a road, so we decided to flaunt the law and take Rio along. We had stunning views down to Tomales Bay, out to the ocean, and all the way out to Mt. St. Helena.

Sleepy Inverness

Inverness, which sits on the Pt. Reyes peninsula just across Tomales Bay from the town of Marshall, is a pretty sleepy place, especially when it is midweek and not summer. It is largely a residential area, with some very nice homes and lots of B&Bs, lodges, and other places to stay. Inverness was first developed in the 1890s by James Shafter, who named it after Inverness in his home country of Scotland.

Inverness has a few restaurants, but they are currently open mostly on weekends. There’s a market, but it’s been stripped down to an overgrown convenience store.

For the most part, Inverness is a great place to sleep, but you’ll probably go elsewhere for most of your activities.

Eating Out

As with most of our vacations, I must admit that eating out was a major focus. In time, I am likely to be very restricted in my eating, so for now, I’m going for everything I can get.

Pt. Reyes Station, which is on the west side of Tomales Bay across from Pt. Reyes, is the biggest town in the area, with a nice assortment of restaurants, a great bakery, and a cheese maker.

Osteria Stellina is an excellent Italian restaurant, better (to my taste) than any in Sonoma County and on a par with many with San Francisco and Palo Alto.

Down the street, the long-established Station House Cafe is more casual, less expensive, and has a larger, if more pedestrian, menu.

Pt. Reyes Station is also home to Cowgirl Creamery, which is a fun cheese manufacturer to visit, and Bovine Bakery, which is one of those local bakeries that has a vast and loyal following.

A few miles south of Pt. Reyes Station, past the south end of Tomales Bay, is the tiny town of Olema. Although it makes even Inverness seem mid-size, it is more lively, at least at this time of year. There are two good restaurants, one of which is something of culinary legend.

Since 1876, Olema has been anchored by the Olema Inn, at the corner of Sir Francis Drake Blvd. (“Sir”) and Highway 1 (the “Star” route). In 2006, the Inn closed and the building went up for sale.

At about the same time the Inn closed, the Pt. Reyes area’s best-known restaurant, Manka’s, was destroyed in a fire. It has not been rebuilt, and the owner and chef behind Manka’s purchased the Olema Inn in 2012 and opened Sir and Star in 2013.

Chef Daniel DeLong previously worked at Elroy’s, Bix, and Stars restaurants in San Francisco. Owner Margaret Grade brought her unique style from another world: she was a neuropsychologist at UCSF before leaving the city and medicine for West Marin and the world of local food and hospitality.

Grade and DeLong purchased a 1910 former hunting lodge in 1989 and turned it into Manka’s. Alice Waters of Chez Panisse mentored Grade, and the restaurant quickly became well known for its distinctive food and quirky hunting-lodge decor.

Manka’s moment of royal fame came when Prince Charles of England and his new wife, previously Camilla Parker Bowles, took over the entire main lodge at Manka’s during their West Marin tour of local farmers and ranchers.

Now the style of cooking that was created at Manka’s is being carried forward at Sir and Star. A pioneer of farm-to-table before anyone called it that, Grade has been cultivating Marin food sources for decades. She tries to source all food within 30 minutes of the restaurant, and explained that was why there was no fish on the menu the night we were there.

Since the days of Manka’s, Grade has been fond of clever menu titles. On our visit, I had “tasty parts of a local pig”, while Irene had the “leg of a neighbor’s duck”. Both were beautifully prepared, simple in one sense (mine was essentially a few slices of pork on mashed potatoes) but with each element so thoughtfully prepared and full of flavor that the dishes sang.

If you’re looking for a more casual alternative with a more traditional menu, across the street from Sir and Star is the Olema Farm House. We had a very nice lunch on their outdoor patio.

The Merging of the Plates

Shifting from plates of food to plate tectonics, we come to the most remarkable thing about Pt. Reyes: its geology.

The peninsula is on the west side of the San Andreas fault and is part of the Pacific Plate. The rest of Marin County is on the east side of the fault and is part of the North American Plate. As a result, the peninsula’s geology is completely different from the rest of Marin.

Pt. Reyes actually moves north at about 2 inches per year, and geologists believe it started far south of its current location. At Point Lobos in Monterey there are rock formations that match very closely those of the peninsula.

If you’re interested in geology and are taking a trip to Pt. Reyes, download the excellent, if somewhat technical, Geology at Point Reyes National Seashore from the USGS.

A Perfect Trip

This was a perfect trip for us. Being away from home, with so much natural beauty all around us, helped us stay in the present and enjoy life.

If you find yourself interested in a West Marin vacation, I highly recommend the trip.

The post Three Exquisite Days in Pt. Reyes appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

Despite a love of Sonoma County, Barney and his wife Susan have yet to reach escape velocity from Los Angeles. We have kept in touch through the decades, and Barney has come to visit a couple times since my diagnosis.

In addition to being the author of several dozen children’s books, Barney is a musician and songwriter. Inspired by this post, Barney wrote this song for me! I think it is awesome. No song has ever made me cry so hard.

(If you are reading this in email, you will probably need to click through to the website to play the song.)

Here’s the lyrics:

Up in the morning
half past five
My heart’s still beating
Looks like i’m still alive

Looked in the mirror
Old guy’s looking back at me
Looks like my father’s here
He’s just in time for tea

I’m moving slower
Than I’d like to move
This old lawnmower
Still got the groove

I’m still standing here
I didn’t disappear
I know the end is near
Time makes it pretty clear
I still love you dear
You can drive, I’ll steer
Got no time to fear
I’m still standing here

I shake my head
A little disbelief
I’ve still got my bark
But I’ve lost my leaf

When did this happen?
I was cruisin’
I’m not a poker player
But this hand is loosin’

Strike up the band
I’ve got some time
Open the bottle
Poor me a glass of wine

Living each day like it’s my last
Wouldn’t mind a longer day, this one’s going fast

Keep a sense of humor
In your pocket
Cause time is zipping
Like a rocket

I’m feeling good
Just a little creaky
Like my legs are made of wood
I’m just a little squeaky

I’m not complaining
The sun is shining
It’s not raining
I’m not whining

The post I’m Still Standing appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

My focus is on creating something that will live longer than I will — hopefully a lot longer. It turns out that this is not so easy to do!

I have picked 50 years as a goal. Longer would be better; I’d like 250 years! But it is hard to think clearly about even 50 years in the future.

There’s a big stack of issues to consider, from the domain name and hosting to the content management system (CMS) and software maintenance. I’m going to survey most of them in this article, and then dive into a couple of big issues in future articles.

Third-Party Dependencies

With longevity of the site as a key goal, it is important that the website avoid use of third-party services. For example, in current websites JavaScript libraries and font files are often loaded from Google or other content delivery services. Using a third-party server to supply the file has some performance and simplicity advantages, but it makes the site vulnerable to any changes to the third-party service. My top goal is maximum long-term stability, so third-party services are out.

The current site does use some third-party services, such as AddThis for sharing, for ease of development. As long as these are optional services that don’t otherwise affect the site, they are an acceptable risk. When it comes to dealing with social networks, stability and avoidance of third party-services just aren’t possible.

Third-party software is fine, though, as long as it is considered part of the website’s software. For the CMS, I chose to use WordPress, knowing that it is more widely used than any other system on the web and therefore will be around for a long time.

Normally, an unattended WordPress installation is a dangerous thing, considering the number of hack attempts aimed at WordPress sites and the frequent rate of software upgrades.

There’s a whole host of issues here that I’ll address in a future article. For now, let’s put this big messy issue aside, and consider the WordPress software and the PHP/MySQL stack that underlies it as a given.

Offline Files, Online Website

A website does not need to be connected to the Internet; it can exist, in a static form, as a set of bits on any storage device or service.

An offline website is only good as a “deep freeze” backup, however. My guess is that most sites that make it to this state are never seen again.

I am putting together both an offline set of files and a website. The offline files will be my complete data set in raw form. This makes it easy to assemble the content, since no user interface is needed, and it can be as inclusive as I want without a lot of effort.

While I like the idea of having this big pile of bits that will capture a big piece of my life, it is far more important to me to have the most interesting of this content easily available to anyone. And for that, I need a website.

Long-Term Hosting?

To be on the web, the site needs to be hosted by someone. That is simple enough to do, of course, for immediate use; there are hundreds of hosting companies to choose from.

But how do I set up hosting that will run indefinitely? Servers cost money to run and need maintenance and support. Any company that is offering “lifetime” hosting can only be referring to that company’s lifetime. The few I found offering this kind of service did not appear to be big enough that I would bet on their lifetime.

The best approach, putting aside cost for the moment, seems to be to host the site on two different services, with automatic synchronization between the two. This adds cost and complexity that I don’t want to deal with right now, but I’d like to add it in the future.

So it comes down to betting on one company to be the initial host. My guess is that Amazon’s AWS services are likely to be among the last hosting services standing. Their scale, in terms of the number of companies that depend on their services and the ranges of services they provide, as well as their own businesses that use the same infrastructure, is a huge strength.

Amazon’s billing however, is usage-based, so you get a bill at the end of every month and the amount varies depending on traffic. This is not a good match to our “set it and forget it” goal.

Amazon will sell you a “reserved instance” paid up to 3 years in advance, but they don’t offer longer periods than that. The service is about $200/year, when paid 3 years in advance, for what Amazon calls a t2.medium instance. So even if you could pay for 50 years, you’d be looking at a $10,000 bill. (I imagine Amazon might offer a discount for 50 years — or they may not want to commit in any way to that long a period.)

Currently, I am hosting this site at WP Engine, because of their strong support for WordPress security. They might be a great long-term host, but they don’t want prepayment for any longer than one year, and they are too small for me to depend on as a 50-year solution.

One backstop is the Internet Archive’s wayback machine, which caches much of the web periodically. This is a wonderful service, and I am delighted that it is there — but it doesn’t do a comprehensive enough job to be the primary site, or even the primary backup. For example, it doesn’t include all the images and other ancillary files.

So let’s assume we have hosting set up somewhere prepaid for a few years, and that the best we can do for the long term is to have a couple of people lined up to pay the bills, maintain the software, and find the next-generation team when they are ready to retire. Perhaps some sort of escrow account can be set up that will pay the bills in future years.

Finding the Website

If the website is going to have its own domain name, the name needs to be registered at one of the domain registrars. GoDaddy will sell you 10 years prepaid, and Network Solutions offers 25 years. So someone is going to have to pay to renew this, but not for a while.

In addition to domain name registration, someone needs to provide domain name services (DNS). Typically, this is done by the domain registrar, and they do it for free. So if the registration problem is solved, the DNS problem should be solved too.

Another option is to use a subdomain with an existing service — for example, this site could be partingthoughts.wordpress.com, instead of partingthoughts.net.

If you take this approach, however, the site is now tied to a particular hosting provider, which is an unnecessary risk. It might be useful for a backup version of the site, however.

Storing Lots of Content

I have about 100,000 photos that I have taken during my lifetime. Only a tiny fraction of them will make it up onto the web, but they will still add up to a substantial amount of disk space. When I start adding in videos, the amount of space needed will skyrocket.

Fortunately, disk space, and the services that deliver it, have continued to fall in price and increase in capacity. Cost and availability of storage is no longer a limiting factor for this sort of website unless you have vast amounts of video or other big data sets.

In the AWS world, storage is the S3 service. It gives us arbitrary amounts of space for a low price. Some redundancy is built in, and you can pay extra for more redundancy if you want even higher reliability.

Of particular interest for archival storage is Amazon’s Glacier service, which stores data offline. It is significantly less expensive than online storage, making it ideal for backups.

Character, Page, and Image Encoding

It is easy to lose sight of the fact that everything that we store, process, and deliver from our web servers is just ones and zeros — there are no alphabetic characters, no images, no audio.

All of these media types are possible because of some defined encoding of the real-world entity — such as a photo — into bits. For these files to be readable, future software needs to be able to decode them. This is typically done by the browser, so it is dependent on what future browsers support.

Choosing encodings is something we need to do once, and do it right, so that our content will have as long a life as possible.

For characters, ASCII remains the heart of standard encodings. A specific enhancement, called UTF-8, predominates on the web today and provides for encoding of a much larger character set without going to a full 16-bit character. I’m betting that browsers will be able to display UTF-8 text for a very long time to come.

Images are more complex, because it is not just a matter of encoding but also of resolution and compression. I am storing at least two versions of my photos, if they are on the web: a screen resolution version for the web, and the original file for the offline archive.

The file size difference is huge. Images on the website are typically 100 Kbytes to 1 Mbyte, while raw files from my camera are around 25 Mbytes.

For offline storage, where I want the full photo quality to be preserved, I’m saving the Canon raw files. It would be more robust, perhaps, to convert the files to Adobe’s vendor-independent Camera Raw format, but this is a project I suspect I won’t get to.

For the web, I’m betting that JPEG is going to be around for a very, very long time. The number of JPEG images in the universe today is already massive, and it is increasing at an ever-faster rate. Cameras and other capture devices may move on to new formats, but display software — such as browsers — aren’t likely to drop legacy JPEG support for as far in the future as I can glimpse.

One way to reduce the dependency on JPEG would be to use an uncompressed format, but this would dramatically increase the amount of storage required and decrease the performance of the website. I’m going to roll the dice with JPEG.

Initial Conclusions

There does not seem to be any realistic way to create a website that has a high likelihood of persisting unaided for more than a few years. But with a little help from friends, or perhaps from an escrow account, a 50-year goal is achievable with diligent effort.

You can prepay everything for 3 years and it should run unaided, as long as there are no security breaches or truly essential software upgrades. After a few years, however, someone is going to have to start paying the bills for hosting, and once every 10–25 years someone will need to renew the domain name.

If you are intrigued by the idea of creating a personal archive, I encourage you to begin by ignoring most of this article so you can focus on your content. What do you want to publish, and how do you want to present it? Then you can move on to all the issues discussed here.

The post Creating a Lasting Website as a Personal Archive appeared first on Parting Thoughts.

Sure, we’ve been there for years, depending on how you define it. But this is a big leap from anything I’ve had in decades of internet use.

I started with 1200 bit/s modems, had 256 Kbit/s ISDN for years, and have been through generations of DSL and cable broadband, starting with less than 1 Mbit/s and moving up to today’s 34 Mbit/s from Comcast.

We currently have both Comcast (cable) and Sonic (was DSL, now fiber) service. Sonic’s DSL service delivered only about 13 Mbits/s, and we used it only as a backup.

In the selected areas in which they offer it, Sonic now provides gigabit fiber service for $40/month, including a phone line. This is an awesome deal. It is the same price Sonic has been charging for DSL, which is 50 times slower, and even that is a good deal.

In 2011, Sonic ran fiber through several Sebastopol neighborhoods, but it only hooked up houses on one street. My neighborhood was left on Sonic’s “coming someday” list. Five years went by, and I was wondering if I would ever get fiber.

Now it is here! The fiber runs from the pole to my house, into the room that is my office, and terminates optically in the first of three Sonic boxes. None is a modem of any kind! Ones and zeroes just flow on through as either light or as electrical levels.

Sonic put a sign in the driveway while they were doing the work, to complement the two loudly painted Sonic trucks parked across the street.

How Fast Is It?

But is it really gigabit? Not quite, but pretty darn good: more than 700 Mbits/s download, and 100 Mbits/s upload.

That’s about 20 times the download speed of the Comcast connection. If you use the Sonic DSL service as the basis for comparison, instead of Comcast, then the speed increase is more than 50X. Either way, it is a stunning upgrade.

But Does It Matter?

As spectacular as this improvement is on paper, how much difference will it make in the real world? That remains to be seen, but some things are clear.

Independent of the speed gain, fiber should be significantly more reliable than the old phone company copper wires that Sonic leases for DSL service, or the coaxial cable network that Comcast maintains.

In terms of speed, I expect it to make a big difference to me in a few areas.

I keep all of my files synchronized to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service and/or to Dropbox. The 100 Mbit/s upload speed should make uploads go much faster when I have big files.

Ignoring all overhead, if we look just at raw, peak transfer time, 100 Mbits/s is 12.5 Mbytes/s. If I have 1 Gbyte of photos from a photo shoot, that will take about 1.3 minutes to upload. At 6 Mbits/s (Comcast upload speed), the transfer rate is 0.75 Mbytes/s, so 1 Gbyte takes 22 minutes. (Real-world figures will be lower, but we’re only looking for comparative numbers here.)

Now let’s suppose I have 100 Gbytes of photos and video from a vacation. That will take 2 hours and 13 minutes with the gigabit service, or about 37 hours with Comcast. You could upload 100 Gbytes in an evening using the gigabit service, but with Comcast you’d have to hope you could keep it going for nearly two full days.

Will Video Be Better?

In the past few years, the situation in which I most frequently experience what appears to be a bandwidth problem is when watching streaming video. The image may freeze up, get blocky, or drop to non-HD.

I’ve never been sure who to blame. It could be Netflix’s or Amazon’s servers that are providing the data, or it could be my internet connection, or it could be anything in between. We’ll soon see how much this has changed.

I remember watching a demonstration at an Intel analyst event in the early 90s, at which they showed jerky, postage-stamp-sized video on a PC screen. It did not move me at all; I thought, “who would ever want to watch video so tiny and low quality?”

It has taken almost 20 years of evolution in multiple areas, including faster processors, bigger memory chips, larger disk drives, and a much higher bandwidth internet infrastructure, but those postage-stamp videos are now movie-theater, big-screen quality, and I can stream them straight from my internet connection — a different video stream into every room in the house, if I wanted!

Bandwidth appears to have ceased to be a precious commodity, at least at my house.

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