June 11, 1989

MY CURIOSITY IS KILLING ME: I predict the new monthly magazine for Silicon Valley, called Upside, will make big waves with its premier issue, scheduled for mid-July. Co-publisher Tony Perkins says it contains an investigative piece on one of the largest venture capital firms in the Valley.

Managing editor Nancy Rutter (a self-described “pit bull” of a journalist), is the author of the piece. She says that not one of the firm’s partners would consent to an interview and that one even bawled her out, telling her it was “passe” to write a story about a company that didn’t cooperate with an investigation. “I apologized to him for breaching Silicon Valley etiquette,” she said, “but, I told him, I’m a reporter.”

Sadly typical of the male-dominated Valley, Upside’s original promotional material gave a reader profile of “The Upside Man: successful, aggressive, intellectual, adventurous…” Perkins says “about a million people” gave him grief for the sexist plug, so he changed it to The Upside Persona.

“I think of Maggie Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick as Upside Men,” says Perkins, by way of explanation.

(Cough.) I’ll just leave it at that.

PLAY IT LEGATO: A few years ago, visionary engineers at Sun Microsystems Inc. made computer networking easier by designing NFS, or Network File System. NFS was a big deal back then because it allowed machines by different vendors to share information over a network AND Sun basically gave it away.

Now almost everybody uses NFS, but it has the same problem that older IBM/clones have. The installed base is so big, it is hard to make it state-of-the-art again without making it obsolete.
This week a group of longtime Sun engineers will unveil a new company they peeled off nine months ago to solve the problems with NFS. Called Legato Systems Inc. (the musical term means “smoothly connected”), its mission is to “improve and simplify network computing.”

The founder lineup is impressive. Bob Lyon and Russel Sandberg were key in developing and implementing NFS at Sun; Jonathan Kepecs and Joe Moran played important roles in developing different parts of Sun’s much-praised operating system.

Legato’s first product is PrestoServe, a circuit board and software that shoulders much of the network’s operational load. Legato says it improves network performance from 50 to 600 percent.
Legato’s founders are planning a slew of products that work with Unix, MVS, VMS, MS-DOS and the Macintosh operating system. They say it was time to leave Sun because networking is taking on such global importance. “Now that we’re freed from (Sun’s) technology, we don’t have to worry about things like the next SPARC chip,” Lyon, Legato’s VP of engineering, says. “We have a broader view because we’re unencumbered by platform or operating system.”

NANO NANO: Nanotechnology doesn’t really exist, but when it does it will give new meaning to Steve Martin’s old adage, “Let’s get small.” Eric Drexler is the Los Altos scientist who coined the term in his book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. An upcoming British documentary may be the vehicle that brings Drexler’s ideas to the masses.

Nanotech is the making of molecule-sized machines. These machines, capable of rearranging the building blocks of the physical world — atoms — will allow us to restructure the physical world in various and sundry ways.

For example: the main difference between graphite (pencil lead) and diamond is the distance between their carbon molecules. Diamonds are tightly bound, making them very strong. If we redesigned the Golden Gate Bridge using nanotech, Drexler believes we could spin diamond rope from relatively inexpensive materials and use it in place of the huge, heavy and weak (compared to diamond) steel cable in place today.

David Kennard, director and/or producer of many distinguished TV documentaries (including episodes of The Ascent of Man and Cosmos), was filming at Drexler’s home last week and will visit nanotech researchers in Boston and Europe in preparation for a one-hour special to air on British TV in September.

Drexler’s ideas are controversial because many people are afraid of a nanotech future. But he’s certain molecular machines are inevitable because the concept breaks no laws of physics as they’re known today. “I’m not talking about new research from the lab,” Drexler says. “I’m trying to explain the long-term consequences of research that’s going on already.”