Honorable Mentions of Mobile Computing

    Like the devices, I was fond of a few mobile entrepreneurs. I devoured Jerry Kaplan’s book, Startup, on his failed pen computing company. At the time, most observers thought the next big thing would be writing with a stylus on a pocket-sized PC. Kaplan clearly had fun writing his book and giving Microsoft a jab for copying some of his company’s ideas.

Jeff Hawkins (above) was my favorite mobile pioneer. He seemed more like an Iowa farm hand than a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. A lanky, animated guy with a shock of blonde hair, contrarian opinions on everything and a passion for new product concepts, Jeff made for a great and candid interview. He loved few things more than holding forth on his latest idea or gadget. He once described himself as “a product guy…My value is trying to figure out how to get the next thing going.”

Before I met him, Jeff had designed one of the first tablets, the Grid Pad, that had minor commercial success, as well as the Palm Pilot (pictured), the best-selling member of a challenged category of super-organizers like the Palmtop PCs. 

In the days when folks still believed handwriting recognition might work, he developed Graffiti, a set of simplified characters people could quickly jot with a stylus to speed the job of getting digital text into a PDA. For a short time, Jeff’s modern form of hieroglyphics had a small following.

In 2003, he debuted an early smartphone, the Treo 600. It looked like an HP iPAQ handheld computer and had a built-in cellular phone. But arriving on the heels of the popular Research in Motion Blackberry, the Treo never got much traction.

I interviewed Jeff in 2007 just after the iPhone was announced. He was mainly a big-hearted guy, but he seemed a bit sour as he poured cold water on Apple’s work and its outlook. “They’re going to discover it’s really hard to make a great device for voice,” he said recounting tech challenges he overcame.

Then he launched a rant on the sorry state of the cellular industry. At the time carriers exerted huge control over mobile devices and their so-called walled gardens, the limited network services they could access.

“We can't build the products we want to build, charge for them what we want and add the services we want. It's just a really broken system,” he told me.

“We have all these carriers, each one has their own idea of what a smartphone should be, what the technical specs should be, and what e-mail and the Web-browsing experiences should be.

“It's very complex and daunting. We have chip makers like Qualcomm or the GSM guys who control their deals and have their own ideas,” about software for them, and cellular networks came in many different flavors, each requiring detailed engineering work.

“We have to make 20 little teams, one for every carrier. That's an obstacle in general for moving the market forward. It slows things down so that people can't innovate,” he said.

I loved his candor, but I was also glad when our conversation wandered off topic and the more upbeat Jeff returned. He said something about climbing up Half Dome, Yosemite’s iconic peak, with his daughter. I loved the park and took my kids there several times but never attempted the 12+ hour hike that ends with a famously rickety wire ladder up the near-vertical rock face where some climbers start to lose courage. For a few minutes, we were just two Silicon Valley dudes swapping tales.

About the time folks forgot about the Treo, Jeff returned on the scene talking about his greatest passion yet—neuroscience.

So far, he's published two books with thoughts about how the neocortex works, insights that, once refined, he thought would radically change computer design. It was both compelling and a bit half-baked, but he sold it with a double dose of his usual enthusiasm in talks and interviews. And it was not just an exercise in theory. Jeff launched a small research institute to flesh out the concepts and lay the foundations for brain-like computers.

“I felt that if you understood how the human brain works you could build machines that work the same way, and they could do things humans could do, like recognize speech,” he said in a 2005 interview.

He foreshadowed claims Sundar Pinchai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would make more than a decade later about another branch of machine learning, deep learning, the technology we now generically call AI.

“As always in technology, when you come out with a whole new computing paradigm, it will blossom into a gazillion things people never thought of before,” Hawkins said. “People who invented the transistor and microprocessor had no idea what was going to come from it. This [brain theory algorithm] is going to be bigger than all that stuff, I promise you. It is the ultimate way of information processing. It's a fundamental capability that has so many ways of extending what we do as humans that it will be incredible. It will be right up there with the invention of the digital computer and electricity. It will transform our lives in a major way.”

I was not the only one enchanted once again by his boyish energy. Organizers of ISSCC, one of the lead conferences for engineers who design chips, a group known for its skepticism and technical chops, asked him to deliver a keynote on his work in 2008.

In the talk, he described algorithms still in development that could greatly advance work in areas such as computer vision. “I think this is going to have an enormous impact on semiconductors,” Hawkins said.

In a brief 2013 encounter, I heard how he released some of his work in the form of open-source software.  But as far as I could tell it never got significant traction.

Jeff was among a small crowd of researchers bent on the idea of understanding the brain as the door to a new age of computing. But the proponents of that path made little headway compared to those who simply experimented with diverse, complex algorithms.

When what became deep learning emerged from the labs about 2010 showing amazing results, it had little to do with any specific breakthroughs in understanding human cognition. Once again, Jeff had labored on the bleeding edge of a major tech shift only to see others make the winning contributions. His intuition was always strong, but his execution somehow missed the mark. In some ways, that only made me fonder of him, especially compared to his more aloof rivals, like Jobs, who hit digital paydirt.

Next: Building A Bridge to the Sky