Product System

5 PRODUCT SYSTEM INTRODUCTION We have noted that a new economic functional system is constructed from the new high-tech products of the new technology. We have also seen that technologies are a kind of system and emphasized that invention of the technology system is the first part of innovation. The second part of innovation, commercialization, occurs by de- signing the new technology into new products (or services or operations). Now we look at high-tech products, and we will see how products, too, are systems. As the idea of a technology system is fundamental to innovation theory, so is the idea of a product system. But there is an important difference between them. A technology system is knowledge, and a product system is a utility. The knowledge of a technology is embodied in the design of a useful product. We will review the idea of a product as a system, including the basic ideas of: product architecture and com- plexity and the differing roles of technology in product, service, production, and operations systems. As an example of a product system, we use the case of the computer. It makes an interesting illustration, since the technology in a computer is complex in both physical morphology and schematic logic. First we look at the invention of the electronic computer and then we look at the design of an early computer product, the PDP-8 minicomputer. CASE STUDY: F Invention of the Computer Like the ancient invention of iron, the computer was one of those great inventions that change human civilization—an invention of mythic scale—a Promethean invention. Prometheus was a titan in ancient Greek mythology to whom the Greeks ascribed the invention of the technology of fire as a gift to humans. The ancient Greeks thought the gift of fire so valuable—and so godlike in power—that they imagined that Prometheus was punished for his gift. The angry gods chained 85 86 PRODUCT SYSTEM Prometheus to a mountain, to be exposed eternally to the harshness of weather, blasts of lightning, and the flesh-tearing beaks of vultures. Fascination with the power of technology has long been a part of human culture. The computer changed the mythic power of humanity to acquire and process information. Central to its invention were five people: von Neumann, Goedel, Turing, Mauchly, and Eckert (Heppenheimer, 1990), each of whom came to a tragic end. John von Neumann was born in Hungary in 1903, the son of a Budapest banker. He was precocious; at the age of 6 he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and talk with his father in ancient Greek. At 8 years of age, he began learning calculus. He had a photographic memory; he could take a page of the Budapest phone directory, read it, and recite it back from memory. When it was time for university training, he went to study in Germany under a great mathematician, David Hilbert. Hilbert believed that all the diverse topics in mathematics could be established on self-consistent and self-contained intellectual foundations. In a famous address in 1900, Hilbert expressed his position: “Every mathematical problem can be solved. We are all convinced of that. After all, one of the things that attracts us most when we apply ourselves to a mathematical problem is precisely, that within us we always hear the call: here is the problem, search for the solu- tion; one can find it by pure thought, for in mathematics there is no ignorabimus (we will not know)” (Heppenheimer, 1990, p. 8). As a graduate student, von Neumann worked on the problem of mathematical foundations. But in 1931, Kurt Goedel’s famous papers were published, arguing that no foundation of mathematics could be constructed wholly self-contained. If one tried to provide a self-contained foundation, one could always devise mathematical statements that were formally undecidable within that foundation (inca- pable of being proved or disproved purely within the foundational framework). This disturbed von Neumann, as it did all other mathematicians of the time. But Goedel also introduced an interesting notation in which any series of mathematical statements or equations could be encoded as numbers. This notation would later turn out to be a central idea for von Neumann’s vision of a stored program computer. All mathematical statements, logical expressions as well as data, could be expressed as numerically encoded instructions. However, the first person to take up this idea was not von Neumann but Alan Turing. Turing was a 25-year-old graduate student at Cambridge University when he published his seminal paper, “On Computable Numbers,” in 1937. He had used Goedel’s idea for expressing a series of mathematical statements in sequential numbering, Turning proposed an idealized machine that could do mathematical computations. A series of mathematical steps could be expressed in the form of coded instructions on a long paper tape. The machine would execute these instructions in sequence as the paper tape was read. His idea was later to be called a Turing machine. Turing had described the key idea for what would later become a general-purpose programmable computer. Although many people had thought of and devised calculating devices, these had to be instructed externally or could solve only a specific type of problem. A machine that could be instructed gener- ally to solve any kind of mathematical problem had not yet been built. INTRODUCTION 87 Back to von Neumann. After finishing his graduate studies in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Princeton Uni- versity in 1930. There Turing’s and von Neumann’s paths crossed temporarily when, in 1936, Turing came to Princeton to do his graduate work. He was think- ing about the problem of his idealized machine (which he would soon publish), and he worked with von Neumann, exposing von Neumann to his ideas. Von Neu- mann offered Turing a position as an assistant after Turing received his doctor- ate. But Turing chose to return to Cambridge where in the following year, he published his famous paper. So Turing’s ideas were in the back of von Neumann’s mind. But meanwhile, war was to intervene, beginning with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. During that war, Turing went into England’s secret code-breaking project and helped construct a large electronic computer to break enemy codes. Called the Colossus, it began operating in 1943, but it was a single-purpose computational machine (Zorpette, 1987). At the same time in the United States, von Neumann was involved in the Man- hattan Project, to create the atomic bomb. Earlier at Princeton, von Neumann had been exploring the mathematics of problems in fluid flow. In the design of one of the atomic bombs, it was proposed to place a sphere of dynamite around pie- shaped wedges of plutonium. When the dynamite exploded, the wedges were in- tended to be blown together into a small sphere (slightly smaller than a soccer ball). This plutonium sphere would then undergo the violent nuclear chain reac- tion of an atomic explosion. Von Neumann designed the dynamite trigger for this bomb, called the “Fat Man” version of the atomic bomb. The trigger problem was: To precisely what thickness should the dynamite around the wedges of plutonium be formed so that they would all be blown in at the same time? To design this, one had to calculate the physical form of the shock waves from the dynamite explosion that would push the plutonium wedges in- ward. It was a flow type of mathematical problem, and von Neumann would be just the one to calculate it. But it was a tough problem because of the accuracy required in describing the shock waves. To do it, von Neumann and a colleague at Los Alamos, Stanislaw Ulam, devised a kind of human computing system. They had one of their colleagues, Stanley Frankel, devise a lengthy sequence of computational steps that could be carried out on mechanical calculating machines made by IBM. Frankel then had a large number of Army enlistees running these steps on the calculating machines. It was a slow kind of human computer, but it worked. von Neumann got the solutions he needed to design the explosives for the Fat Man. The Fat Man bomb was the second atomic bomb to be exploded. It was dropped on Nagasaki, killing more than 100,000 Japanese. This technical challenge taught von Neumann an important lesson, the need for a general- purpose computer. (Afterward, one of von Neumann’s favorite events was ob- serving atom bomb tests, and exposure to radiation may have been the cause of von Neumann’s fatal tumor.) One day in August 1944 (before the atomic bombs were dropped), von Neu- mann had gone to the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland on a 88 PRODUCT SYSTEM consulting assignment. Afterward, he waited at the station for a train. On the same platform happened to be Lt. Herman Goldstine (who before the war had taught mathematics at the University of Michigan). He recognized von Neumann, already a world-famous mathematician. Goldstine introduced himself. Personally, von Neumann was a warm, pleasant man. He chatted amiably with Goldstine, ask- ing him about his work. Later Goldstine said of the meeting: “ ‘When it became clear to von Neumann that I was concerned with the development of an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second, the whole atmosphere changed from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for a doctor’s degree in mathematics.’ ” (Heppenheimer, 1990, p.

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