The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the visible front of the current standards battle royale: in this corner, at 220 pounds, Open Document Format (ODF)! In the other corner, the 800 pound gorilla, Microsoft Office 12 XML format! Hopefully, we won’t get caught in the explosion.

The day my father blew himself up

I was four years old the day of the explosion. I’d like to say I remember it well, but I don’t; I don’t remember my mother’s fear, or the excitement or terror. Sometimes I think I remember my father’s absence, or staying with Grandpa while Dad was away, but I can’t be sure of those memories. The older I get, the surer I am I invented a lot of my own history.

This is all true. Dad recalls the explosion with great clarity.

It starts with a drill, a drill designed to bite holes into solid rock.

The drills were big machines, driven by air. Each drill drove a shaft of steel with a ten-pound bit on the end. As the steel made its way into the rock, the driller added another ten-foot section of steel. After much noise and dust and physical labor, the driller had made a thirty-foot hole down into solid rock. Dozens of holes made up a pit, named for the large gap in the rock left behind after the explosion turned solid rock into gravel, and the gravel was turned into road.

After drilling this particular pit, the crew fed the explosives down the holes. In one hole, Dad fed a cardboard-wrapped tube of explosive, but it didn’t slide to the bottom of the hole. He dropped another tube on top the first one, hoping to knock the first tube loose. It failed.

The two tubes of powder did their job as they exploded, breaking up solid rock and shooting brand-new jagged-edged gravel like shrapnel into the air, into my father’s head, into part of his brain

On June 18th, 1971, it was standard practice to use a wooden pole to unblock a stuck hole. They kept such poles handy. Dad prodded the stuck explosives. They did not break free.

Dad tells me, “Some folks would use the drill to ream out a clogged hole. The bit would just eat right through the powder. You lost the powder, but saved the hole.” As the holes were drilled in patterns designed to break the solid rock into gravel, each hole was important.

Sheer muscle was not going to open the hole. Dad attached the wooden pole to his drill, and used its might to push the powder down the hole.

The two tubes of powder did their job as they exploded, breaking up solid rock and shooting brand-new jagged-edged gravel like shrapnel into the air, into my father’s head, into part of his brain.

“I was following a common procedure,” Dad says to me. “These days the procedure’s a bit different.”

I can only imagine.

The importance of being standard

Standards exist for many reasons: to provide uniformity, to outline a best practice, to facilitate the sharing of information. In the computer world, the sharing of information is of paramount importance. Without acceptable standards outlining methods of information sharing, computing as we know it would not exist.

If processing power is the heart of computing, information is its soul. Without information, computers are merely the dry bones of a useless technology.

Information has economic and social worth only to the extent that it is both useful and available. A useful piece of information known to only a few can benefit only those few; worthless information known to everyone helps no-one. Beyond that, the worth of information is not universal. The fact that a wooden pole can be used to set off explosives does me very little good, but would have been quite valuable to my father.

If we are to make full use of computers, we must facilitate the sharing of information. Even the slightest inhibitor to sharing will reduce the effectiveness and eventual economic worth of our information.

Procedural standards such as the one with which Dad blew himself up are used to proscribe a safe, acceptable practice. These standards are inherently different from information-sharing standards; however, the lesson learned the day of my father’s accident are still valid.

Drilling right-of-way in Southeast Alaska

Not everything that is labelled a standard is safe. Sometimes the cost of following a standard is higher than we might imagine.

Dad says to me, “DuPont claimed there was no way a wooden pole could set off that powder. They didn’t believe me until they went out to the pit and saw the pole in the middle of the crater.”

The first standard

Some standards seem almost axiomatic. ASCII is perhaps the best-known of all computer standards, one of the oldest, and one we take for granted.

The most fundamental aspect of information sharing is the representation of the building blocks of information. In the early 1960s, that meant choosing a method to encode individual characters. Until that time, there was no universal standard for sharing information between computers.

And now, a history lesson:

Alfred Vail invented Morse code before 1844. This was one of the first electronic character encoding schemes, and certainly the first to gain widespread acceptance. As telegraphy equipment evolved, so did the encoding schemes—from Baudot’s code thirty years later, through Murray’s code around the turn of the century, to ITA2 in the 1930s and the U.S. Army’s FIELDATA in the late 1950s. Each of these codes contributed to the development of serial data communication by providing an encoding standard for the Roman alphabet, along with transmission control codes. [1]

By 1963, the American Standards Association produced a new character encoding format, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). The X3.4 committee, which produced the ASCII-1963 standard, was composed of representatives from the computing industry, including AT&T and IBM.

Virtually every computer today uses ASCII

ASCII is a 7-bit (not 8-bit, as is often assumed) encoding scheme, based on the serial communications encoding schemes that came before. The telegraphy coding solutions from the prior 100 years of work provided the solution to an emerging computer problem.