 The beginning of the 21st century, the Earth needed to find a new way to keep up with the data from over 30 billion connected devices. Just 30 billion. A bold group of researchers and computer scientists in Silicon Valley had a breakthrough. They called the machine. It changed computing forever and it's been part of every new technology for the last 250 years. Everything? Everything. This year, human-packer enterprise will preview the machine and accelerate the future. Sea Star Trek Beyond. Good afternoon. That's a pretty cool video and the machine is pretty awesome. A new kind of physics for computation and data storage. Very, very dense, very, very fast, very, very energy efficient, very, very agile. One of the cool things that I find most impressive about the machine is that it runs Linux with all the various new magic that it provides accessible with open source software, open source demons, open source libraries, all of which are available publicly on Git repositories already. Why did we do it that way? Well, because a new kind of computer and a new kind of computer architecture is pointless if it's not used and the best way to promote the use of any sort of new technology is to make it open source. I recommend, let me jump forward. Sorry about that. If you have any technical questions about the machine that you go watch Grant Likely and Keith Packard's presentations on YouTube, they answer all the questions you might have. If you have any additional questions, we are always looking for more people to work on the machine. But now that I'm done talking about the machine and you can all download these slides after the fact, I want to talk about Star Trek. How many of you grew up watching Star Trek? Most of you. I'm going to talk about Star Trek and the history of science fiction and what I like to call the conversation. First of all, I need to apologize. My knowledge of this history is very U.S. centric, mainly because I don't know the history of science fiction in Europe. This year, Linux turned 25. Star Trek turned 50. And genre science fiction turned 90. Let's take a look back to the early 20th century. At the time, high technology meant vacuum tubes and it meant wireless radio. That particular field was full of hobbyists, people who were passionately engaged, building all sorts of new things. Today we would call them makers. They were building on each other's ideas. They were exploring the new physics that were available to them. And they were finding each other through the medium of mass-market sheet magazines printed on cheap pulp paper, pulps, they were called. Now, radio is subject to Metcalf's Law. Who knows what Metcalf's Law is? One or two hands. Metcalf's Law says the value of a network increases faster than linear for each node you add to the network. So the more people who got involved in radio, the more valuable radio became for everybody. And that was the start of the conversation. One of the people involved back then was a man named Hugo Gernsback who was born in Luxembourg and then he moved to the United States to New York City. And he was a publisher of the technology pulps for radio and wireless. And he also operated a broadcast radio station called WRNY Radio New York. And that was a technology test bed for radio, for wireless, and for electronics. In his magazines he published plans for receivers to receive the new test signals coming out of his transmitter. Many of the articles in his magazines consisted of people taking plans that had been published earlier or published in other places, analyzing them, taking them apart, putting them back together, new and better and different. Sounds kind of familiar, right? Open source, the conversation. And he published a letters column. People would write letters responding to articles that had been written, responding to previous letters, and also talk about subjects of interest to people involved in the electronics and radio amateur community. Hugo would edit those letters, he would publish them, and then people would read them and respond again. He had basically created a moderated discussion forum with a one month cycle time. And as we all know how these things work, the forum created a community and that community drove the technology once again, the conversation. Let's take another look at WRNY. It was one of the very first broadcast stations in the world to do regularly scheduled programming. And it was also one of the very first radio stations in the world to publish episodic fiction. And one of the technology tests that they ran was vision over radio, television. Hugo also loved the writings of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, kind of the great-grandfathers of science fiction out of the United Kingdom and out of France. And he tried to write his own fiction. He was terrible. I've read some of his stories and they're some of the worst I've ever read. But they were of a new genre about how technology could change the world for the better. In 1926, he started a new magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. And he created the genre of science fiction doing so and also created science fiction fandom. His magazine was run the same way. He would publish stories and then later issues. He would publish stories that were written in response to earlier stories. Ideas built on ideas. A very early story had the concept of the ray gun and spent an entire page in boring detail talking about what a ray gun might be. Later stories could just say that the character had a ray gun at his hip and wouldn't have to spend the page describing the same thing. Ideas built on ideas, trope upon trope, concept on concept. And again, he had Letters' Column. Letters' Column practically took over the magazine. People would write, people would read, people would respond. He would publish them all. Creating another community around a brand new genre and a new way of seeing the world. The people in that community gathered together in 1939 for the world's first world science fiction convention. And the way that convention was organized was almost completely unlike what had happened before. It was very much unlike the learned symposiums of the centuries past or of the political conventions for which it was named. The way that convention was organized echoed forward through time and laid out the structure for nearly all the kinds of technical conventions and literary conventions from that point forward, including the conference we're here at today. The main difference from WorldCon and going forward was that most of the value in going was meeting the people like yourself. Again, the conversation. Let's keep looking at 1939. In 1939, on the other coast of North America in California, two men who had grown up reading those technology pulps and reading those science fiction pulps founded a company. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packert founded HP out of their garage in Palo Alto. And that's the company I work for today. HP, by coming into existence, helped create the very idea of Silicon Valley, helped create the very idea of the technology startup, and helped create the very idea of the engineering-focused technology company. Around the same time and for a few decades afterwards, there was another young man. And he read those tech pulps and he read those science fiction pulps. And he also read the related genres of aviation adventures and exploration adventures. And he had an amazing life story, which I'm not going to go into now, in part because it sounds almost impossible, all the things that he did. But he came out of and entered his middle adulthood with a love of science fiction, a lived experience of ordinary heroism, and almost naive idealism in the improvement of the world and improvement of people. And that man was Gene Roddenberry, and he created Star Trek. Let's look back at technology again. Radio and analog electronics flowered into digital computers. Again, digital computers improved at almost an impossible rate, mainly because all the people involved would look at what had been done last year, last month, last week, take advantage of the new physics that are made available to them. They would take existing ideas and take them apart and prove on them and release new products. Or they would take the new technology that was being made available new each week and use it as a component for what they were building on top of that. And Hewlett Packard was there at the heart of that, building electronic test systems, building all the various parts and components that were necessary and all the tools that were needed to build those digital computers. Improvement on improvement. Again, the conversation. In the early days of computers, someone came up with the funny word software, and it was a joke. It was a funny neologism. But it turns out that software was the most important part. And software improved the same way. The people who knew how to write software could read what happened before, could read what was out then, they would take the ideas apart, they would improve on them, and then they would run new versions on the newer, faster machines that are available each month, each year. That conversation was threatened, and we all know that story. Some people saw that threat, they worked to counter it, and that flowered into the early and the history of free software and open source, which I won't dig into now because we all know that story. But the people who drove radio and analog electronics, the people who founded the technology startups, the people who went to work for the technology companies, the people who worked in the government labs and the corporate labs, the people who write the software, the people who created open source all the way to us now today. Our conversation reaches back to Hugo and his pulps, and it reaches back to Gene and his vision and his television show. Science fiction is a way to have a conversation about the kind of world that we can make, the kind of world that can be made of the technology that we have and that we're building, and the world that we can make out of our various ideas for organizing people. Our world will not look like this video. Our world will not look like the United Federation of Planets. It will not look like Star Trek. But it will look like what it will end up looking like, because of Hugo, because of Gene, because of companies like Hewlett Packard, because of the conversation, and because of Star Trek. Thank you very much.