For the last few years of the 90s I managed a web site which for some reason I called cipx.net – Carrier IP Xchange (IP is Internet Protocol not Intellectual Property!). The site was an attempt to get to grips the phenomenal number of companies supplying the communications community with IP equipment and software. It was also an attempt to categorise them so that I could understand which companies operated in a particular market sector. It was also useful to see who the existing competition was for a start-up.

This proved to be a rather difficult exercise as companies had a propensity to not define what they did too tightly on their web sites, an approach that we still see today. You can easily speculate as to why this should be!

In those days, many companies were not even supplying IP based stuff as they had still not recognised the tsunami nature of this new IT derived protocol. This web site eventually totalled many hundreds if not thousands of companies with all the technology bubble start-ups. It certainly felt that way in the optical / photonic sector!

I’ve recently decided to resurrect this site on TechnolgySpectra but it’s proving to be an interesting challenge that will take me a few months to complete I suspect.

It’s not only that I needed to get rid of just Enron by going through each and every link, but hundreds of other companies that I can categorise as follows:

• Companies that are still operating as an independent operation
• Companies that have merged – several times sometimes!
• Companies whose domain cannot be found
• Companies whose domains are now held by 3rd party and advertising God knows what.

I even had half a dozen stealth companies in the “What do they do” section but I’ll never know what as all the URLs bounced.

Also, some of the categories have a folklore sort of feel to them such as ASP services, eStore, eTailers, catalogue shopfronts, terabit switching (BTW, I noticed that the 1st terabit HD was announced yesterday), bandwidth exchanges and WAP. I guess these all need updating over time.

It’s not only companies that are affected but forums as well. I do have to smile to see that the ATM forum is now the MFA Forum and looks at MPLS, Frame Relay and ATM technologies! All those years of telling everyone that ATM was dead! Now, what was Bill Gates favourite saying?

This is going to take me some time!

Thinking about Dr Pinkerton made my unruly mind reminisce about the many individuals that have really helped me at certain critical times in my working life. Sometimes they have done this knowingly, but I guess mostly not.

I’m a great believer in picking other people’s brains as much as possible and using this gained knowledge to modify my world view (if required!) or help me take that next practical step forward.

It’s not so much facts and information that I look for, though that is exceptionally useful, but more in the area of views and opinions gained through raw experience at many coal faces. It’s funny really, but I’ve always found that many of the best opinions to listen to come from those individuals that have failed or had a bad experience in a particular venture or activity.

I’ve always found that moving job to a completely different market requires the most reliance on learning through talking and listening. Unfortunately, in this new connected world we live in, there is usually no time to learn basics when taking on a new leadership role. You are expected to be up and running from day one and know exactly where you are running to. I could never recommend becoming a CEO in an alien industry where you could not rely on your own experience for guidance.

One of my biggest changes came when I left the semiconductor industry to join the telecommunications industry. By the way, this was one of the best career moves I made, though the last few years have shaken that view I tiny bit. What did I know about telecoms technologies and businesses? Simply nothing. Before I made the move, I went into a blitz of discussions to try and find out what such things as SDH and ATM were. You don’t know? Shame on you! Well, SDH is Synchronous Digital Hierarchy. How could I forget that ATM is Asynchronous Transfer Mode. More on these later in this blog I’m sure.

Ummm? I now wonder what made those two particular TLAs pop into my head? Maybe it was because both of these technologies are on their way out after being the seen as the golden network technologies of the mid 1990s. I digress again!

However, SDH does lead me onto PDH, SDH’s technology predecessor. This in turn, reminds me of several individuals who helped me with that big transition to the telecommunications world.

When I joined Cable and Wireless nearly 15 years ago, I was one of those many IT people who were creeping into the industry and who knew little about the 150 years of history, technology development and standards that made the industry what it was. I was so, so, ignorant, I’m ashamed to say.

In those days C&W employed many engineers known as ‘F1s’. These marvellous people joined the company from school and were shipped out to the colonies on the whim of the management to run the local ‘stations’. These guys, were thrown into the middle of jungles and local wars and were expected to get services up and running and manage everything from digging trenches (well maybe not), commissioning satellite and terrestrial systems, negotiating with the local government and managing the local business – profitably of course. Boy, were they the real experts! A good read would be Voices Over the Horizon: Tales from Cable and Wireless.

I remember so well writing a strategy paper about SDH and I needed to know what PDH was all about (mountains seemed to be a pertinent word in the PDH world I seem to remember). I went around many departments trying to get a clear definition and understanding of what the limitations of PDH were. With little success I might say. OK, I’ll put you out of your misery, PDH stands for Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (BTW, I’m sure this term was invented after SDH was defined to describe a legacy technology). This was my first exposure to an F1 and I guess that I practically lived in their pockets for the next few months. I needed to, as many that I met were just about to retire!

Another interesting fact was that these ‘old timers’ (not from an age, but experience perspective) were very open in their attitudes and accepted new services and technologies such as the Internet with great ease. Indeed they welcomed them with open arms! I didn’t necessarily find that in other quarters where it seemed to me that the principle aim was to preserve the status quo of legacy services because they felt threatened. This was particularly the case with IP. NO please, come on, not intellectual property, Internet Protocol.

I learnt such a lot from those guys and would definitely buy them a few beers any day and reminisce. Of course, this would preferably be on some pleasant Caribbean island like Antigua or Barbados with a large tumbler of rum in my hand. However, the Falkland Islands or Ascension Island would be just as pleasant. But, that is another story.

Thank you F1s for taking the time to educate me. I have never forgotten what I learnt.

I am surprised at some of the opportunities I have missed over the years and I sometimes wish I could turn the clock back. We come across so many people in our day-to-day lives that we could learn from if only we realised or took the trouble to find out. This is especially so in our youth. Missing an opportunity then means possibly missing out for ever, as our older colleagues pass on.

I only recently realised that I missed a major opportunity to learn from my officially allocated mentor in ICL in 1969.

I joined ICL’s Advanced Research and Development Laboratories in Stevenage in 1969 and was allocated a mentor when I was in a year in industry as a part of my Physical Electronics thick sandwich degree course. That mentor was Dr John Pinkerton. I remember meeting Dr Pinkerton many times and indeed, he was one of my proposers for becoming a Fellow of the IEE in the mid 1986.

In a bored moment over the Christmas break, after rummaging around in my attic and came across a bunch of old line-printer papers, I used Google to search for Dr Pinkerton only to disappointedly find that he passed-on on December 22, 1997. The full document contained an excellent photograph of him sitting at his desk in ICL’s HQ in Putney. He was exactly as I remembered him and it turns out he was about my current age when he mentored me in those far off days.

It was then that I read that Dr Pinkerton was the project leader at Lyons that resulted in him designing and developing the world’s first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office or ‘LEO’. Wow!

Did I know this at the time and I had just forgotten? To be honest I am not sure that I did. In those paper-tape, main-frame oriented days we didn’t have Google to undertake research.

I would love to meet up with him today. The stories he could tell about his war time radar research and ask questions about what must have been those fabulous pioneering days of developing LEO.

Missing opportunities? Please don’t…