January 26, 2003
Urbana, Illlinois: Center of the Universe?
If you look around in the town where I live, you start to notice something. There seems to be a confluence of some sort that occurs here. A lot of it is related to the University of Illinois, but still, the influences seem to be particularly strong here. Examples? OK.
Take computers. Or more specifically, computer software. Eudora was written at the U of I. Mosaic, which became Netscape, was written at NCSA at the U of I. Apache is based on NCSA HTTPD server code. Mathematica is located here. Ray Ozzie, who is the man behind Lotus Notes, attended the U of I. One of the coders for Napster lives here. Hell, the man that wrote Flight Simulator lived here when he did it, and now lives in the countryside around here.
Now, what about creative writing? Well, David Foster Wallace grew up in Urbana. I attended high school with him. Richard Powers has lived here for quite a while, extending his original academic stay when he would be able to go anywhere. And Neal Stephenson even lived here when he was a small boy, and still gets membership in the Midwestern Writers Mafia since when his parents moved from here they went to Ames, IA.
Computer Hardware? John Bardeen. End of story. Or beginning of story, but either way, a hell of a story. The inventor of the blue laser attended grad school here, before going on to PARC. Arthur C. Clarke had the HAL9000 computer being built in Urbana.
This is a map of the internet, then arpanet, from Sept. 1971.
Guess where that little dot marked Illinois is located?
It's weird little place. I remember an article published in the San Jose Mercury News about a guy just getting his public financing to start his new company, and how as a kid growing up in Urbana he used to disassemble phones all the time. I wrote a note to the author, relating all the other tales of beginnings from Urbana. He wrote me back, to relate that he himself was a graduate of the University of Illinois.
I have no idea what it is about the place, but something is almost always starting here, to be delivered to the outside world. Like I said, a weird confluence of some sort.