Youthful Reminisces II

I'm continuing to collect images and memories "retrieved" from the recent trip to Hualien (see Youthful Reminisces). I started writing this post on March 16, 2019.

Most of the documents included are from a time period in my rearing when I began to explore possible career options and interests, in some way setting the path to where I am today.

BitSmart: Ron Huang, Ted Way, Me, My Mother, Albert Lin, Helios Yu. [see an older, rambling article here]

During my high school years (1995-1998), the Internet with hypertext html was beginning to develop rapidly. For those of us that played around with computers, we were already using messaging programs (ICQ later AIM), text based email (Eudora, pine) and bulletin board systems (ptt.cc). Developing webpages was, for me at least, a neat idea and way to write and record a little something about myself. In particular, webpages were not just text based, rather a key component that made the internet fun for me was the ability to insert images and photos easily, and by hyperlinking, share those images on webpages. The knowledge that such webpages would be "online" if hosted from a working IP address and available to view by anyone with the link was certainly also an important appeal for youngsters like myself. In that spirit, I organized a group of like minded classmates to start a computer club. BitSmart (a name I came up with for the club) was started by five of us: Ron Huang, Ted Way, Albert Lin, Helios Yu and myself, all in high school at the National Experimental High School in the Science Based Industrial Park in Hsinchu, Taiwan (now known as the IBSH). I still remember Ron creating a Kansas City Chief's fanpage (I wrote about it here years ago), as well as coding NTHU's Materials Science Center test page (and getting paid for it). Albert and Helios were into running servers, and I still remember them compiling Redhat/Apache Linux for the first time on newly purchased server hardware (I wonder if the machine is still around at our high school?). This server hosted our (seems now defunct) website, bitsmart.nehs.hc.edu.tw and others.

The original webpage for the National Experimental High School in the Science Based Industrial Park in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Internet related activities were abuzz at our high school and also the neighboring universities and companies. Hsinchu, Taiwan is unique in that it is the host city to two national universities and a nationally governed science park. My mother, Gretchen Tang 唐慧睛, was the teacher spearheading efforts to teach computer science at our school. We attended a conference on Youth and the Web (青少年網路文化研討會), held on June 29, 1997, to highlight some of our activities at NEHS and BitSmart, see the photo of the six of us above. During this time in high school I remember having lots of (and I still do) wacky business ideas, such as opening Internet Cafes (網路咖啡店). I also remember lamenting to my parents that we didn't have enough funds to do anything about it! Notably, Internet Cafes are also mentioned in a somewhat biography, Hero Alone, of one of my favorite artists as a youth, Chen Uen. Interestingly, www.books.com.tw was started in 1995 (I can't seem to find a wikipedia page about site histories).

The conference on Youth and the Web (June 29, 1997) my mother 唐慧睛 and several of us from BitSmart attended.

A slide from a talk that I gave, along with my mother.

My mom's talk title and additional slides.

Books.com.tw is a pretty nice web address. I remember also thinking at the time about web "real estate" or usernames at online services (hotmail, rocketmail) and how being first to grab catchy names might bring riches (you know, park a web address and hope someone wants to buy it from you, stuff like that). It seemed at the time that web real estate was akin to the wild wild west of America's cowboy era, with hopes and dreams, gold rushes, as well as sketchy characters! These days web addresses are proliferating, beyond the .com's, .org's, so I wonder what's next. Will we have .頁, for example, some day?

At the time, I set up my own simple html based webpages and hosting directly from machines I controlled (my attention to virus and trojan software would come later), with Microsoft personal web server for example, and then finding ways to link the IP to urls. Alternative approaches were also available, such as with Geocities, an early web page hosting service. [Note added: I recall one of my classmates, George Lee, setting up Geocities sites. A search online still reveals some interesting pages, such as this one on human powered vehicles!] The first approach required more play with the computer hardware and software (the backbones so to speak), while the second approach focused on getting content onto the web.

Mom's notes page 1 of 4.

Mom's notes page 2 of 4.

Mom's notes page 3 of 4.

Mom's notes page 4 of 4.

These days as large portions of online connectivity has migrated from the desktop to the smart phone, I wonder where things will go next? In between this evolution of sharing text and images on webpages became sharing music, games, flash animations then videos. This trend continues with smart phone apps and in app sharing, though in my mind, we haven't seen the end of the desktop (or workstation or server for that matter), yet.

In addition to spending time in the computer lab at school, I also scooted around my Dad's laboratory, at NTHU at the time. My father, Maw-kuen Wu 吳茂昆, headed the superconductivity and materials laboratory, and was also Director of the Materials Science Center (材料中心) at NTHU from 1995-1998.

Equipment and other items from Dad's 吳茂昆 lab at the Materials Science Center based in the National Tsinghua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Some more scientific equipment from Dad's lab.

Photos of a pretty large laboratory space with lots of useful machines, and my foot in socks.

A photo of a couple more photos of machinery and computers, what for I can only imagine.

I had early exposure to some of the fascinating developments in superconductors (at NTHU, Columbia University in New York and also at University of Alabama in Huntsville). In particular my father's discovery of 90 K superconductivity in YBaCuO is well documented. In Huntsville I recall being in my dad's lab when an air force or marine general (dressed impeccably in military attire) came to visit, and apparently offer straight up research funding. I was very young then, and mostly only understood that liquid nitrogen was extremely cold (and the helium level measurement stick could hurt if used as a whip). Our family moved to Taiwan and NTHU when I was about ten, after my father accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in NY, another general (郝柏村, former general, prime minister actually) visited the laboratory, although this time I was late to the visit. When I reached the end of elementary school and transitioned to middle school, I had the chance to work slightly more hands-on and mixed and ground up my very own pucks of YBCO, which could be cooled with liquid nitrogen and levitated over or under permanent magnets to spectacular effects.

Building on these interests, where am I today? Blogging and searching for new battery materials, I think.