Lost City of the Arabian Nights

Never Lost Again

Obsolescence Accelerating

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In 1994, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, contractor for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), invited me to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to witness the blast-off of the space shuttle flight known as the Mission to Planet Earth. It was carrying their sand-penetrating SIR-C/-SAR radar. NASA's new 3-D radar would hopefully penetrate fog, rain, sleet, ice, snow, and sand.

The intriguing pictures taken from space by the space shuttle, the French SPOT (Satellite Pour Observation de la Terre) and the Landsat satellite showed trails of sand ground fine by camel feet, leading to what appeared to be the Lost City of Ubar (also called Atlantis of the Sands by Lawrence of Arabia) on the skirt of the Rub'al Khali, the Empty Quarter of the fabled Arabian Desert, in the Sultanate of Oman.
I had to go.

Fate and fortune finally allowed the gods to line up the trip early in 1998. My writer wife and I flew via Canadian Airlines to London (eight hours) and from London to Muscat (seven hours) by British Airways, in all through 12 time zones from Vancouver at 49 degrees latitude south to the Tropic of Cancer halfway around the globe. Another 10 kilometres and we would have been on our way back.

I wanted to see the Lost City of Ubar, the great sand sea the size of Texas, and the dunes, 200 metres (600 feet) high, of the southern Arabian Desert. I also wanted to study accelerated change. Years ago I had read about elaborate road construction in Oman. Developing countries with few paved roads don't require much construction to show a large increase in roads. The then-called country of Muscat and Oman (slightly larger than France) had but 10 kilometres (six miles) consisting of one strip of semi-paved road. There was only one school in the entire country. This was a land of Bedouin nomads, tough desert-survivor warriors.

Dramatic change? Yes! This country, called the Sultanate of Oman since 1970, along with Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have changed more in the past three decades than any other places on the planet.

Oman has two million residents (73 percent Oman is, plus 500,000 expatriates), including half-a-million boys and girls aged six to 18 studying in modern schools. Hospitals and medical care equal to or surpassing what we have in North America. Medical staff is paid more than in Canada. Sultan Oaboos Bin Said combed the world and hired the best. Oman is still pumping 900,000 barrels of oil a day, but the Omanis did something worthwhile with their money over the past 27 years. Smart investment. Oil now accounts for only 40 percent of their income.

Back to the Lost City of Ubar. With 3-D radar finally able to penetrate dry sand, much more of the world is now viewable. It could be the opening of a new continent, The Land Below. Coupled with new technologies for probing ocean depths, we could be entering another new era, which will enable us to see so much more. Another new frontier.
So with Ubar. Archeological expeditions uncovered ruins at the convergence of old caravan routes, at Ash Shisr on the southern edge of the Empty Quarter.

Take 100,000 camels. Let them plod the seven trails into the city for a few thousand years—and grind the sand into talcum powder. The sand compresses on the trail into hard shale-like material. This compacted sand dust shows up on radar as more solid than sand similar to caribou migration tracks through the Arctic tundra. Computer-aided colour reproduction shows these old camel caravan routes from many directions converging at the spot located by the shuttle, Landsat, and SPOT satellites. Mankind has seen from space what was invisible from the ground.

I consulted chief archaeologist of the expedition, Dr. Juris Zarins, who participated in the preliminary excavations. He and his colleagues found a large octagonal fortress with thick walls three metres (10 feet) high with corner towers. Greek, Roman, and Syrian pottery, some 4,000 years old, unearthed at the site indicate Ubar was a thriving trade centre, especially for frankincense, a product that was then more valuable than gold. At its peak Ubar "mysteriously vanished back into the sands." In reality the city apparently collapsed or imploded because of a limestone cavern under the city that weakened over time.

Unfortunately, today the still crumbling limestone at the site has halted excavations for safety reasons. It would be a very expensive operation to unearth anything else under such conditions as I recently saw and videotaped.

This may or may not be the fabled Ubar, rich trading centre from the tales of the Arabian Nights. But the big story is that humankind has seen from a new vantage point in space to beneath the sandy surface of this hostile desert.

This is the start of Historical Recovery Class 101. Will time and advancing technology tell us more?
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Never Lost Again

Have you acquired one of those nifty new digital portable PCS (Personal Communications Services) phones? In Japan they are all the rage, especially since their boom in cheaper wireless telephones called PHS (Personal Handiphone System). The company installed 25,000 telepoint reflective mirror sites around Tokyo shortly after introducing the units. More are being added daily.

Nippon Telephone & Telecommunications (NTT) has a new subsidiary called Personal. They haven't missed a trick yet. They are currently operating a private experimental Internet website that produces magic. If you know the number of someone with a PCS phone configured with special software, and have the proper search software, you punch in their number and up on the web page pops the "lost" phone (hopefully, with the owner still carrying it). Well, not actually the lost phone, but the precise map coordinates along with a detailed description of the phone's present location including the floor.
Husband working late at the office tonight? Why is his phone in the Gay Gals Nightclub? Your wife having dinner with a girl friend? In a rooms-by-the-hour "love motel" on the Ginza strip? Highly paid technician supposed to be on a lengthy repair job at the local hydro power plant? Check him out. No, he's clean. His phone is on the fourth floor of the power plant, exactly where he is scheduled to be for the next three hours.
How does this magic work? PHS, unlike a regular cell phone, is low-powered. So base-stations are closer together because they don't have enough power to go long distances like the more powerful (and heavier) cellular phones. Sometimes, as in a large train station or football stadium, there could be three or four units. In some Tokyo entertainment complexes, I have seen up to 50 separate nightclubs under a single roof. PHS and Personal can almost give you the table number.

When you type in that private number, the system sends out a code that asks, "Where are you?" With 25,000 reflectors in Tokyo, it takes two seconds to locate the phone and get the number up on the selected (although at the moment secret) website. Personal hopes to speed up access time with the next generation of phones and software.
Who are you going to call? My hacker consultant is already working on a clone phone which will always be where you are supposed to be even if you're not. He's in the eighth grade. He built one of these for the answering machine on his bike years ago.

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Obsolescence Accelerating

One of my sources of information is the New Scientist Magazine. I look in particular for the byline Barry Fox.

The new year opened up with this gem of an article written by Fox in the issue for January 17, 1998:

"Coming Soon - The Disposable Desktop Computer." It covers a report from Livingston Rental, a company in the West End of London that does a substantial business leasing computers to companies throughout Europe. Who else would have their finger so closely tuned onto the monitoring switch for computer longevity?
Which makes me think of Kimberly-Clark Inc. (which has its Canadian office in Mississauga, Ont.). It manufacturers and distributes the universally popular Kleenex. If they are looking for acquisitions, and what major company isn't, their field has recently widened considerably.

According to Livingston Rental, by the time the third millennium opens, if the current trend continues, a PC could last a full six months! Livingston bases this prediction on fairly sound grounds. Their rentals are returned ever more quickly as the phenomenal speed-up in product upgrading continues.
In 1994, the delay in customer requests until peak time for the IBM/clone containing the much-improved (at that time) 486 chip was 13 months. By 1996, and the introduction of the Pentium 133 chip, obsolescence time shrunk to nine months before rentals peaked.
A year later, when the Pentium 166 chip came aboard, new models peak demand for rentals dropped to eight months. If such a trend continues for 10 years, rentals might be returned within few weeks. Overall, the lifespan of such computers has been falling two to three months per year.

One thousand days ago, the Intel 486 chip was the hottest thing on the planet, and average lifespan was 17 months. That dropped in 1996 to 14 months, making a big point for leasing instead of buying computer equipment in this era of obsolescence-compression.

A year ago, 166-Mhz Pentium chip computers were being returned in eleven months, according to Barry Fox. Computer users wanted the new Pentium chip that ran at 200 Mhz. Those same customers are now demanding the units containing the latest chip that runs at 300 Mhz. Has Intel Inside found the "holy grail" or what?
Sound advice comes from Fred Round, chief executive of the Radio, Electrical and Television Retailers' Association in Great Britain, who says this accelerated obsolescence is a serious issue. "Renting will soon be essential to a retail dealers survival," he explains. Sounds like sound advice. Obviously it has to slow down or stop sometime (or change to some form of modern magic) but another excellent source says that isn't going to be soon.

Jeffrey R. Harrow, Senior Consulting Engineer, Corporate Strategy and Technology at Digital Equipment Corporation, puts out a free weekly report entitled "The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing" (obtainable upon request at jeff.harrow@digital.com}. Non-readers or people whose eyes tire from extended screen reading may prefer his material available via RealAudio. He also replies to personal e-mail, usually at the speed of light. At least that has been my experience. I thought he might have had an "interne" (like President Clinton) helping him out. But he said, "No, I'm just a one-man operation."
His weekly reports on "The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing" are my single best source of data concerning the global computing industry. And he can quote me on that.
Let's look at the bright side: Obsolescence has its built-in advantages. No need to worry about the so-called Millennium Bomb and the date-change hassle when 1999 turns into 2000. Updating your PC as fast as Livingston Rentals reports means you haven't had this problem for years. The year 2000 problem is never encountered by Mac users. Different operating system.

Most digirati are usually so enraptured by the future (I'm no exception) that they sometimes forget to gaze into that rear-view mirror which shows as we speed up the rate of change that we are creating history at the same lightning speed. No museums have ever had so rapid a flow of historical artifacts as computer museums. They don't even have to dust displays before they are replaced by last week's antiques.