Bell's Axioms on Standards

CowboyRobot writes "The inimitable Gordon Bell has a 5-page article at ACM Queue on the difficulties and necessities of standards adoption, in which he lays out 11 axioms on how to best establish and adopt standards. He quotes MIT's Dave Clark, 'Standards setting sits in a boring trough between two exciting peaks. The first is the peak of technical innovation, and the second is the billion-dollar investment or market.' It's often the rush for money that makes us move to fast to do the job right."

Comments

Let me give you an alternative example of standard

[GuyFawkes]

s in action.

As I've said elsewhere, my original trade was engineer, so I'll use an engineering standard that you will ALL have handled, and hopefully it will be distant enough from computing to illustrate some points without getting embroiled in a fanboy flame war.

Lots of people say the original great invention was the wheel, as an engineer I'd have to pick the much more recent lathe bed or screw thread, without the lathe bed NO accurate machining is possible (including screw threads)

What this means in laymans terms is that EVERY SINGLE COMPONENT would be bespoke, hand made, and slightly different, so EVERY mechanical device would have to be ENTIRELY hand made... no going to the shop to buy a gasket, you have to make every one by hand to match whatever you are working on.

When we come to screw threads there are many standards, BSP, JIC, Metric, and variations amongst these.

Each thread has it's own strengths and weaknesses, and included in these is the actual cost of making a given nut or bolt to a certain thread patterm, which depends on the specification and STANDARD of the thread chosen.

BSP is simply the best for hydraulics for example, while BSF and UNC are good for bolting things together, however metric comes along, with it's predisposition (which is an entirely ETHICAL predisposition, eg academic, rather than practical, and likes everything to be in nice multiples of ten) for simplicity, and it has to be said this simplicity makes a metric bolt cheaper to make than say a BSF bolt. (if you think the cost is the same in these days of CNC then you are wrong and you are omitting precision tolerances and cost of metal removed etc etc etc) so of course metric bolts rapidly became extremely popular.

Trouble is metric threads are, to an engineer, shit. They are cheaper, so management selects them over the engineers preference.

Henry Ford went metric on the truck side of things many mnay years ago now, but for many years (and possibly still today, I'm out of the loop) kept some things, notably wheel nuts, on an imperial thread. Why? because the metric threads worked loose.. like I said, metric threads are crap, old imperial threads are far superior.

SO, to the point.

Obviously a standard thread is very useful, a 1/2 inch AF spanner bought in the UK will fit perfectly around the head of a 5/16 bolt made in germany, which will screw perfectly into a 5/16 water pump made in the USA, because of standards.

SO, we have a general trend away from the old, superior, but more expensive, standards, towards the new, inferior but cheaper standards.

This is all great in theory and the halls of academia but in the real world these unequal pressures bring about strange offspring.

About 20 years ago I worked in Spain, which had just thrown off the mantle of a dictatorship, and was working its way towards joining the European Union, so things including the economy were in a flux, although spain was metric lots of the stuff that was used in spain (for example austin had a car assembly plant there) was not metric.

Instead of everyone owning a whitworth tool set, an AF tool set, and so on (remember that thing about costs, imperial spanners were higher precsion than metric too, so cost more) so the spanish came out with a unique solution, which saved EVERYONE money.

When they made a bolt they would make a 5/16 UNC bolt, just like everyone else, except it would end in a METRIC head, so pable with his metric toolkit could work on it.

When you come across this and see a "wrong" size bolt head on say an engine, you ASSUME that some bastards have ruined it in the past and stripped the thread, and drilled to a larger diameter and tapped it to a matric thread, which of course will have an utterly different ideal torque setting, so you sigh and swear.

It is only when you REMOVE the bastard that you discover that it is a 5/16 UNC.

At this point, all the preceding standards are vastly degraded, you cannot as

Geek or geezer?

[museumpeace]

Not sure which I am but to make my comment, I must betray a bit of both.
When I got my first software engineer job, a PDP-20 was a cool toy. Back in the day, one thing about DEC that just blew us away was that they actually published the bus standard. Any garage or EE grad could design peripherals to plug into a PDP backplane. It was a defacto standard and it turned a "good" processor family into a great product family because any would-be customer in a laboratory could just about be certain that whatever odd data-capture, storage, display or comms device was needed, someone had developed. It made DEC's fortunes to multiply the advantages of a [then] cheap new processor by the advantages of a published "standard" architecture. The ironic thing is that when the PC revolution got under way, DEC's response was to emphasize the PRO350, a [by then] relatively closed PDP based architecture over its "Rainbow" product. The IBM PC architecture rules to this day because IBM beat DEC at its own game. Those of us in the early 70's who said "Digital is crazy: they're gonna let everyone else make the peripherals that DEC could be sellng" just didn't get it. Gordon Bell was a chief architect and engineering manager of the original PDP...he did get it, at least back then.
There are lessons in the parabola of DEC's fortunes that bear study by any of us, engineers to marketing, who compete in development of technical products.
Favorite geek-geezer link is to a book that recounts the history on which my pathetic career was spent. See also a link to much of Bell's commentary and output since joining Microsoft