[SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen and the communities of IT History

Info @ IT History Society info at ithistory.org
Wed Aug 31 17:02:24 PDT 2011


Tom,

We at the IT History Society are pleased to offer our support to SIGCIS.
You are doing a great job and we wish we could do more.

Also, our best wishes to everyone for upcoming SHOT meeting.

Thank you for the mention of some of the various activities that the IT
History Society is involved in.  We do appreciate it.

As to your our projects database, that section is in sort of limbo until our
membership grows and the archival community knows more about ITHS.  We
started the projects looking for funding too early for we ended up with too
many projects looking for support and not enough grantors of funds.

Yes, our master calendar of archival events is growing, but in addition to
the databases mentioned, there are two other significant ones that need
mentioning.

First is our fully indexed IT searchable archival database of 750 IT sites
archival sites.  This indexed IT database is the only one of its kind where
one can search ONLY IT archives and get only archived IT information.  See -
http://ithistory.org/resource_sites/resource-sites.php  We expect the site
to grow way past 1,000 sites by the second quarter of 2012.

Second is our database of information technology individuals that have made
an out of the ordinary contribution but not necessarily an extraordinary
one.  That site is located at
http://ithistory.org/honor_roll/honor-roll-random.php.  Currently there are
around 750 honorees and expect the honoree entries to grow past 1,000 by mid
2012.

Thank you.

IT History Society
One Blackfield Drive – Suite 331
Tiburon, CA 94920
(415) 435-2263
 
info at ITHistory.org
www.ITHistory.org
 
Ensuring the Future by Preserving the Past 
 
  

-----Original Message-----
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
Behalf Of Thomas Haigh
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 12:14 PM
To: 'Coopersmith, Jonathan'
Cc: members at sigcis.org
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen and the communities of IT History

It would be fun if he did! 

SHOT as a whole used to have more attendance at its meetings from enthusiast
historians (I remember a group of radar historians, for example) and museum
people. In fact SHOT was centered on museums and material culture in its
early days. As SHOT has matured and the history of technology had
professionalized (to use the term loosely) as a scholarly field there's been
much more of a standardization on the techniques and world view associated
with Ph.D. historians working in universities. On balance that's a good
thing for the field, but it does come at a cost.

So that's why I'm pleased that the SIGCIS workshops are providing a
welcoming venue for people from museums, institutes, schools of information
and communication, etc. who are interested in engaging in a scholarly way
with IT history.

On the other hand there's a whole world of collectors, enthusiasts,
restorers, retrogamers, old timers and the like out there who love old
computers but are not necessarily interested in scholarly history. Some of
them have the resources to pursue their passion on a larger scale than
others. Evan Koblentz has been our informal liaison in this area.

Clearly we would like to expose this broad audience to scholarly work on the
history of computing. Many of those active in computing societies have
probably come across Annals, which could maybe be a "gateway drug" for those
so inclined. The SIGCIS online resources may also help. On the other hand
the retrocomputing community will always have its own distinctive interests,
centered more on machines and technical documentation than historical
research papers.

On an institutional level, SIGCIS has benefited enormously from the support
of Len Shustek of the Computer History Museum in finding donors willing to
support the CHM book prize and CHM travel awards. I'm hopeful that this
points to the potential for more collaboration in the future. We don't
realistically aspire to do independent fundraising outside the scholarly
community as there are already at least three groups working to target such
donors (CHM, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the IT History Society).
SIGCIS works with all three.

Of these the IT History Society is intended to serve in large part as a
means of bring together historical projects in need of support with donors
interested in supporting them. I'm pleased to say that we have received $200
from ITHS toward travel support for this year's meeting. ITHS did establish
a list of "projects seeking funding" some years ago (see
http://ithistory.org/projects/overview.php) though it's not clear that any
funding has happened as a result. There were also plans for a regular
meeting series to bring the communities together.
http://ithistory.org/events/events-past.php.

It's clear that the scholarly history of computing community and the
professional societies of computing have drifted further apart in recent
decades. Back in the 1970s AFIPS spent a great deal of money to sponsor the
first history of computing activities, there were "pioneer days" at the
Joint Computer Conferences, and Annals was organized by eminent computer
people. The Charles Babbage Foundation raised a lot of money on behalf of
what became CBI from the computer industry. These connections are not dead
-- the ACM History Committee has been doing good work since 2004, including
support for its archive, and of course IEEE Computer Society took over the
publication of Annals and has proved a great home for it. But as I've looked
recently at materials from 30 years ago it's striking how much deeper the
connections used to be.

So to get back to your suggestion: we'd love to welcome Paul Allen or anyone
else interested in the history of computing to our workshop. We've
particularly love to welcome people with the resources to sponsor our
activities -- though Paul Allen probably gets asked for money a thousand
times a day. But there's a broader question of how to bridge the interests
of scholars, donors, and enthusiasts which is a challenge not just for
SIGCIS but for the history of computing community as a whole.

Any thoughts on contributions SIGCIS could make in this area are welcome.

Tom 
 



-----Original Message-----
From: Coopersmith, Jonathan [mailto:j-coopersmith at neo.tamu.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 11:23 PM
To: Thomas Haigh
Cc: members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen's Personal Museum

Maybe we should invite Mr. Allen to attend or send one of his people.  
Or even sponsor a session?

  Jonathan

----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org>
To: members at sigcis.org
Sent: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:25:03 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen's Personal Museum

An interesting story at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576516552161014410.ht
ml

It states that Paul Allen has commissioned a kilt-wearing grizzly graduate
student to roam the globe tracking down rare machines of a physical size
impractical for lesser collectors, such as a PDP-7 and IBM 70XX series
machines. They're being restored for a personal museum. I hadn't heard of
Ian King, but apparently he's a computing veteran working on an historical
Ph.D. in the University of Washington Information School. The museum is
online at http://www.pdpplanet.com/. 

The more machines that get preserved the better, and it certainly does more
good for history than most billionaire hobbies. Perhaps this will evolve
into a sustainably endowed public museum, or the machines will eventually be
donated elsewhere. 

Yet when I see something like this is does make me ponder the widening
disconnect between the growing community of scholars working on many aspects
of the history of computing with minimal financial support and the
comparatively huge amounts of money being spent/given by billionaires to
support preservation with no involvement from Ph.D. historians. Maybe it's
inevitable that the interests of the two groups would evolve in different
directions. It's also true that academic priorities may have moved further
than necessary from micro-level practice and materiality over the past few
decades.

This might be one of the topics for discussion at the forthcoming SIGCIS
workshop, where I'm pleased to say that the panelists include people from
the Smithsonian, Henry Ford Museum, Charles Babbage Institute, and Computer
History Museum as well as academics from a variety of disciplines.
http://www.sigcis.org/workshop11 

Tom





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-- 
Jonathan CoopersmithAssociate Professor    Department of
History   Texas A&M University  College Station, TX 
77843-4326 979.845.7151    979.862.4314 fax 
 http://aggiegaijin.blogspot.com/   
Secretary   Section L, History & Philosophy of ScienceAmerican
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)www.aaas.org

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