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

[Ian King]

Well, let's not point fingers solely at the Silicon Valley crowd - after all, IBM (to pick just one) has not made a historian's job easy, either.  :-)  

I concur that hobbyist/collectors have been an important factor in saving what's been saved; just a few years ago I was known to opine that the history of the minicomputer era was being maintained by guys like me with stuff in our basements.  The companies that had created these machines were either completely gone or merger'ed into oblivion (DG being subsumed by EMC a particularly pointed example), and unlike either mainframes (challenged by the mini) or PC/workstations (being outsold by mobile information devices today) the minicomputer completely disappeared.  That's one reason I was so thrilled when I learned that Mr. Allen was taking this seriously and putting resources into preserving these machines not just as artifacts on a shelf but as working computers.   

The apparent paucity of scholarly work on the history of information technology subsequent to the first big successes, i.e. the minicomputer era, is what inspired me to pursue my Ph.D.  I see more scholarly work lately, premised on the emergence of the PC/workstation, but I think there's still a lot of work to do regarding that interval between mainframes and PCs - which, loosely speaking, is both the focus of the LCM and of my research work.  

And the Information School environment seems to be a good fit.  The interesting questions are often about what people did with these systems and why - in other words, how did information technology come to transform information science?  When we consider the original use cases for computing technology, primarily focused around the arithmetic of business and secondarily that of science and engineering, one can envision an alternate timeline in which the creation, management and storage of information in its broadest sense might not have occurred.  An information economy would not have developed without this evolving synergy between information science and information technology.  

And I started out as a hobbyist/collector - and I still have twenty or so machines in my basement at home.  When I started here with the Living Computer Museum, my wife hoped they might go away.  No, but the growth rate has slowed... and reflects personal interests that do not overlap with LCM's focus.  -- Ian 

Ian King, Curator of Education
Living Computer Museum
A presentation of Vulcan, Inc.
http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org

> -----Original Message-----
> From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
> Behalf Of Ceruzzi, Paul
> Sent: Friday, September 02, 2011 5:55 AM
> To: 'Evan Koblentz'; members at sigcis.org
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen and the communities of IT
> History
> 
> Evan:
> 
> I support your suggestions. I remember attending the VCF in Santa
> Clara, CA in 1999 and it was one of the most memorable high points of
> my entire career. I gave an interview to an on-line-only journal
> (radical at that time--this was 1999) about the ASR-33; I saw someone
> building a replica of the Whirlwind using modern miniaturized vacuum
> tubes [!]( I think it was Whirlwind, could be wrong but it was
> definitely vacuum tubes); I got to hang out & shoot the breeze with Lee
> Felsenstein. The only downside, sort of, is that I got a t-shirt that
> is so cool that I only wear it once every five years, since I am afraid
> of wearing it out.
> 
> On the other hand, my general impression of Silicon Valley, from the
> perspective of the East Coast, is that the people out there have no
> rear-view mirror or brake pedal. They just go forward as fast as
> possible. Some exceptions. Not good for historians, but that is who
> they are.
> 
> Paul E. Ceruzzi
> Chair, Division of Space History
> National Air & Space Museum
> MRC 311; PO Box 37012
> Washington, DC 20013-7012
> 202-633-2414
> <http://www.nasm.si.edu/staffDetail.cfm?staffID=24>
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
> Behalf Of Evan Koblentz
> Sent: Friday, September 02, 2011 2:18 AM
> To: members at sigcis.org
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen and the communities of IT
> History
> 
> Tom et al,
> 
>  >> 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.
> 
> I made an observation at the DC meeting: collectors / hobbyists in
> general are as far removed from UNIVAC and Burroughs as history
> professors are from Apple and Sinclair, however, as scholars of the
> histories of computing begin to cover the minicomputer / homebrew /
> microcomputer generations, that will naturally appeal more to
> hobbyists'
> first-person experiences.
> 
> So I have three suggestions for SIGCIS members:
> 
> - Change gears! Rather than clawing for fresh angles about Babbage,
> mainframes, and business software, consider "the many histories" of the
> PDP-11, CP/M, the S-100 bus, single-board computing, small-scale
> storage
> media, user groups beyond just SHARE, the BBS, x86 chips (and rivals),
> and the early days of graphical interfaces, to name a few.
> 
> - Embrace grassroots history. Make consumer end users a priority, not a
> curiosity. Learn about computer museums that aren't professional
> institutions. CHM isn't the only computer museum doing good work.
> Attend
> the Vintage Computer Festival (as Peter Meyer said in a May 27 SIGCIS
> post, "The whole thing was quite electric, memorable, and worthwhile.")
> Unfortunately, for each of the past three Vintage Computer Festival
> East
> shows, I posted on this list asking for guest lecturers to creatively
> show hobbyists a scholarly perspective -- and received no responses.
> 
> - Touch something! Obtain a piece of vintage computer gear and play
> with
> it. Whether it's an ASR-33 teletype, IMSAI, an ordinary TRS-80, or a
> BASIC emulator for Windows 7 -- it doesn't matter what.
> 
>  From the opposite perspective, several of us on the hobbyists side are
> ourselves easing into scholarly topics, and convincing others to do so.
> We've had VCF lectures about ENIAC, UNIVAC, RCA, Monrobot, and the
> ARPAnet -- all from people in the industry. My user group's mailing
> list
> is how Ian King learned about the Allen job. CHM's Al Kossow is an
> esteemed member of the discussion list at classiccmp.org and also runs
> the precious hobby resource at Bitsavers.org.
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