[SIGCIS-Members] Members Digest, Vol 54, Issue 18
Edgar Daylight
egdaylight at yahoo.com
Tue Dec 23 10:44:38 PST 2014
Hi Dave & Gerard,
My central question when I interview Turing Award winners is indeed: Did the interviewee actually read the work of Turing? That's what Naur and Knuth talk about at length in my Lonely Scholar booklets.
The work of E.F. Moore, 'A simplified universal Turing machine', is discussed in my book `The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra,' as are several other early writings and Dijkstra's (non-)reception of Turing's work.
Dave's question about the origins of the Turing Award is addressed in the following two publications:
+ E.G. Daylight, Towards a Historical Notion of "Turing — the Father of Computer Science, http://www.dijkstrascry.com/TuringPaper
+ M. Bullynck, E.G. Daylight, L. De Mol,
Why Did Computer Science Make a Hero out of Turing?
Accepted for publication in the Communications of the ACM.
Best wishes,
Edgar.
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Today's Topics:
1. NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a question (Dave Walden)
2. Re: NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a question
(Alberts, Gerard)
3. Re: Origin of the Tablet (Elizabeth Petrick)
4. Re: Origin of the Tablet (Evan Koblentz)
5. 12 Days of YouTube (adam spring)
6. Re: NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a question
(Brian Randell)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:39:47 -0500
From: Dave Walden <dave.walden.family at gmail.com>
To: Dag Spicer <dspicer at computerhistory.org>,members
<members at sigcis.org>
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a
question
Message-ID: <5498495e.c918e00a.54b7.4ef9 at mx.google.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Hi,
With all this emphasis on Turing these days, including the 100th
anniversary celebration a couple of years ago and opinions about how
fundamental Turing was to how much that came later, I am curious if
anyone knows what the ACM people were thinking when they named their
award after Turing only a decade or so after his death. Did they
already see him as important historically as he is seen today? Did
they think he had been a brilliant many whose life ended badly and
who thus deserved memorializing? ...? I suppose there may have been
some writing in the CACM when the award was named or first awarded,
and I can go try to find that. In any case, I am wondering if anyone
knows what the committee members (or whomever) who decided on this
name for the award were thinking.
Dave
At 11:54 AM 12/21/2014, Dag Spicer wrote:
>http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/
>
>Best,
>
>Dag
>--
>Dag Spicer
>Senior Curator
>Computer History Museum
>Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
>1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
>Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
>
>Tel: +1 650 810 1035
>Fax: +1 650 810 1055
>
>Twitter: @ComputerHistory
>
>_______________________________________________
>This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
>list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member
>posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The
>list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you
>can change your subscription options at
>http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
--
home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537
home ph=508-888-7655; cell ph = 503-757-3137 (often don't carry it)
email address: dave at walden-family.com; website:
<http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 18:07:46 +0000
From: "Alberts, Gerard" <G.Alberts at uva.nl>
To: Dave Walden <dave.walden.family at gmail.com>, Dag Spicer
<dspicer at computerhistory.org>, members <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game
-- a question
Message-ID: <B7AEF8DE01BF884C9498D6FD489F190242978329 at MBX04.uva.nl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Dear Dave,
let us ask Edgar Daylight what he has to say on this. He and I did work on precisely this question for a while, but our findings did not yet reach the stage of formal publication. Basically the impression is that the Perlis and Carr gang, busy in creating a venue for exchange of software ideas (Communications of the ACM), went on to create a professional identity. Part of such effort, of course, is to name one's heroes. Probably from the US perspective pointing at the Englishman Turing was a safe choice. There is no indication that Turing was in any way the cult figure he is today.
Edgar's bold entry question at the time was how many of the Turing awardees would have actually read the work of Turing.
An exceptionally early, and to my knowledge the earliest explicit computer science continuation on Turing's 1936 article is by E.F. Moore, 'A simplified universal Turing machine', in Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery; Meeting at Toronto, Ont. Sept 8-10, 1952 (Washington, ACM, 1952), 50-55.
Christmas thoughts,
Gerard
________________________________________
Van: members-bounces at sigcis.org [members-bounces at sigcis.org] namens Dave Walden [dave.walden.family at gmail.com]
Verzonden: maandag 22 december 2014 17:39
Aan: Dag Spicer; members
Onderwerp: [SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a question
Hi,
With all this emphasis on Turing these days, including the 100th
anniversary celebration a couple of years ago and opinions about how
fundamental Turing was to how much that came later, I am curious if
anyone knows what the ACM people were thinking when they named their
award after Turing only a decade or so after his death. Did they
already see him as important historically as he is seen today? Did
they think he had been a brilliant many whose life ended badly and
who thus deserved memorializing? ...? I suppose there may have been
some writing in the CACM when the award was named or first awarded,
and I can go try to find that. In any case, I am wondering if anyone
knows what the committee members (or whomever) who decided on this
name for the award were thinking.
Dave
At 11:54 AM 12/21/2014, Dag Spicer wrote:
>http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/
>
>Best,
>
>Dag
>--
>Dag Spicer
>Senior Curator
>Computer History Museum
>Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
>1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
>Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
>
>Tel: +1 650 810 1035
>Fax: +1 650 810 1055
>
>Twitter: @ComputerHistory
>
>_______________________________________________
>This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
>list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member
>posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The
>list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you
>can change your subscription options at
>http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
--
home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537
home ph=508-888-7655; cell ph = 503-757-3137 (often don't carry it)
email address: dave at walden-family.com; website:
<http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
_______________________________________________
This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 12:51:46 -0700
From: Elizabeth Petrick <elizabeth.petrick at gmail.com>
To: members <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Origin of the Tablet
Message-ID:
<CALwHdbbZhDTFXEq7RGyQajfX=CnqCEwkcyXpY=zjBBAhAHFEGQ at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
This discussion on early tablet histories is very timely for me. I'm just
starting a large project on the history of tablet computer interfaces and I
was hoping someone on this list might be able to help me track down some
materials.
I'm particularly interested in some of these attempts at Apple during the
late 1970s and 1980s to build tablets, including two that aren't mentioned
in the CHM article: the Pocket Crystal and Magic Slate. Steven Levy has
mentioned these projects a little bit in some of his writing, but otherwise
I've never seen anything on them. I know that Bill Atkinson was involved
with both.
Does anyone have any ideas on where I might be able to find materials on
these projects? There doesn't appear to be anything at Stanford's Apple
archive. Alternatively, is anyone in contact with Atkinson?
Thanks everyone!
Elizabeth Petrick
Assistant Professor
Federated Department of History
New Jersey Institute of Technology
On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 11:45 PM, Chuck House <housec1839 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would certainly confirm this version about Alan. He used my HP1300A
> vector graphics CRT for the Flex machine, which was an electrostatic CRT
> built on a 14? TV bottle salvaged from an electromagnetic TV display. We
> in the HP Colorado Springs ?scope lab were experimenting with the Plato
> plasma display at the time also since my boss, John Strathman, was a U of I
> grad still very connected. Alan did not see our work, but he did see the U
> of I work. He did not start the Dynabook until PARC, more like 1972 as
> indicated.
>
> Sutherland knew of our display in 1966. I had visited his MIT lab after
> the IBM Share Design conference in May 1965 in New Orleans, and came away
> much impressed after seeing Sketchpad and Project MAC.
>
> My partner in the US Forestry (summers while we were in college) was at
> the U of Utah (Irving McQuarrie). His uncle Don McQuarrie (MD, head of the
> local AMA) teamed with Homer Warner at the U to create Beehive Medical
> Electronics long before Evans and Sutherland was founded. Beehive became a
> key raster graphics terminal for computer interaction in the late 1960?s,
> building terminals for HP, Cromemco, and Harris among others, and even for
> the Altair later on. Beehive was Alan Kay?s first employer, summers while
> he was a U of Utah undergraduate.
>
> I built the HP1300A as the display for HP?s new minicomputer, the 2116 in
> 1966, but marketing and HP Labs insisted that an ASR-33 was ample for user
> interface. Packard ordered the HP 1300A canceled in prototype form, hence
> the later ?Medal of Defiance? because we built and sold it anyway. We
> introduced in spring 1967, selling the first one to Doug Engelbart at SRI.
> and I think the one for U of Utah was in the first forty. By 1970, Carl
> Machover later estimated only 1,000 interactive computer terminals existed
> in the world, a fair number of them that HP box for $2,000. The IBM
> vector graphics box introduced eighteen months or so earlier, was more like
> $200,000. They did not sell particularly well.
>
> So Alan was plenty versed in the notion of graphical as well as textual
> display on CRTs?recall that the Culler-Fried graphics terminals had been
> ?widely? available by the early 1960s (certainly predating the IBM machine
> that gets the credit). Success has a thousand creators?Alan has also given
> credit (his ?aha? moment) to the day he saw the HP 35 handheld scientific
> calculator, since he had loved the HP 9100A and long considered it ?the
> first personal computer"
>
>
> On Dec 19, 2014, at 8:32 PM, Brian Dear <brian at platohistory.org> wrote:
>
> > Interesting piece! Didn't know about this U of I student project -- cool!
> >
> > One minor tidbit in the article got my attention -- dating Alan Kay's
> "Dynabook" being from 1968. I would suggest it dates more officially from
> 1972, not 1968. In '68-'69 he was working in Utah on his PhD dissertation
> about the FLEX machine. In '68 he'd visited the U of I to attend an ARPA
> conference of grad students, and while at the U of I he'd seen a demo of
> the prototype of the upcoming PLATO plasma display panel (PDP), which, he
> once told me, was his "aha" moment, the realization that personal computing
> devices of the future could truly be portable as they wouldn't require
> lugging around a CRT. But judging from his output in '68-'69, especially
> his dissertation, seems to me the Dynabook concept was still a gleam in his
> eye and it wouldn't be until he'd arrived at Xerox PARC and settled in that
> he'd have time to fully flesh it out, culminating in the famous 1972
> published article.
> >
> > - Brian
> >
> >
> > Brian Dear
> > PLATO History Project
> > La Jolla, California
> > brian at platohistory.org
> > www.platohistory.org
> > www.friendlyorangeglow.com
> > @platohistory
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Dec 18, 2014, at 9:46 AM, Dag Spicer <dspicer at computerhistory.org>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> A nice piece today on the CHM Blog by Assistant Curator Alex Lux.
> >>
> >> Enjoy:
> http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/yesterdays-tomorrows-the-origins-of-the-tablet/
> >>
> >> Best,
> >>
> >> Dag
> >> --
> >> Dag Spicer
> >> Senior Curator
> >> Computer History Museum
> >> Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
> >> 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
> >> Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
> >>
> >> Tel: +1 650 810 1035
> >> Fax: +1 650 810 1055
> >>
> >> Twitter: @ComputerHistory
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
> list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member
> posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list
> archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change
> your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
> list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member
> posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list
> archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change
> your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list
> of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and
> are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at
> http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription
> options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
>
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Message: 4
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 18:07:09 -0500
From: Evan Koblentz <evan at snarc.net>
To: members <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Origin of the Tablet
Message-ID: <5498A41D.9090804 at snarc.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
> I'm particularly interested in some of these attempts at Apple during
> the late 1970s and 1980s to build tablets, including two that aren't
> mentioned in the CHM article: the Pocket Crystal and Magic Slate.
I corresponded privately with Elizabeth, but maybe others are interested
in the Apple aspect. Apple had several competing projects during the
Newton development era (late 1980s through mid-1990s):
Code name: Junior
Result: became Newton
Code name: Smartifacts
Result: canceled
Code name: Swatch / Pocket Mac
Result: canceled
Code name: Pocket Crystal
Result: became General Magic's Magic Cap
It's possible that there were other still other teams.
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 06:36:06 +0000
From: adam spring <adamspring at gmail.com>
To: members at sigcis.org
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] 12 Days of YouTube
Message-ID:
<CACthR2k+Tnv2ciurcQhALZteXvnk7Vhg2PnzUi+w7j4Rm3O4Nw at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Dear all,
Please find my latest post, 12 Days Of YouTube, now up:
http://remotely-interested.com/12-days-of-youtube/
It features several links, including one related to Walter Isaacson'c book
The Innovators, that might be of interest to the group.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Adam
--
Adam P. Spring
Skype: adampspring
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Message: 6
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 11:04:12 +0000
From: Brian Randell <brian.randell at newcastle.ac.uk>
To: Dave Walden <dave.walden.family at gmail.com>
Cc: members <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game
-- a question
Message-ID: <6D3344DA-B860-4DAA-B196-A2E677D96E70 at ncl.ac.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hi Dave:
A good question. I was a member and than chair of the Turing Award Committee a few years ago, and do no recall anything among the explanatory paperwork that we were given which would answer you question.
Cheers
Brian
On 22 Dec 2014, at 16:39, Dave Walden <dave.walden.family at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> With all this emphasis on Turing these days, including the 100th anniversary celebration a couple of years ago and opinions about how fundamental Turing was to how much that came later, I am curious if anyone knows what the ACM people were thinking when they named their award after Turing only a decade or so after his death. Did they already see him as important historically as he is seen today? Did they think he had been a brilliant many whose life ended badly and who thus deserved memorializing? ...? I suppose there may have been some writing in the CACM when the award was named or first awarded, and I can go try to find that. In any case, I am wondering if anyone knows what the committee members (or whomever) who decided on this name for the award were thinking.
> Dave
>
>
> At 11:54 AM 12/21/2014, Dag Spicer wrote:
>> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Dag
>> --
>> Dag Spicer
>> Senior Curator
>> Computer History Museum
>> Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
>> 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
>> Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
>>
>> Tel: +1 650 810 1035
>> Fax: +1 650 810 1055
>>
>> Twitter: @ComputerHistory
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
>
>
> --
> home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537
> home ph=508-888-7655; cell ph = 503-757-3137 (often don't carry it)
> email address: dave at walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
--
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923
FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell
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