<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">personal opinion, based on the Steve Jobs book and my interview with Isaacson after his talk at the Computer History Museum, this will be a relatively shallow treatment by a gifted captivating writer<div><br><div><div>On Oct 5, 2014, at 1:28 PM, Thomas Haigh <<a href="mailto:thaigh@computer.org">thaigh@computer.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div class="WordSection1" style="page: WordSection1;"><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Hello everyone,<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I haven't read Isaacson's book yet, but have been looking at some reviews with interest. It sounds from the review that Andy links to that the book gets better as it goes on. On the historical part, Wisnioski notes in his polite and generally favorable review that "Isaacson diligently attends to this syllabus, but it curbs his trademark enthusiasm, and many of his anecdotes are well-worn."<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">What I've seen in other places makes me question the diligence of Isaacson's attention in the earlier chapters, like that of Jane Smiley in her attempt at a popular history of early computing a few years ago. According to a profile in the New York Times the book starts and ends with Ada Lovelace. Isaacson credits her to the extent of observing that<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson-how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0" style="color: purple; text-decoration: underline;">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson-how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0</a><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN">“Ada Lovelace defined the digital age,”</span><span lang="EN"> </span><span lang="EN">Mr. Isaacson said in one of several recent interviews about the book….</span><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">“If it wasn’t for Ada Lovelace, there’s a chance that none of this would even exist,” Mr. Isaacson added as he waved his hand in the air, gesturing as if to encompass all of Silicon Valley and the techies sitting around us.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Given that Babbage’s project was itself apparently unknown to computer pioneers of the 1940s such as Aiken, Eckert, Atanasoff and Mauchly at the time they conceptualized and designed their machines this claim seems to me quite impossible to justify, however profound Lovelace’s contribution to that project was.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">He also has a chapter on the “Women of ENIAC.” That has been put up as an text and audiobook extract as a teaser prior to the launch of the book.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/" style="color: purple; text-decoration: underline;">http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/</a><o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">This chapter captures a broader trend in ENIAC’s changing role in collective memory: for about fifteen years now it has been remembered primarily as a machine programmed by women. Even within the scholarly literature our discussion of the place of the initial cohort of six operators has sometimes mischaracterized the work they were hired to do and exaggerated their contributions to the development of thinking about what ENIAC could be used to do and how it might be configured to accomplish those tasks. That’s something I’ve become aware of in returning to primary sources for my forthcoming book<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>ENIAC in Action</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope. Janet started this thread with mention of some NPR interviews, and coverage in her recent book<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Recoding Gender</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>makes a definite contribution towards clarifying these issues. In contrast, drawing almost entirely on oral histories and memoir, Isaacson is for the most part just summarizing the consensus when he implies that Jean Jennings and her colleagues made fundamental innovations by, for example, realizing that the master programmer could be used to do the exact task it was designed and built to perform: looping nested subroutines.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">It seems that the book is held together with a Gladwellian argument about the collective and incremental nature of innovation, which is certainly preferable to the lone genius view of history. However the ending of the ENIAC extract makes me question how tightly though through this argument is: he asserts that “all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women”. That’s either a very radical STS argument that a computer is only created in use, or a sign that he did not spend much time thinking about what creating a computer involves.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Now of course Lovelace, the “Women of ENIAC,” Hopper, and a few others are of interest to a lot of people because of their instrumental value as the source of parables useful in the rebranding of computing as a field created in large part by women. That’s a worthy goal, and there are no wrong reasons to be interested in history. Isaacson’s book will sell maybe 1,000 times more than anything that any of us are ever likely to write. However it would be nice if there was a way to achieve this without pretending that a causal chain makes Ada Lovelace essential to the “birth of the digital age” or Jennings and her colleagues essential to the creation of ENIAC. Is there a necessary tradeoff between historical accuracy and inspirational value, as with the story about young George Washington and the cherry tree? I hope not.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Best wishes,<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><br>Tom<o:p></o:p></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>This email is relayed from<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="mailto:members@sigcis.org" style="color: purple; text-decoration: underline;">members@sigcis.org</a>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. 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