February 2012 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

New book about Turing Award winner Peter Naur
by Edgar Daylight 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

************ Book announcement *********** `Pluralism in Software Engineering: Turing Award Winner Peter Naur Explains' --- by Edgar G. Daylight As a software engineer and aspiring historian of computing, I have had the honor of meeting the computing pioneer Peter Naur at his home in Copenhagen in the spring of 2011. My lengthy discussion with Naur is documented in my new book and is published by Lonely Scholar. I invite historians of science to have a look at the book's summary at: http://www.lonelyscholar.com/node/7 Naur discusses varying topics, ranging from astronomy to programming and from philosophy to psychology. An underlying theme is Naur's rejection of Western philosophy. best wishes, Edgar G. Daylight www.dijkstrascry.com

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more electronic mail references
by Nathan Ensmenger 02 Mar '12

02 Mar '12

Tom --- the earliest reference I have seen to electronic mail in a relatively mainstream publication is from the Harvard Business Review in 1972. Here is the cite. If you want the article, let me know. I have a PDF Bryan Carne. Telecommunications: its impact on business. Harvard Business Review; Jul/Aug72, Vol. 50 Issue 4, p125-132 There is also an "electronic speed mail" system that was pioneered under the Eisenhower administration. I found at least one reference to it from 1959 that uses the term "electronic mail." Tours Scheduled to Put Electronic Mail on View. Washington Post, March 6, 1959. -Nathan -- Nathan Ensmenger School of Information University of Texas at Austin www.ischool.utexas.edu/~nathan/

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Email Invention: Homing in on Compuserve "GO EMAIL"
by Thomas Haigh 01 Mar '12

01 Mar '12

Hello, I'm now homing in on CompuServe as a possible vector for the popularization of the word "email," perhaps as early as 1979. What I know so far: . In 1979 Compserve, formerly a business oriented timesharing business, launched a consumer oriented $5 an hour service called Micronet. In 1980 this was rebranded as Compuserve Information Service. . Electronic mail using numerical DEC userIDs as account names seems to have been there from the outset. . There was some attempt to brand a Compuserve email service as "Infoplex," circa 1978/9 onward but this may have been a separate service aimed at business. . By 1984 email was definitely accessed on compuserve by typing "GO EMAIL" http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1984IAPPP..17...11H/0000011.000.htm l <http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984IAPPP..17...11H/0000011.000.htm l> . Compuserve filed a trademark application for email in 1983, citing a first use in commerce in 1981. It was abandoned in 1984. (Verified with TESS database). Anyone find anything to firmly document "GO EMAIL" before 1984? Micronet was used particularly with the TRS-80, so user group materials might be one source. Tom

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Email History -- unresolved questions
by Thomas Haigh 29 Feb '12

29 Feb '12

Hello everyone, Thanks for all the messages that keep flooding in. To avoid duplication and wasted effort, I'm trying to be clearer on what specific topics we're currently in need of hard evidence on. One thing we do know about: the relevant RFCs (354, 385, 524, 561, 733, etc). Between these, Craig Partidge's very thorough article and some personal communications from participants such as Ken Pogran I'm confident that we know what we need for this short article about ARPANET email and its evolution. Unresolved questions: . "Electronic mail," as a phrase I have usage of Business Week going back to 1975. Am interested in earlier usage, particularly in publications aimed at business or the general public. . "email" or "e-mail" as a word. A Google Groups (formerly Deja News) archive of a May 1981 post suggests that the Compuserve email program might have been called EMAIL. It's clear from a news story that Compuserve had electronic mail in 1980. (Compuserve began in 1969 as a timesharing service provider and only later morphed to a personal computer oriented online service). Does anyone have documentation or other sources to confirm when it first offered email and what its command was called? . How about other commercial timesharing services, such as TYMSHARE or COMSHARE? I assume they had electronic mail by some point in the early- to mid-1970s but have no evidence as yet. (We do know that APL offered its users an early and robust email system by about 1972). These systems might have offered the first way for an individual to buy email access (though of course there were no gateways between services in the 1970s). . We know about CTSS email and the materials at multicians.org, and I'm in touch with Tom Van Vleck. As far as I know nobody has challenged its 1965 claim to be the first mail system on a computer. Are they any other serious claimants? . How about other early timesharing systems, e.g. Michigan. There were some articles in Annals on Michigan timesharing I should pull up. Do we know when these got mail? . Email attachments - anyone know when these emerged as a standard feature? I suspect maybe on office automation style email systems before Internet email, as I remember in the early 1990s having to UUENCODE things and send them in the message body for manual decoding using SUN UNIX. Can't imagine office workers putting up with that. . XEROX PARC email for the Alto. Probably a milestone in terms of GUI client. Best source I know on its "Laurel" software is Butler Lampsons chapter in History of Personal Workstations. That includes a 1981 screenshot. Anyone know of any descriptions or publications prior to that date, or in more detail. Also when did it became operational? Thanks, Tom

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SIGCIS has a DIGEST OPTION for once a day delivery
by Thomas Haigh 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

Hello Everyone, I can imagine some of you who don't care so much about email history may be reaching for your spam filters or unsubscribe buttons with the recent flurry of list activity. Just remember there is an alternative: you can receive the members(a)sigcis.org messages in a once-daily compendium. Go to http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members. At the bottom of the screen you'll see a text box. Enter the email address at which you receive mail. You'll get to another screen where you can enter your list management password. Enter it, click "Log in" and you can change your delivery to digest to get just one message a day. Note: this password is not the same as your sigcis.org web password. You should get a reminder email with your list management password at the start of every month. If you can't find this, just click the "Remind" button on the screen you get to after entering your email address. Tom

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Email inventor: Help me set the record straight for the WP
by Thomas Haigh 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

Hello everyone, Exciting news! If you read the response from the Washington Post ombudsman, you may remember that it mentioned that the post "has invited Ayyadurai and MIT to write a response to all the readers who wrote in to denounce the story. That also is an excellent way to address the dispute, and enhance the discussion. That will be appearing in coming days." I've just been asked by Emi Kolawole to prepare a piece disputing Ayyadurai's claim and laying out the actual historical consensus on the invention of email. This will presumably run alongside his defense of his position. Not sure about length or format yet. So, who wants to help me get it right? To avoid spamming the list too much, maybe reply to me directly unless you are confident your post will be of general interest to the list. Here are a few areas where I'd like to pin things down more and would welcome assistance. 1) Does anyone have a usage of "email" or "e-mail" prior to 1980? I haven't looked seriously at this. 2) If I had space to mention 6 or 8 milestones in the development of "modern email" what would they be? Say a sentence, a date, and maybe a person or two for each. I'm thinking something like a. CTSS and other timesharing university systems, b. ARPANET network mail, c. Proprietary commercial email systems d. SMTP over TCP/IP, e. desktop clients, f. Notes g. MIME, h. webmail. 3) Does anyone know MIT job titles? Ayyadurai claims to be a "Faculty Lecturer in Biological Engineering" at MIT and this has been widely reported and even survived recent upheavals on his Wikipedia page. This seemed rather tautological to me, as lecturer is not usually a faculty position in the USA. Googling "Faculty Lecturer" MIT gives no other individuals holding this title. One of his personal pages at MIT includes the title, http://web.mit.edu/be/people/ayyadurai.shtml although he does not appear on a list of faculty in Biological Engineering http://web.mit.edu/be/people/alphabetical.shtml. He is listed on another page http://web.mit.edu/be/people/index.shtml as "Research/Teaching Staff". Doing a "people" search from the MIT web page, which pulls official institutional data, gives him only as a Visiting Lecturer (a job title I do understand) in Comparative Media Studies. So does the position of "Faculty Lecturer" even exist at MIT? Tom

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ACM history question
by Evan Koblentz 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

I'm trying to learn more about the March 1950 ACM conference held at Rutgers University. Specifically, I'm looking for a list of who attended. Susan @ CBI sent me many pages of documentation about the conference. It focuses on the agenda, lectures, and exhibits, which is terrific. It says 370 people attended. I hope to find out who they were. My goal is to find out if any of the attendees were from the Signal Corps Radar Lab -- that's the one here in NJ which is now our computer museum. Are there other sources I might find of data about this conference? (Rutgers itself does not have much.)

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introduction, and restoring an IBM MT/ST
by Matthew Kirschenbaum 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

Hello all, Thanks to Tom Haigh for letting me know about this list. A quick introduction: I'm working on a book under contract to Harvard UP that is a literary history of word processing. The project had a cycle of press attention a little while back, including this piece in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processi… More info is also available at the Tumblr blog listed in my sig. On a general note, I'd be interested in hearing from any list members with tips or anecdotes regarding writers (popular and highbrow alike) who were early adopters of computers and word processors. I'm also writing with a more specific request. I've recently acquired an IBM MT/ST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter) from eBay. This is the first product explicitly marketed by IBM as a "word processor." It worked by storing keystrokes from the typewriter on magnetic tape, thereby making them available for electronic revision and automatic printing. Retail c. 1964 was $10,000! The novelist Len Deighton leased one from IBM in the late 1960s and thus could be said to be the first writer to use a "word processor," even though the technology is not what we would today recognize as a word processing program. Anyway, the particular model I've acquired appears to be in reasonably good condition and I think there's a more than fair shot of restoring it to working order with some expert help. Ideally then I'd like to make contact with retired IBM personnel who designed or serviced the system. Any assistance in terms of getting the word out in relevant channels would be much appreciated. I have a great deal of documentation (manuals, workbooks, circuit diagrams) for it as well. This thing is a beast, ~200 lbs., so not easily moved from my office at the University of Maryland. Does the listserv accept attachments? If so, I'm happy to post a couple of JPEGs. Best, Matt -- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland 301-405-8505 or 301-314-7111 (fax) http://mkirschenbaum.net and @mkirschenbaum on Twitter The Track Changes project: http://trackchangesbook.tumblr.com/ I am on leave, Aug. 2011-12; please refer to my personal leave policies: http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/during-my-fellowship/

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WP Ombudsman on "Email Inventor" & My Response
by Thomas Haigh 27 Feb '12

27 Feb '12

Hello everyone, I just posted this to the SIGCIS site. I wasn't going to spend any more time on this story, but then when I read the Post's Ombudsman's column over the weekend I just couldn't restrain myself. Tom ------------------------- Over the weekend the Washington Post delivered its response to a storm of protest over last week's story claiming that the Smithsonian had "honored" V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai as the "inventor of email." This came in the form of the "Reader Meter" column written by Patrick B. Pexton' the Post's Ombudsman. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/omblog/post/reader-meter-who-really-inve nted-e-mail/2012/02/24/gIQAHZugYR_blog.html. His column does offer a general implication that something about the story would, in an ideal world, have been done differently. However he does not concede any specific error, and concludes that "Kolawole did the due diligence for the story, and she responded to the readers within a reasonable time frame. That's all an editor can do." Pexton does not choose to defend Ayyadurai's relatively specific (and easily debunked) claim that his was the first system to include from, to, cc, bcc and subject fields. Instead, in the manner of a drowning man clutching as straws, he falls back on what, to him, appears to be proof that Ayyadurai must have invented something important: We do know that the guy who copyrighted the terms "email" and "e-mail" and who developed and copyrighted some of the computer code and underpinnings of the modern versions of e-mail that we all use is an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. And he did some of his e-mail work when he was 14, 15 and 16 years old, as a New Jersey high school student. The Smithsonian decided to honor him in February, and take all of the documentation of his youthful work.. There are three important claims in there. All of them are false. 1) Ayyadurai "copyrighted the terms 'email' and 'e-mail'." 2) Ayyadurai created "some of the computer code and underpinnings of the modern versions of e-mail that we all use" 3) That Smithsonian decided to honor him in February. Let's take them in that order. Has Ayyadurai copyrighted the terms 'email' and 'e-mail'. No. In fact nobody who knew the first thing about copyright could possibly believe that he did. Copyright grants exclusive rights over the reproduction of a creative work to its author for a fixed period. The author may chose to grant requests for its reproduction, often in return for money. So, if the word "email" was copyrighted then I wouldn't be able to reproduce it. Nobody could write it or say it without getting Ayyadurai's permission. Maybe he'd want ten cents every time. Maybe he'd grant permission only to people who agreed not to challenge his claims. (There is a tradition of fair use, but that isn't usually taken to allow reproduction of the whole work, so maybe we could use the letters "e" and "l"). Of course the only thing you'd achieve by copyrighting a new word is making sure that it never caught on. This is why the law does not allow anyone to copyright individual words, terms, or even titles. Ever notice that multiple, unconnected books have the same title? Perfectly legal. What Ayyadurai has copyright on is the code of a computer system he submitted to the copyright office in 1984 and a user manual from 1982. This would support a claim that he was the author of this program and its manual. It does absolutely nothing to support any claim that this was the first email program. The appropriate form of intellectual property protection for a word or short phrase would be a trademark, registered with the USPTO. That would reflect a judgment that the phrase had not previously been registered and would provide exclusive commercial use. Ayyadurai does not have a trademark on the word email. The open question is whether Ayyadurai was the first to contract "electronic mail" down to "e-mail" to name his program rather than just to "mail" as on most systems. That's actually an interesting little footnote-worthy detail that has been rather obscured by his claims to have invented email. Did Ayyadurai create "computer code and underpinnings of the modern versions of e-mail that we all use" Consider the evidence presented on one of his many websites, http://www.inventorofemail.com/. Presented in loving detail are copyright slips for his user manual and computer code, an entry for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and a program booklet page suggesting that he was one of many students that year to receive some kind of honorable mention. Finally there is a short 1980 inside page story from the West Essex Tribune, mentioning his "design and implementation of [an] electronic mail system." It makes no description of any particular novel feature of the system, but does call it sophisticated and useful. Finally, part of a sentence is devoted to Ayyadurai in a story on incoming students in MIT's Tech Talk in 1981. This falls so far short of supporting a claim that his code "underpins the modern versions of e-mail that we all use" that it's hard to know where to start. Let's say that there are two main problems. (1) The underpinnings for modern email had already been created elsewhere by 1980. It's not just APRPANET email, the direct precursor of today's Internet based protocols. The concept had been widely distributed to the public in books like Toeffler's The Third Wave (1980) and Hiltz and Turoff's Network Nation (1978). Electronic mail had been the main subject of articles published in magazines like Business Week since at least 1975. That was when office automation companies (IBM, DEC, Xerox, etc) began to promote electronic mail as a key feature of their current and future products. Email systems were offered by commercial timesharing providers, and widely used inside large technology companies. The Xerox PARC email system included a recognizably modern GUI client program. Email was being built into Unix as a standard feature. (2) Ayyadurai does not seem to have published any papers describing his work or distributed its code to others. There is no obvious direct path from being one of 12 children in New Jersey to receive an honorable mention in a science competition that year to laying the underpinnings for all email software in use today. There would have to be a number of steps in between where the ideas in the system are widely reported and everyone working on developing email decides to drop what they were doing previously and copy them. A short profile in a small local newspaper doesn't quite do that. So the onus would really be on him to show exactly how a system that nobody ever heard of (except loyal readers of the West Essex Tribute or office workers at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey) came to lay the foundation for all subsequent work on email. Did the Smithsonian decide to honor Ayyadurai in February, and take all of the documentation of his youthful work. No. It's clear that the Smithsonian did accept a box or two of materials from him for its archive. In as much as it honored him it was by accepting this donation and not, as Pexton suggests, through some separate activity. It did not present an award, host a gala dinner, or do any of the other things that come to mind when someone is being honored. The Smithsonian recently issued a release clarifying the reasons for the acquisition. http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cfm?key=29 <http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cfm?key=29&newskey=1465> &newskey=1465. This notes In accepting these objects, the museum did not claim that Ayyadurai was "the inventor of email," as some press accounts have alleged. Exchanging messages through computer systems, what most people call "email," predates the work of Ayyadurai. The statement basically says that it is interesting to preserve material about a small, obscure and unknown email system as a complement to the big government funded and commercial efforts we were already aware of. It also mentions relevance for historians interested in computer education during the era. An Aside Pexton's opening suggests that the truth as inherently unknowable so that there's no point actually trying to find it out, which is funny as it's generally humanities scholars who get accused of postmodern disregard for empirical truth, moral relativism or nihilism: Who invented e-mail? Crikey, I don't know. Maybe Al Gore. But to properly determine who did what in the multi-year, organic development of electronic messaging would take a fleet of patent lawyers months and years to sort out. If only, one is tempted to speculate, society had somehow produced a group of people whose work was to investing months and months, sometimes even years, sorting through tangled claims and masses of contradictory sources to produce a coherent and well supported narratives about the past. We could call them "historians." They could write books and articles, and then people who needed to find out about the past could read them without needing to hire patent lawyers. Seeing this kind of thing published in the Washington Post is really shameful. (Gee, I hope nobody copyrighted that word). Pexton reads more like a defense lawyer for a journalist than a representative of the reader. It's like the efforts of lobbyists to create spurious uncertainty over the health risks of tobacco or existence of climate change. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who could plausibly claim to have achieved some kind of significant incremental "first" in the development of email. Untangling that would be a lot of work. On the other hand there are billions of people who clearly didn't invent email. Finding this out about someone is pretty easy. Unfortunately for Pexton and the Washington Post, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is one of the billions of people who didn't invent email. No hedges or qualifiers needed.

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CFP: SHOT 2012 Conference, 4-7 Oct in Copenhagen. Deadline 31 March.
by Thomas Haigh 23 Feb '12

23 Feb '12

Hello SIGCIS members, The dance of the heavens and progress of the Earth have brought us once again to that special time of year: the SHOT annual meeting call. Well, technically the "pre-call," as so far there's been a limited announcement with a promise of details to follow "By 13 February 2012." Below this message are pasted the current details from the SHOT website at <http://www.historyoftechnology.org/shot2012cfp.html> http://www.historyoftechnology.org/shot2012cfp.html. Note: this is NOT the call for the annual SIGCIS workshop, which usually takes place on the final Sunday of the conference. Our call will follow and will have a much later deadline. SIGCIS generally organizes one to three panel proposals for the main SHOT conference, and individual members sometimes also use the email list to put together panel proposals with SIG sponsorship. These proposals are reviewed like any others by the SHOT program committee. Sponsorship doesn't guarantee acceptance, but working with the SIG raises the chance of your paper being part of a coherent, relevant, and polished proposal. If you are interested in being part of such a panel please send me an informal expression of interest with a brief description of your possible contribution. I then try to find common themes to develop in the topics that could tie them together into a coherent looking proposal, and work with the authors to refine the individual abstracts to meet the expectations of historians of technology. SIGCIS members are also encouraged to develop their own panel proposals. These can also be sponsored by the SIG. Feel free to reply to the list ( <mailto:members@sigcis.org> members(a)sigcis.org) to find additional panel members. Certain things are common for history conferences but can confuse those from other disciplines. SHOT isn't usually as explicit about some things in its call as it could be. What you need to know: . Panels generally run for 90 minutes and consist of three panelists, a commentator, and a chair. Speakers get about 20 minutes each, with 10 for the commentator, 10-15 for questions, and the rest wasted. Most people now use PowerPoint. Many historians still read papers word for word. Some panels are proposed as a whole. Others are assembled by the program committee from papers submitted individually. . Reviewing is based on a one page abstract and one page cv, and thus is obviously not double blind. Usually about 1/3 of submissions are rejected, but you will never know why as you do not receive comments from the reviewers. Selection is done by the program committee members themselves, with program balance and session coherence a concern. Therefore the odds of being accepted are generally higher as part of a coherent panel than as an individual paper. . The full paper is never reviewed or published, but you are still expected to write out some version of it for the commentator to read prior to the meeting. The commentator is supposed to weave together useful common threads in the papers, add context where missing, and make suggestions on possible improvements. This role is known as a "discussant" in some disciplines. SHOT commentators generally err on the side of niceness, particularly versus some discussion I've seen in business schools. . All the chair does is to introduce the speakers, moderate the question period, and make sure that everything runs to time. It's a good way to get yourself onto the program if you don't have any new work to present. . Only one paper submission per person per year is allowed. SHOT discourages people from speaking two years running, but that rule does not apply this year because this is an "overseas" (i.e. not the USA) meeting. . Connecting your paper or panel to an official conference theme is helpful, but not usually essential. The East/West Cold War theme should be an easy one for many of us to address. . SHOT usually has travel money from the NSF and other sources to help graduate student presenters and those "between jobs." This is applied for separately after acceptance of your paper. Best wishes, Tom Haigh SHOT CALL FOR PAPERS, on SHOT WEBSITE AS OF FEB 16, 2012 Call For Papers: SHOT 2012: 4-7 October Copenhagen, Denmark Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2012 The Society for the History of Technology will hold its annual meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark from 4-7 October at the Copenhagen Business School. The Program Committee invites paper and panel proposals on any topic in the history of technology, broadly defined. The Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or sessions, as well as works-in-progress from researchers at all levels (including graduate students, chaired professors, and independent scholars). It welcomes proposals from those new to SHOT, regardless of discipline. Multinational, international, and cross-institutional sessions are particularly encouraged. We especially encourage proposals from non-Western and Eastern-European scholars. Since this is a non-North American meeting, the Program Committee will permit scholars who presented at the 2011 Cleveland meeting to give papers in Copenhagen. It is SHOT's policy to relax its rule about not presenting papers at two consecutive meetings in order to attract as many people as possible to meetings outside of North America. For the 2012 meeting the Program Committee continues to welcome unconventional sessions; that is, session formats that diverge in useful ways from the typical three/four papers with comment. These might include round-table sessions, workshop-style sessions with papers that are pre-circulated electronically, or "author meets critics" sessions. We also welcome poster proposals for presentation in poster sessions. THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS 31 MARCH 2012. DETAILED SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE AVAILABLE BY 13 FEBRUARY 2012. SHOT 2012 SPECIAL THEMES While paper and session proposals on all topics are welcome, the Program Committee is especially interested in proposals that engage the following themes: I. Technology, sustainability, and environment. SHOT has a long history of analyzing how technologies have interfered with or shaped nature and our social or cultural environments. The search for sustainable technology solutions has recently become a main preoccupation of engineers, designers and tinkerers all over the world and is high on the political agenda too. Possible themes to address are: . Questions of scale: onsite, small- and community-scale technology as challenges for large-scale and centralized models of technology design, both in rural and new urban environments . Smart design: ecodesign and sustainable industrial or product design as evidence of smart solutions for an accountable handling of technology . Natural infrastructures: infrastructures as "natural" environments and nature (air, water, soil) as co-producers of large-scale infrastructures . More with less: new technologies and the search for efficiency in energy consumption or technologies of power saving in housing, transport, and communication II. Technology, East-West relations, and the Cold War. During the Cold War, Europe was one of the central laboratories for experimentation with ideological and political regimes, which deeply affected traditional paths of knowledge and technology transfer in Europe. While the history of the Cold War has mainly been told as a history of discontinuity and fragmentation, we would especially welcome papers and sections dealing with examples of successful co-operation or "hidden continuities" in inter-European technology transfer during the 20th century. General areas to be explored are: . Changing times: continuities and discontinuities in the transfers of knowledge and technology between Eastern and Western Europe and the rest of the world from the mid-19th century to the present . Negotiating identities: spaces and places of co-operation or confrontation before, during, and after the Cold War . Blurred boundaries: spill-over effects and holes in the Iron Curtain . Trading zone: Europe as symbolic battlefield and diplomatic playground for world hegemony . Chilling effects: Technologies at war & wartime technology . Secret stories: technologies of intelligence and espionage and their staging in popular media (comics, films, magazines, television & radio) . Competing Modernities: the uses of technology in a variety of economic development and modernization schemes Evaluation Criteria The Program Committee's highest priority in evaluating paper and panel proposals is scholarly excellence. General ground rules SHOT rules exclude multiple submissions (i.e., submitting more than one individual paper proposal, or proposing both an individual paper and a paper as part of a session). However, scholars may both propose a paper and serve as a commentator or session chair. Proposals for individual papers must include 1. a one-page abstract (maximum 600 words) 2. a one-page curriculum vitae, including current postal and e-mail addresses Proposals for complete sessions must include 1. a description of the session that explains how individual papers contribute to an overall theme (300 words max) 2. the names and paper titles of the presenters 3. for each presenter, a one-page summary (maximum 600 words) of the paper's topic, argument(s), and evidence used 4. for the commentator, chair, and each presenter: one-page c.v., with postal and e-mail addresses * Please note that in general we discourage panels with more than three papers. **Please indicate if a proposal is sponsored by one of SHOT's special interest groups. DETAILED SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE AVAILABLE BY 13 FEBRUARY 2012 For more information please see the Society's <http://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual_meeting.html> Annual Meeting Webpage. For general questions about the Society, please email SHOT Secretary <mailto:shotsecy@virginia.edu> Bernie Carlson <mailto:shotsecy@virginia.edu> .

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