August 2012 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Advice on a Syllabus for Computer Software: History, Culture and Theory
by Joline Zepcevski 17 Aug '12

17 Aug '12

Hello, I am not sure if this is the correct forum for this, however - I have a great opportunity to teach a history of software course in a private (fine) art college. I've spent quite some time working up this syllabus, but I would really appreciate any feedback or pointers from more experienced faculty members. If anyone has the time and inclination, I could really use the advice! The syllabus is available at: http://www.jzepcevski.com/Courses.html as a pdf Sincerely, Joline Zepcevski

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: When was first campaign for computer users' freedom
by William McMillan 17 Aug '12

17 Aug '12

Richard, it might not come across in the article or other available sources on UCSD Pascal, but I'm convinced from many hours of interviewing Ken Bowles that UCSD Pascal and the efforts in programmed instruction were definitely about freedom, about empowering the end user and the small enterprise. Political? Not so much, if that's your thrust. - Bill On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> wrote: > In the late 1970s, Ken Bowles and students at UC San Diego produced > UCSD > Pascal, which was largely an attempt to escape from the strictures of > mainframe computing. > > It sounds like this was about convenience, not freedom in the > political sense of human rights. But I will take a look at the > article. > > Advances in features (such as drop-down menus) are not the issue here. > > Thanks. > > -- > Dr Richard Stallman > President, Free Software Foundation > 51 Franklin St > Boston MA 02110 > USA > www.fsf.org www.gnu.org > Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. > Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call >

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Early UCSD Pascal screen shot
by B. Degnan 17 Aug '12

17 Aug '12

-------- Original Message -------- > From: "William McMillan" <wmcmillan(a)emich.edu> > Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 9:59 AM > To: "Ian S. King" <isking(a)uw.edu>, "sigcis" <members(a)sigcis.org> > Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: When was first campaign for computer users' freedom > > OK, now I realize what people are saying -- the menus in UCSD Pascal were > not "drop-down." Sorry, I'm so used to letting the term trip from my > fingers that I mistyped. > > Yes, they were single letter menu commands on a character-based "graphic" > screen. > > They did influence the development of drop-down menus at Apple. > > - Bill > Just for reference purposes, I have a UCSD Pascal system running on my Sage II Computer. This micro pre-dates the Apple Lisa, it's all bare-bones, text-based. Here is a photo, not sure if version IV.13 is an upgrade from the original. http://vintagecomputer.net/pictures/2011/SageII_Televideo_Pascal/UCSD_Pascal _Terminal4.jpg Here is a set of photo screen shots of the terminal. http://vintagecomputer.net/pictures/2011/SageII_Televideo_Pascal/ Bill Degnan vintagecomputer.net

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Fwd: When was first campaign for computer users' freedom
by Andrew Russell 17 Aug '12

17 Aug '12

Hello everyone - This question (via Dave Farber's list) seemed like a good one for SIGCIS members to think about. My first thought is that answers would depend on one's definition of each of the operative terms (campaign, computer, user, freedom) :-) Andy PS you might cc Stallman and Farber on any responses that have examples of earlier 'campaigns.' Begin forwarded message: > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: "Richard Stallman" <rms(a)gnu.org> > Date: Aug 4, 2012 1:43 AM > Subject: When was first campaign for computer users' freedom > To: <dave(a)farber.net> > > The free software movement, a campaign for computer users' freedom, > started in 1983. > > Do you know of any other campaigns for computer users' freedom prior > to that? I don't mean the same specific issue (free vs proprietary > software), I mean any issue of freedom from unjust power, specifically > in regard to computer users or computer use. > > The reason I'm asking is that the free software movement might have > been the first such campaign, but I can't sure yet. > > -- > Dr Richard Stallman > President, Free Software Foundation > 51 Franklin St > Boston MA 02110 > USA > www.fsf.org www.gnu.org > Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. > Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/ > Archives | Modify Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now

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A vote for history from a young student
by William McMillan 16 Aug '12

16 Aug '12

Dear SIGCIS members, I wanted to tell you about a conversation I was party to with a group of high school students who had completed a pretty amazing robotics project: *http://tinyurl.com/ctukmdb* The students were asked what would motivate more of their peers to pursue science and technology. Expecting to hear something like, "Assign more cool projects," I was surprised that the first suggestion from a student was, "Teach the history of science." I think he meant technology too. The whole group agreed. (Of course, they suggested more cool projects as well! And some remarked that, since many of them were fortunate to grow up on farms, they learned about all kinds of technology, unlike urban kids who get exposed to so little.) Bill

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SIGCIS lunch - is happening, on Friday
by Thomas Haigh 16 Aug '12

16 Aug '12

Hello SIGCIS members, I was just registering for SHOT, and realized I should alert you to something. The registration form does not include a SIGCIS lunch this year. This is, I think, because we chose the university cafeteria option. The lunch will happen as usual on Friday, and include introductions of new members, our book auction, presentation of travel grants, announcements from members, etc. Good news: this gives you choices and saves you money! This also means that, as usual, we're clashing with the other Friday lunch event which is the WITH (Women In Technology History) lunch. We're hoping to arrange something for future meetings whereby we don't clash with WITH every year. We did our best to avoid the clash this year, but for this meeting the logistics of a Saturday lunch didn't work, due to cafeteria closures, etc. Our lunch is listed at http://www.historyoftechnology.org/copenhagen/copenhagen_sigs.html, but this is easy to miss when registering so please do remember that it is happening as usual and make an effort to attend. We had originally been told that there would be a reserved area of the cafeteria for our lunch, to ensure that we could sit together, and I am checking currently to confirm this. Tom

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Final cfp Turing in context II, 10-12 Octobre 2012, Brussels
by Liesbeth De Mol 10 Aug '12

10 Aug '12

Dear all, I hope the following cfp is of interest to some of you, best wishes, Liesbeth. [Apologies for X-posting] FINAL CALL FOR ABSTRACTS "Turing in context II" Historical and Contemporary Research in Logic, Computing Machinery and AI www.computing-conference.ugent.be/tic2 10-12 October, 2012 Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts, Brussels, Belgium In the spirit of Alan Turing's interdisciplinary research, an international meeting will be held at the Royal Flemish Academy for the Sciences and Arts, exploring recent research into the many directions brought together in his work. This meeting is the second Turing in Context event during the 2012 Turing centennial. The first was held at King's College, Cambridge, 18-19 February 2012. It was an outreach event for the general academic public with invited speakers only. Turing in Context II is a research meeting meant for experts in the fields touched by Turing's contributions to science. TOPICS of the meeting include but are not restricted to: * history and theory of symbolic and physical machines * human and artificial intelligence * logic, computability and complexity We cordially invite contributions in all fields relating to the work and legacy of Alan Turing, both current research continuing Turing's ideas, and historical and philosophical reflections on them. Researchers from areas that Turing worked in but are not listed above, such as pattern formation and cryptography are explicitly encouraged to submit as well. Submissions should be 200-500 words abstracts and should be submitted to EasyChair via the following link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tic2 Authors of accepted papers will later be invited to send an extended abstract (max. 6 pages) to be reviewed by the programme committee for publication in a volume of the Academy Proceedings Series. A volume of full papers might follow after the conference. TIMETABLE: Deadline Submission of Abstracts: August 15, 2012 Notification of Acceptance: August 31, 2012 Conference: October 10-12, 2012 KEYNOTES: S. Barry Cooper, "Turing Machines, Embodied Information, and Higher Type Computability" Leo Corry, Turing and the Computational Tradition in Pure Mathematics: The Case of the Riemann Zeta-Function Daniel Dennett, "Turing's gradualist vision: making minds from proto-minds" Marie Hicks, The Imitation Game Writ Large: Thinking about gender, labor, and sexuality in making machines useful. Maurice Margenstern, Universality everywhere and beyond, an epic of computer science Elvira Mayordomo, From Computability to Information Theory Alexandra Shlapentokh, Definability and decidability over function fields of positive characteristic Rineke Verbrugge, Cognitive systems in interaction PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: Bill Aspray (University of Texas) Tony Beavers (University of Evansville) Liesbeth De Mol (Ghent University) Luc De Raedt (Leuven University) Pablo Gervas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Antonina Kolokolova (University of Toronto) Benedikt Loewe (University of Amsterdam) David McCarty (Indiana University Bloomington) Erik Myin (Antwerp University) Giuseppe Primiero (Ghent University) Wilfried Sieg (Carnegie Mellon University) Mariya Soskova (Sofia University) Jean-Paul van Bendegem (Free University of Brussels) Bart van Kerkhove (Hasselt University) ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Liesbeth De Mol, Benedikt Loewe, Giuseppe Primiero, Jean-Paul van Bendegem, Bart van Kerkhove The meeting is sponsored by: Royal Flemish Academy of the Sciences, Belgian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Fund for Scientific Research Flanders, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, VUB.

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New CHM Lectures - Now on YouTube!
by Dag Spicer 09 Aug '12

09 Aug '12

Dear SIGCIS Friends, I'm delighted to announce the publication on YouTube of several new lectures. All lectures took place recently at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. Enjoy! Dag -- Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvUJpvop-0w Many people consider Apple the most powerful brand in the world -- an accolade that's hard to dispute when its product line includes iPad, the iPod, iPhone, iMac and MacBook Air. Companies all over the world try to emulate Apple's creative genius and groundbreaking marketing. But what is the real secret to Apple's success? According to Ken Segall, the man who put the "i" in iMac and served as a member of Steve Jobs' creative inner circle for more than a decade, the answer is: simplicity. Segall's book reveals what sets Apple apart from other technology companies and makes it stand out in a complicated world: a deep, almost religious belief in the power of simplicity. The purest expression of Steve Jobs' unique viewpoint, it's apparent in everything Apple does, from product design to advertising. Serving as Jobs' ad agency creative director for both NeXT and Apple, Segall led the team that created Apple's legendary Think Different campaign, which was an integral part of Apple's transformation following Jobs' return. Segall's other clients have included technology giants such as Dell, Intel and IBM as well as consumer brands such as JCPenney. Harry McCracken, TIME's Editor-at-large, has covered the technology beat for two decades, writing about the Web, mobile technology, consumer electronics and PCs for PC World, Macworld, CNET, and his own site, Technologizer. He will moderate a discussion with Segall about Apple, Steve Jobs and the art of marketing technology to the masses, from the inside out. [Recorded July 31, 2012] DARPA's Dan Kaufman in Conversation with John Markoff of The New York Times http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny6xDCFU4nI Imagine what the world would look like if we gave everyone the ability to solve its toughest problems, the freedom to explore the world, and the tools to build the future. These are ideas that have been driving Dan Kaufman and his research efforts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He is convinced that if we build the tools and technology to empower everyone to participate, we would be amazed at the results. Recently at DARPA there have been multiple efforts to research the mobilization and self-organization potential of social networks & crowd sourcing. Two interesting questions arise: can you use the power of the crowd to solve a specific problem, and can you find special people in the crowd to solve a problem who have never been asked before? The power of the crowd has been explored through DARPA's Network Challenge (commonly referred to as the Red Balloon Challenge) in which 10 large red weather balloons were placed at undisclosed locations across the US for one day. Finding people in the crowd who can contribute greatly has been explored through a recent DARPA sponsored experiment called the Shredder Challenge. In this test, the winning solution was not resolved by the "power of the crowd," but by finding, in the crowd, those special people who may have never been asked the question. Many thought the task impossible, but it turned out that they had been asking the wrong people. An obstacle to fully empowering the crowd is the need for software programmers. DARPA has pushed to develop tools that allow ordinary people to solve complex problems. The program RealWorld gave tools to U.S. soldiers to allow them to create their own mission-specific simulations, without expertise in computer programming. Those tools have now been used to build aircraft, medical, and neurological simulators. John Markoff has referred to DARPA as an "Agency of Wonder" -- join us to find out why. [Recorded July 24, 2012] Transforming Music: From Guitar Hero to Robotic Opera & Beyond http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFKzBvInaCY "Music exerts its power when we are actively engaged, not when we listen subliminally. For this reason, I have been working with my group at the MIT Media Lab to create musical tools -- often with specially designed technologies -- that enable everyone to participate directly in music-making, regardless of background." Tod Machover "Tod Machover is the only person I am aware of who contributes on a world-class level to both the technology of music creation and to music itself. Even within these two distinct areas, his contributions are remarkably diverse, and of exquisite quality". Ray Kurzweil Join us for an evening with musician, inventor and educator Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music & Media at the MIT Media Lab, where he directs the Opera of the Future Group. An influential composer, he has been praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries; his music has been performed and commissioned by some of the world's most important performers and ensembles. He has also created the technologies behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Machover's opera "Death and the Powers" premiered in Monte Carlo in the fall 2010. The project was developed by a creative team of international artists, designers, writers and theatrical luminaries, as well as by an interdisciplinary team of Media Lab graduate and undergraduate students. Powers features a robotic, animatronic stage -- the first of its kind -- that gradually "comes alive" as the opera's main character. The Museum's John Hollar moderated a fascinating conversation with Tod - the son of a noted piano teacher and a computer graphics pioneer - who is using technology to revolutionize music. [Recorded: June 27, 2012] -- Dag Spicer | Senior Curator | Computer History Museum Editorial Board | Annals of the History of Computing 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. | Mountain View CA 94043 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 | Fax: +1 650 810 1055 Twitter: @ComputerHistory FB: facebook.com/computerhistory Technology married with the humanities makes our hearts sing. -- Steve Jobs

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interviewing in North America
by Edgar Daylight 03 Aug '12

03 Aug '12

Dear All, As a researcher in the history of programming languages, living with a wife and daughter in Belgium, I am looking for funding so that I can travel to North America multiple times in 2013 in order to extensively interview some high-profile & retired computer scientists. I have already met some of these potential interviewees at Turing events in England and have had lengthy email conversations with others (--- as a reaction to my previous writings). So most of them already know me. Can anyone help me get funding? Unfortunately, moving to the USA for a year is not an option for me due to family obligations. Each interview would require 8 weeks of preparation. If possible, I would like to interview at least 4 people (and wouldn't mind having dinner conversations with several more). Being able to meet some interviewees more than once would be nice. I can be more specific in private correspondence and am of course willing to write a research proposal. All interviews will cover the 1950s -- 1970s and will share the same themes: + the transition from special-purpose machines to general-purpose computers (e.g. IBM Stretch, IBM OS/360) (cf. Amdahl, Blaauw, Brooks) + the emerging dichotomy between software engineering and computer science + the influence, if any, of Turing and logic in the aforementioned transition and dichotomy + different notions of structured programming (e.g. Mills at IBM, Parnas, Dijkstra) + different notions of "general purpose", "general", "elegant" in programming Any feedback is very welcome! Many thanks in advance. Edgar Daylight. My short CV is available on my website: www.dijkstrascry.com

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