October 2014 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Evgeny
by David C. Brock 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

I find it hard to believe that Morosov did not read anything by Andy Pickering on S. Beer. Andy has written a few things on Beer, who is a major character in “The Cybernetic Brain.” I don’t know if Eden covers the Brian Eno-Beer connection in her book, but Andy certainly spends a good deal of time on it in his. Pickering’s name isn’t anywhere in Evgeny’s article. Probably because Andy’s whole book subverts the argument of the New Yorker article. +++++++++++++++ David C. Brock dcb(a)dcbrock.net Senior Research Fellow Chemical Heritage Foundation www.chemheritage.org Principal, D.C. Brock Consulting www.dcbrock.net 40 Russell Street, Greenfield, MA 01301 Mobile: 413-522-3578 Fax: 866-549-8597 Skype: dcbrock Twitter: @dcbrock

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Should we crowdsource an Isaacson fact check?
by Thomas Haigh 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Hello Bernard (& SIGCIS) Thanks for the thoughtful response. It seems to be that there are two main ways we as a community might choose to respond to popular non-fiction work such as that presented by Dyson or Issacson. The first is to treat it as historical scholarship in need of expert review, checking its various claims and assessing the extent to which consists of statements which, while simplified, can be reconciled with expert consensus and primary sources. The other is to go to the meta level, and ask what the popularity of particular kinds of narrative tells us about the world we live in, perhaps taking a memory studies approach and charting the different ways in which ENIAC, for example, has been represented over time. Ive done both in the past, for example with respect to the Inventor of Email where I both maintain a page debunking his specific claims and wrote a column for CACM looking at broader lessons from the affair. Our ENIAC book include a chapter Remembering ENIAC looking at its posthumous career, and I will certainly be adding a short discussion of Isaacson into its last section on the 2000-onward era we characterize as The ENIAC of Women. I just purchased the Kindle version of Isaacsons book and am already noting a number of factual errors small and large. Some of these are a result of necessary simplification performed without finesse (e.g. a rather incoherent treatment of the stored program concept) but many are flat out carelessness where being accurate would not have made the text any longer or harder to understand. For example statements that ENIAC was designed to calculate missile (rather than shell) trajectories, that the Army no longer intended to calculate firing tables after the end of the war, use of Bartik quotes about 1947 meetings with von Neumann to characterize his 1944 meetings with the ENIAC team before she even came to the Moore School, etc. At one point he claims that ENIAC was one of the first two stored program computers along with the Manchester Baby. Thats trueish, though our conclusion was that this points out the limitations of stored program as a category. However next two consecutive sentences are completely incoherent, in crediting it both with program storage only in read only memory (true) and a functioning delay line memory in April 1947 (a total fantasy): a read only memory, which meant it was hard to modify programs while they were running. In addition, its mercury delay line memory was sluggish and required prevision engineering. A paragraph or two earlier he calls the mathematician Richard Clippinger and physicist Nick Metropolis engineers. In many other places he relies on claims made in oral histories without looking to see if historians have been able to reconcile the details quoted with other sources. Now to combine these two perspectives, its probably the job of someone like Isaacson to write popular history that is wildly inaccurate in many details and the job of scholarly historians to pedantically point out errors and be largely ignored. Meanwhile he will win all the fame and media attention we secretly believe should be ours, but which our fusty attachment to accurate detail and distain for the narrative expectations of popular history will forever deny us. Its not that we want to come at Isaacson with pitchforks and flaming torches to demand that his book be pulped, and it will surely increase general interest in our field. But the thought of students or researchers citing some of these details is scary, and his book does have the outward appearance of a serious contribution it has footnotes, a surprising amount of technical terminology, etc. Errors here will be disseminated widely. So there might be some benefit in putting up on the SIGCIS site a crowd sourced fact check to document clear cut errors in the text, using quoted primary or authoritative secondary sources to document the truth. (Reactionary as I do feel to appropriate momentarily the concepts of truth and authority). Then if, for example, a SIGCIS member finds an odd assertion sourced from Isaacson in a student paper being graded he or she could point to the SIGCIS page as evidence that ENIAC did not have a delay line memory, that Hopper did not serve as the technical lead in coordinating the creation of COBOL, that a large part of ENIACs existence was spent calculating firing tables, etc. Note to enthusiasts: this does not include grading Isaacson on his fidelity to one or another school of thought on the first computer, etc. So, does anyone with an interest in such things want to volunteer to edit such a page? That would primarily involve check submissions from SIGCIS members for inclusion and making decisions on what counts as a clear factual error vs. a personal interpretation. Best wishes, Tom From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 4:43 PM To: members(a)sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book 2 Dear All, I've been thinking about these kinds of histories, quarrels, and computer historiographies in recent months, esp. in the light of the "debate" around Shiva Ayyadurai and the invention of email. I'm interested in these histories, claims, and claimants for the origins and development of info technologies. They are stimulating and telling ("symptomatic" one might say) for the reason that "computer historiography" is not to my mind an impartial, neutral recounting of a series of rote facts, but rather itself a vibrant actor within the history of computational innovation. The Shiva case shows this pretty well, because the "historiography" is in some way coextensive with individuals staking claims that shape their ability to act in the field in the present (i.e. Shiva has patents, a start-up company, etc, so I think his belated discovery of his "invention" speaks to his present-day ambitions; his enlisting of The Smithsonian etc. to back up his claims is an fascinating case of an actor-network theoretical aligning of interests in action). Same goes for the Isaacson books, because they also involve efforts to ally, interest, and orient readers around certain conceptions of where and how invention happens. These frames and theories of innovation converge with other agendas (figuring out how private markets shaped the PC revolution; granting women greater representation in computational histories; writing a history of computing focused on its ability to stimulate our passions rather than just crunch numbers). These kinds of frames and agendas relate specifically to the struggles surrounding innovation and education in the present; that they should bear on popular histories shouldn't be so surprising, nor that they would come to bear upon how the Smithsonian or TIME magazine decides to acknowledge innovation. As for the kinds of cases surrounding the "ENIAC girls" invoked in a previous mail: Even despite the condescending instances of tokenism invoked by Tom, I think that when push comes to shove, actually distinguishing the "real" or "authentic" innovation from the cultural hype proves tricky (this isn't meant as a counter-argument--Tom's commented on these same problems elsewhere). As works by Ensmenger and Jen Light and others note, the distinctions between invention and innovation, hardware and software, engineers and mere programmers, scientific and technical labor, etc, themselves rest upon a set of (often naive and shortsighted) cultural assumptions over what's the "real" work of computing. Ensmenger in particular shows that these cultural assumptions have profound consequences at the very heart of technological development: There's a decent argument that early computer scientists entirely dismissed programming as a kind of subaltern variety of labor, contributing both to the wartime assignment of this work to women, and the industry-crippling software crisis that followed. This makes the attempt to sift though debating historical causes and factors enmeshed, from the outset, in debates over cultural theory, gender, notions of material history and cultural labor, and so on (Schaffer makes a similar point in Babbage's Intelligence). The attempt to identify a baseline for the "real history" of a technology and its development never "escapes" cultural agendas, for example, re-examining the under-representation of women in computing, which can be credibly cited as a determining factor in the technological (mis-)development in the field. So as I see it, the work of historiography is really about these ongoing battles and quarrels in our midst, each of which deploys alternate values and horizons for making sense of informatics--a process that necessarily will continue to evolve and unsettle, without much resolution, so long as our field remains vibrant and relevant. Isaacson is an actor in this field, much as we are, even as von Neumann was, even if there are (as Tom correctly urges us to recognize) different roles of vastly different import. Moreover, I think readers approach histories like Isaacson's with the ability to recognize that the claims are sort of puffed up. For example, I don't think many readers of Standage's history of the telegraph take as literally true his claim that it was "the Victorian internet" nor his other book's claims that the 17th c. Chess-Playing Turk gave rise to IBM computing machines. Readers turn to these accounts for fun, diverting accounts that mix trivia, drama, and fragments of technical knowledge, as well as orientation in the varied kinds of forces that play out in the history of a technology. These histories, in turn, were often convened in response to a given topical event (anniversary, marketing event, product launch, someone's death). Readers recognize that, too. I wrote about this awhile back in the IEEE Annals, in an article titled "The Historiographic Conception of Information," a kind of reflection on the status of historiography within computing. As I put it there, in discussing popular accounts of Claude Shannon on the occasion of his death, I wrote: Computer history does not appear before the public as a...natural and unmediated accounting of clearcut facts. Instead, a historically specific organization of experts, research, resources, and interpretive frames emerges in response to present and presumably historical events. This is not the meddling intervention of outside interests and biases upon the neutral labor of historiography; rather, these are the basic conditions for writing computer history. These conditions appearance prompts questions about how a retiring mathematician [Claude Shannon], skeptical about his personal acclaim, emerged as a recognizable and heroic subject of popular interest. I guess I'm not above taking some delight in our field's status as a kind of joyful cultural science whose interest and relevance is deeply tied up with its ability to bisect pop culture, current events, and institutional struggles. And if our field attracts shallow excitement and fantastic tale telling, I'm not above welcoming this, our imaginative fecundity, however suspect its offspring may seem. Best, Bernard On 10/5/14 9:47 PM, Chuck House wrote: 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 On Oct 5, 2014, at 1:28 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh(a)computer.org> wrote: Hello everyone, 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." 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 <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson -how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson- how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0 Ada Lovelace defined the digital age, Mr. Isaacson said in one of several recent interviews about the book. If it wasnt for Ada Lovelace, theres 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. Given that Babbages 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 Lovelaces contribution to that project was. 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. <http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/> http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ This chapter captures a broader trend in ENIACs 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. Thats something Ive become aware of in returning to primary sources for my forthcoming book ENIAC in Action with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope. Janet started this thread with mention of some NPR interviews, and coverage in her recent book Recoding Gender 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. 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. Thats 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. 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. Thats a worthy goal, and there are no wrong reasons to be interested in history. Isaacsons 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. Best wishes, Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from <mailto:members@sigcis.org> members(a)sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at <http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/> http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at <http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members> http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members(a)sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT 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 -- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com

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The Imitation Game (was: Isaacson's book)
by Ceruzzi, Paul 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Tom and others mentioned how public figures like Isaacson or Doris Kearns Goodwin add an entertainment dimension to what otherwise might be considered dry history (not to me of course). Generally speaking, it has been very difficult for Hollywood to add drama to a guy (or woman) plugging in vacuum tubes, or worse, typing on a keyboard, e.g. the movie about Wikileaks. But a successful film about the creation of the ENIAC should be done. So we shall see what happens when this biopic about Turing comes out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game Here’s the trailer: http://theimitationgamemovie.com/ Casting Keira Knightley as his friend and confidant has apparently raised some eyebrows, but that’s show business. Paul Ceruzzi From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of PeterEckstein(a)comcast.net Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 11:24 PM To: Koblentz, Evan Cc: Haigh, Thomas; Computer, SIG Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book On the interview, let me add: Good: Recognizing that Atanasoff did not really invent the first "computer". Bad: Saying that JVA worked alone, when in fact Clifford Berry did much of the engineering. He was the "B" in the retrospectively named "ABC." Good: giving precedence to ENIAC and to some extent Colossus. Rather bad: Never mentioning (that I heard, could be wrong) either Eckert or Mauchly by name. ________________________________ From: "Koblentz, Evan" <evan(a)snarc.net<mailto:evan@snarc.net>> To: "Haigh, Thomas" <thaigh(a)computer.org<mailto:thaigh@computer.org>>, "Computer, SIG" <members(a)sigcis.org<mailto:members@sigcis.org>> Sent: Monday, October 6, 2014 4:02:48 PM Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book I heard Isaacson on NPR just now. Good: Realistic treatment to Al Gore's contributions to the Internet. Neutral: Power users today only learn software, not hardware, unlike in his transistor kit youth. (No mention of the present "maker" trend.) Bad: Personal computing was invented in the Bay Area and Altair was the first one. _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members(a)sigcis.org<mailto:members@sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT 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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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book
by Thomas Haigh 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Thanks Janet, I noticed that the same NPR segment has him claiming that "Babbage's machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace's notes were read by people building the first computer a century later." Swade, Bromley, Randell, Cohen, and as far as I know all serious historians who have looked for a substantive influence of Babbage on the conception or design of ENAIC, EDVAC, EDSAC, or the Harvard Mark 1 have concluded that there was none. Aiken did seize rhetorically on Babbage as a precursor whose lineage he was taking up, but as Cohen notes in Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer, he became aware of Babbage only after proposing to build his computer and did not learn of Lovelace's work or appreciate the importance of conditional branching for some years later. After a very careful examination (p.61-72) Cohen concluded that "Aiken was generally ignorant of Babbage's machines" at this point, having seen only brief accounts, and including "summary (and somewhat erroneous) statements about Babbage's machines" in his 1937 proposal. Thus "Babbage did not play a major role in the development of Aiken's ideas." Instead "Aiken praised Babbage to enhance his own stature." He also quotes Hopper as saying that she was unaware of Lovelace's work "until ten of fifteen years later." Likewise, the NPR segment (not sure if this is Isaacson himself) says that "Bartik and her team went on to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first major commercial computers." I believe that only two of the initial six (Jennings/Bartik in 1948 and Snyder/Holberton in 1947) followed Eckert and Mauchly. It's like the bit in his book on Jobs where he startled me (and, Google confirms, many other people) by writing that the magneto optical drive in the NeXT was not good as main storage because its latency was too LOW. I don't expect Isaacson to know what latency is, but wouldn't it have been better to pay for a close reading by someone who understands tech well enough to know a faster response is a good thing for a disk drive used as virtual memory? The Jobs book was rushed when its subject died, which perhaps cut short the editing process, but he claims that this new book was under development for a decade. On the other hand, Paul's comment on the movie potential of the story makes me see this in the broader context of Isaacson as an elite member of the news-entertainment complex. To make a true story fit within the genre expectations of a movie there are all kinds of liberties taken with the truth -- minor characters consolidated, timelines simplified, motives simplified, links between scenes invented. To a lesser extent that narrative streamlining is perhaps what Isaacson is doing here to tie his vignettes together by inventing a connection from Lovelace to ENIAC and by greatly simplifying the connections from the ENIAC operations team to Hopper to COBOL. The headline NPR "The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" also wondering how famous someone can be and still be forgotten. Would it be reasonable to set two documentary films, a number of major honors, and an NY Times obit as threshold to indicate that Bartik and her colleagues were already rescued from obscurity years before Isaacson arrived? How about Ada Lovelace's multiple full length biographies, appearance in various novels, and Ada Lovelace Day? Lovelace is surely more famous than any Turing Award winner or anyone building a computer in the 1940s apart from Turing and possibly von Neumann. Google's Ngram viewer shows her overtaking Eckert, Zuse, Mauchly, Aiken, Atanasoff or Wilkes by 1992 and staying ahead of them ever since. https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=Ada+Lovelace%2CJoh n+Mauchly%2CPresper+Eckert%2CHoward+Aiken%2CMaurice+Wilkes%2CKonrad+Zuse%2Cj ohn+atanasoff&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1990&year_end=2008 Best wishes, Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Janet Abbate Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 9:06 AM To: members Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book In the NPR segment, Isaacson claims that Grace Hopper invented COBOL. "He could find out that's not true just by looking at Wikipedia," I thought.... then looked at the "COBOL" entry and found Grace Hopper plastered all over it. Time for some editing. Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members(a)sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT 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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Isaacson's book
by Thomas Haigh 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

Hello everyone, 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." 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 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson- how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0 "Ada Lovelace defined the digital age," Mr. Isaacson said in one of several recent interviews about the book.. "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. 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. 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. http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ 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 ENIAC in Action with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope. Janet started this thread with mention of some NPR interviews, and coverage in her recent book Recoding Gender 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. 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. 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. Best wishes, Tom

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Burt Grad on Hopper and CODASYL
by Thomas Haigh 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

[Relayed from Burt Grad] As a practitioner, not a historian, I can't debate the details of the creation of COBOL. But I joined Bob Bemer's group in IBM's Data Processing Division in February, 1960 (Roy Goldfinger was part of that group). IBM had designed COMTRAN as the counterpart of FORTRAN and planned to make the language available for use by any manufacturer or user company just as it had with FORTRAN. The IBM people felt that COMTRAN was a consistent language and was superior to COBOL and continued to plan to implement COMTRAN compilers in 1960. But, as I recall, the pressure from DoD particularly was too strong and therefore IBM made a marketing decision to drop COMTRAN and only support COBOL, in spite of what IBM perceived as its deficiencies. I was not privy to the debates within the CODASYL committee, only to what I heard from Bob Bemer and Roy Goldfinger (and other members of Bemer's team), about how the final decisions were made,,,but I had a strong impression that the other manufacturers (Univac, RCA, Honeywell and others) were not willing to have IBM be the "owner" of the commercial language as it was of the scientific language. There is no doubt in my mind that Grace Hopper believed that COBOL was principally based on her work at Univac (she is quoted in many interviews to that effect including at least one on the Computer History Museum website) and, barring any forensic analysis that provesd otherwise, I expect that is as close to the truth as we will get now that so many of the CODASYL participants have died and probably have not left detailed records of the committee deliberations. Burt Grad --part1_bb374.55830386.41641bf2_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content=3D"text/html; charset=3DUS-ASCII" http-equiv=3DContent-Type> <META name=3DGENERATOR content=3D"MSHTML 11.00.9600.17280"></HEAD> <BODY id=3Drole_body style=3D"FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; COLOR:= #000000"=20 bottomMargin=3D7 leftMargin=3D7 rightMargin=3D7 topMargin=3D7><FONT id=3Dr= ole_document=20 color=3D#000000 size=3D2 face=3DArial> <DIV>As a practitioner, not a historian, I can't debate the details= of the=20 creation of COBOL. But I joined Bob Bemer's group in IBM's Data Processing= =20 Division in February, 1960 (Roy Goldfinger was part of that group). IBM ha= d=20 designed COMTRAN as the counterpart of FORTRAN and planned to make the lan= guage=20 available for use by any manufacturer or user company just as it had with= =20 FORTRAN. The IBM people felt that COMTRAN was a consistent language and wa= s=20 superior to COBOL and continued to plan to implement COMTRAN com= pilers=20 in 1960. But, as I recall, the pressure from DoD particularly was too stro= ng and=20 therefore IBM made a marketing decision to drop COMTRAN and only support= COBOL,=20 in spite of what IBM perceived as its deficiencies.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I was not privy to the debates within the CODASYL committee, only to= what I=20 heard from Bob Bemer and Roy Goldfinger (and other members of Bemer's team= ),=20 about how the final decisions were made,,,but I had a strong impression th= at the=20 other manufacturers (Univac, RCA, Honeywell and others) were not will= ing to=20 have IBM be the "owner" of the commercial language as it was of the scient= ific=20 language.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>There is no doubt in my mind that Grace Hopper believed that COBOL=20 was principally based on her work at Univac (she is quoted in ma= ny=20 interviews to that effect including at least one on the Computer=20 History Museum website) and, barring any forensic analysis that= =20 provesd otherwise, I expect that is as close to the truth as we will get= now=20 that so many of the CODASYL participants have died and probably have not= left=20 detailed records of the committee deliberations. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Burt Grad </DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML> --part1_bb374.55830386.41641bf2_boundary-- --===============3271587676444744596== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members(a)sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT 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 --===============3271587676444744596==--

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A particular woman in computing
by McMillan, William W 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

The recent discussion of women in computing prompts me to ask if anyone who's done work in this area has run into mention of a former colleague, Marge Ratner. I knew Marge in the late 1970s at Case Tech when I was a grad student at CWRU, employed at the computing center. She was on the technical staff and was probably in her late 50s then. She worked among the early crew at Case in the 1950s: Ray Nelson, George Haynam, Fred Way, a very young Don Knuth, and others. Haynam (later my department head at Eastern Michigan U.) knew Marge well. Besides whatever disadvantages Marge had due to her gender, she also dealt with the effects of cerebral palsy (or so I believe), making her speech less than crystal-clear and her gait less than nimble. Marge was a cheerful, humble, hard-working, snuff-taking geek of the old school. I haven't been able to find anything about her through Internet searches. Thanks for any info you have! Bill

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Women in computing - NPR interviews
by Janet Abbate 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

If anyone's interested, I just did a couple of interviews with NPR reporters on the subject of women in computing. One should air on Monday (Oct 6) during Morning Edition, in a piece by Laura Sydell. (No idea if I'll get more than a soundbite.) The other is part of a podcast by Steve Henn for Planet Money (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/) not sure when that will be posted. So, why the interest in this topic all of a sudden? Turns out that Walter Isaacson, who wrote the best-selling bio of Steve Jobs, has a book coming out in a few days called "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution." I haven't had a chance to see it yet--any SIGCIS folks get an advance copy?--but evidently he devotes some attention to women in computing. Below is a link to an excerpt that was published in Fortune; the source list at the end shows he is aware of our collective work. http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ On a related note, I see that Kathy Kleiman finally finished her film on the ENIAC women (a few months ago), which had been in the works for years. If anyone has seen that, a review posted to this list would be welcome. Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS

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From Tilly Blyth: Lovelace 200th [Re: Women in computing - NPRinterviews]
by Thomas Haigh 05 Oct '14

05 Oct '14

[For some reason this was flagged as an uncaught bounce rather than a response in need of moderation, so I am forwarding it on Tilly's behalf]. Tom From: Blyth Tilly [mailto:Tilly.Blyth@sciencemuseum.ac.uk] Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2014 2:21 PM To: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] Lovelace 200th [Re: Women in computing - NPRinterviews] Hi all We will be doing a small exhibition around the bicentenary next year to celebrate this event, including the display of the original parts of Babbage's Analytical Engine and engineering diagrams. This will coincide with ALD 2015. best wishes, Tilly Keeper of Technologies and Engineering Science Museum, London

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Charles W. Bachman, 2014 recipient of National Medal of Technology and Innovation
by Andrew Russell 05 Oct '14

05 Oct '14

Hello again everyone - On Friday the White House announced 8 new recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Among the recipients was Charles W. Bachman, a database and networking pioneer who won the Turing Award in 1973. Bachman’s accolades have come primarily as recognition for his contributions to database technology, a subject that the historian Tom Haigh described in a 2011 biography published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing <http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/BachmanBio.pdf>. Here are the concluding paragraphs from Haigh’s biography: “Bachman’s career was long, varied, and distinguished. He ran a chemical plant, created a capital accounting system, headed an early data processing group, pioneered the application of computers to manufacturing control, led efforts to standardize database and computer communication concepts, won the highest honor in computer science, and founded a publicly traded company. Innovation is a collaborative process, but by creating IDS and advocating forcefully for the concepts behind it Bachman did more than any other person to invent the DBMS [database management system] as we know it today. "Through all of this he retained an engineer’s zest for the elegant solution of difficult problems and faith in the power of careful analysis and the systems approach to make the world a better place. As he wrote in a note at the end of our oral history transcript, ‘My work has been my play.’” For those who want to learn more about Bachman and his career: - Haigh’s extensive oral history interview with Bachman from 2004 is available from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141882. - I also interviewed Bachman in 2011, since I was keen to know more about his experience with computer communication systems and especially his Chairmanship of ISO’s subcommittee on Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) from 1977-1982. The transcript is available at http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Charles_Bachman. - I wrote about Bachman’s role in a 2013 IEEE Spectrum article “The Internet that Wasn’t” <http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt> and in my 2014 book “Open Standards and the Digital Age” <http://www.arussell.org/open> - 55 boxes of Bachman’s papers are available at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, collection number CBI 125: http://discover.lib.umn.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=umfa;cc=umfa;rgn=ma…. - And, Bachman has a page on wikipedia which could be improved and updated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bachman Congratulations Charlie - and thank you! Andy --------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew L. Russell, Ph.D. Director, Program in Science & Technology Studies Associate Professor, History College of Arts & Letters Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, New Jersey 07030 t. 201-216-5400 || f. 201-216-8245 arussell(a)stevens.edu || @RussellProf www.stevens.edu/cal/sts || www.arussell.org

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