April 2014 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

My column on Turing and the Invention of the Computer
by Thomas Haigh 12 May '14

12 May '14

Hello everyone, You may be interested in my newly published Communications of the ACM Column "Actually, Turing Did Not Invent the Computer." (It was supposed to be "didn't'" but I think that was an informality too far for the ACM). You can read it at http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/1/170862-actually-turing-did-not-invent-t he-computer/abstract. Or if you do not have an ACM subscription, http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/CACMActuallyTuringDidNotInventTheComp uter.pdf. This had its origins in my presentation of some of my ongoing work on ENIAC over the summer, where I was discussing the different clusters of ideas found in von Neumann's 1945 "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC." I'd expected that any questions about the attribution of these ideas to von Neumann would come from partisans shouting that he had merely stolen the ideas of Eckert and Mauchly and had preemptively noted that while the credit for these ideas had been disputed the impact of the report hadn't. Instead, all anyone wanted to talk about was how von Neumann had taken the ideas from. Turing! Further investigation revealed that a series of increasingly tenuous claims about the similarity between Turing's famous paper and the "First Draft" had been spreading in recent years, reaching a peak with Turing's recent centenary. Professionally trained historians of computing largely moved on from the events of the 1940s a generation ago, leaving the history of early computing to computer scientists, philosophers, logicians, and the partisans of various famous machines and their inventors. (This is beginning to change again, fortunately). I think also that the public really has room in its collective memory for just one famous person per technology, usually its inventor. Thus if someone has heard of Turing doing something famous with computers then they are likely to assume he invented the computer. Hence the need for a concise and balanced assessment of the actual situation. The paper is indebted to discussions with many of you on this topic, including Paul Ceruzzi, David Hemmendinger, Edgar G. Daylight, Pierre Mounier Kuhn, and my collaborator on the ENIAC project Mark Priestley. Best wishes, Tom

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REMINDER - Computer History Museum Prize 2014: Deadline, 15 May 2014
by david nofre 30 Apr '14

30 Apr '14

*** /Apologies for cross-posting - Please circulate to those who may be interested ***///// *REMINDER - Computer History Museum Prize 2014: Deadline, 15 May 2014 * The Computer History Museum Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding book in the history of computing broadly conceived, published during the prior three years. The prize of $1,000 is awarded by SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society. SIGCIS is part of the Society for the History of Technology. Books published in 2011-2013 are eligible for the 2014 award. Books in translation are eligible for three years following the date of their publication in English. Publishers, authors, and other interested members of the computer history community are invited to nominate books. Send one copy of the nominated title to each of the committee members listed below. To be considered, book submissions must be postmarked by 15 May 2014. Current information about the prize, including the most recent call and a list of previous winners, may always be found at http://www.sigcis.org/chmprize. In 2012 the prize was endowed in perpetuity through a generous bequest from the estate of Paul Baran, a legendary computer innovator and entrepreneur best known for his work to develop and promote the packet switching approach on which modern networks are built. Baran was a long-time supporter of work on the history of information technology and named the prize to celebrate the contributions of the Computer History Museum to that field. 2014 Prize Committee Members Rebecca Slayton: Lecturer in Public Policy, Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305-6055. rslayton(a)stanford.edu David Nofre (chair): Research Affiliate, Centre d'Estudis d'Història de la Ciència at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Send books to him at Kleyn Proffijtlaan 47, 2343DB Oegstgeest, Netherlands d.nofre(a)gmail.com Joseph A. November: Associate Professor, University of South Carolina, Department of History, 817 Henderson St., Gambrell Hall, Room 245, Columbia, SC 29208. november(a)sc.edu Please address any questions to David Nofre.

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Book Announcement
by Andrew Butrica 25 Apr '14

25 Apr '14

I would like to announce that "The Navigators," my contract history of NASA's deep-space navigation over the past half century, is now in print and available from Amazon. SIGCIS members will find much on the history of computing within NASA and especially JPL from the era of the IBM mainframes and the Univac 1108 to minicomputers and workstations. The lack of computing power early on, for instance, led navigators to turn their software into a kind of virtual laboratory for post-flight analysis. Computers imposed limitations on the evolution of navigation, but it also was crucial for enabling it. I focus on two broad themes. One is the beginnings and evolution of space navigation in response to the security crisis starting with World War II and running to the present century. The other overarching theme is the relationship between navigation and science, especially astronomy. The navigators, I argue, are representative of the application-oriented science that the security crisis fostered. The book makes additional points about modeling nature, the role of technology (computers, instruments), and the reasons for navigation's increasing accuracy. The book will be of interest to historians of science, space, astronomy, computers, technology, and public policy. It is a print-on-demand book at NASA's request (mainly to expedite publication). I undertook all the steps necessary to turn my manuscript into a book, including cover design, proofreading, and layout. Andrew Butrica Andrew J. Butrica, Ph.D. Research Historian Sent from my Xylo Phone

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my memoir on macro processors I have used
by Dave Walden 25 Apr '14

25 Apr '14

A few months ago I announced posting of a near final draft of this paper. The published version is now available: http://walden-family.com/texland/tb109walden-preprint.pdf [ignore the work "preprint" in the URL; this is the version as published] A year from the journal's publication date, that is, a year from now, the article will be freely available to non-members of TUG.org at http://tug.org/tugboat/contents.html in issue 35:1. By the way, if you are going to be around Portland, OR, in July, the TeX Users Group (TUG) is holding its annual convention there: http://tug.org/tug2014/ Tracy Kidder (Soul of a New Machine) and Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki) are each scheduled to be there for at least one day. TeX remains one of the longest-running open-source-software success stories, with vibrant user and development communities. -- home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537 home ph=508-888-7655; cell ph = 503-757-3137 email address: dave(a)walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/

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Science Museum 'Information Age' conference - call for papers/date change
by Blyth Tilly 24 Apr '14

24 Apr '14

This is a late call for papers but may be of interest to SIGCIS members: Call for contributions 'Interpreting the Information Age': new avenues for research and display November 3rd - 5th 2014 Science Museum, London Dear colleagues, In autumn 2014, the Science Museum will open a ground-breaking new permanent gallery, Information Age. The gallery will expose, examine and celebrate how information and communication technologies have transformed our lives over the last 200 years. To mark this launch, the Museum is hosting a three day conference which will discuss how the history and material culture of information can be made relevant for today's audiences, and celebrate the participation projects which have supported the gallery's development. We would welcome contributions from peers across the sector and beyond, to support this exciting conference. The call for contributions can be viewed at http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/new_research_folder/news_and_ev ents/~/media/14CF9342DB8B459D92E3DAECBC3F5C39.ashx - please send all proposals to research(a)sciencemuseum.ac.uk by Friday 25th April 2014. Dr Tilly Blyth Keeper of Technologies and Engineering Science Museum Exhibition Road London SW7 2DD To leave the list do not reply to this message but send an email to LISTSERV(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK with a blank subject line and these words in the body of the email: SIGNOFF STI-SSN To leave the list do not reply to this message but send an email to LISTSERV(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK with a blank subject line and these words in the body of the email: SIGNOFF STI-SSN This e-mail and attachments are intended for the named addressee only and are confidential. If you have received this e-mail in error please notify the sender immediately, delete the message from your computer system and destroy any copies. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender and may not reflect the views of the Science Museum Group. This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs Email Security System.

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Blue Cube in the News (From Paul Ceruzzi)
by Thomas Haigh 21 Apr '14

21 Apr '14

[Forwarded to avoid the DNS gremlins. Tom.] From: Ceruzzi, Paul [mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu] Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 8:02 AM To: sigcis Cc: thaigh(a)computer.org Subject: Blue Cube in the News A Silicon Valley landmark. Sic transit gloria mundi. http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_25581167/wrecking-crews-demolish-ic onic-blue-cube I managed to salvage the processor and control panel of a CDC 3800 from the facility. Typical CDC construction: built like a tank. The nameplate alone weighs 20 pounds. They never told me the details of what it was used for, of course, but there is no doubt that the computer was central to their operations. It is now on display at our Chantilly, Virginia, museum. Paul Ceruzzi

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Blue Cube in the news
by Ceruzzi, Paul 21 Apr '14

21 Apr '14

A Silicon Valley landmark. Sic transit gloria mundi. http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_25581167/wrecking-crews-demolish-i… I managed to salvage the processor and control panel of a CDC 3800 from the facility. Typical CDC construction: built like a tank. The nameplate alone weighs 20 pounds. They never told me the details of what it was used for, of course, but there is no doubt that the computer was central to their operations. It is now on display at our Chantilly, Virginia, museum. Paul Ceruzzi

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History of SWIFT (the international payments messeging network)
by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo 20 Apr '14

20 Apr '14

I am not sure whether this has been raised before, but people might find the following new study of interest: The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT): Cooperative governance for network innovation, standards, and community. Susan V. Scott and Markos Zachariadis London and New York: Routledge, 2014. xvii+174, hardcover 9780415631648 Kind regards Bernardo Bangor University (Wales)

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Conference: Born Digital and Cultural Heritage
by Melanie Swalwell 17 Apr '14

17 Apr '14

Apologies for x-postings. The International Born Digital and Cultural Heritage conference will be held on 19-20 June, 2014, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The event is one of the outcomes of the 'Play It Again' project, which is focused on 1980s Australian and New Zealand game history and preservation. It is a collaboration between Flinders University, University of Melbourne, Victoria University of Wellington (NZ), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the New Zealand Film Archive, and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum. The program features an exciting line-up of papers from scholars, artists, and practitioners from Finland, U.S., U.K., Germany, Poland, Japan, Samoa, New Zealand and Australia on topics from: demoscene history to manuscripts, archiving tweets to the 'right to be forgotten', Japanese game preservation efforts to artist's apps, and much much more. Our two keynote speakers -- Dr Henry Lowood (Stanford, U.S.), and Dr Anne Laforet (ESADS, France) - are experts in digital game and net art preservation, respectively. All the program details, plus abstracts and speaker's bios are on the conference website: http://playitagainproject.org/conference Registration: Full $210 (early bird is $180, valid until 18th April, so be quick!), $110 single day. Student $100 ($80 early bird), $50 single day. Please share with your networks. A poster is available for printing at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33143419/born%20digital_16%204%2014_pri… I look forward to seeing some of you in Melbourne! Regards, Melanie -- Assoc. Prof. Melanie Swalwell ARC Future Fellow Screen and Media, Flinders University GPO Box 2100 Adelaide SA 5001 Ph: +61 8 8201 2619 278 Humanities Bldg www.flinders.edu.au<http://www.flinders.edu.au/> http://www.flinders.edu.au/people/melanie.swalwell Popular Memory Archive: http://playitagainproject.org<http://www.playitagainproject.org/> Play It Again blog: http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/play-it-again/ Australasian Heritage Software Database: www.ourdigitalheritage.org<http://www.ourdigitalheritage.org/> CRICOS Provider: 00114A This email and any attachments may be confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please inform the sender by reply email and delete all copies of this message.

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HiNC4 – History of IT in the Nordics
by J. Carles Maixé-Altés 16 Apr '14

16 Apr '14

Is now available the program of the Nordic Conference on IT History – Copenhagen 2014 http://www.hinc4.org/ all the best Carles

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